Sometimes No (US) News Is Good News - Part 15 (Undergrad college rankings)

Blog readers will have followed the various posts about law schools pulling out of cooperation with the US News and World Report rankings. So far, the movement has been confined to professional schools. But now Columbia College of Columbia University has pulled out of the undergraduate rankings. 

The story is a bit more complicated in that case, however, as Columbia was earlier found to have send false information when it did "cooperate." From the NY Times: 

Columbia University announced on Tuesday that its undergraduate schools would no longer participate in the U.S. News & World Report college rankings, the first major university to refuse to supply information to the influential undergraduate guide for students and parents.

Columbia said it had become concerned about the “outsized influence” the rankings played in the undergraduate admissions process. “Much is lost in this approach,” the university said in an announcement signed by officials including Mary C. Boyce, Columbia’s provost. Columbia also noted that the expected U.S. Supreme Court decision to end or curtail affirmative action “may well lead to a reassessment of admissions policies in ways we can’t even contemplate at this point.”

Columbia’s move comes after it dropped in the rankings released in September — to No. 18 from No. 2 — and after many prestigious law and medical schools, including Columbia’s, decided to boycott the listings by refusing to provide data to U.S. News. Calling the rankings unreliable and unfair, the schools criticized them for skewing educational priorities...

It was a math professor at Columbia, Michael Thaddeus, who set off at least some of the backlash against the U.S. News rankings in early 2022 when he posted a 21-page analysis of the rankings, accusing his own school of submitting statistics that were “inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading.”

Dr. Thaddeus said he had found discrepancies in the data that Columbia supplied to U.S. News, involving class size and percentage of faculty with terminal degrees — two of the metrics that U.S. News announced it was eliminating from its calculations.

The fallout from his accusations led Columbia to acknowledge that it had provided misleading data, and the school did not submit new data last year. Tuesday’s announcement makes that decision permanent...

Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/us/columbia-university-us-news-rankings.html.

We will see if other undergraduate programs follow Columbia's example and pull out of cooperation.