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U.S. News pulls Columbia University from its 2022 rankings

440 points by selimthegrim 4y ago

onemoresoop 4y ago
https://www.theblueandwhite.org/post/michael-thaddeus https://www.theblueandwhite.org/post/michael-thaddeus
dataphyte 4y ago
US colleges foresee a future where they are under attack for being absurdly selective, what some are now calling being "highly rejective". I think they want to avoid being targeted by the fairness wonks anymore than they already are. Also, US News and World Report rankings have major problems, for instance, the ranking algorithm considers campus aesthetics and food quality, but doesn't account for price, giving schools incentive to raise prices to fund campus improvements that boost rank, in turn boosting applications, in turn reducing % acceptance (the principal indicator of "quality" in US schools). This was how TCU went from a meh christian school to a "selective private college" in just a couple of years. World Report now publishes a "best dollar value" report to account for this, but few read it.
- duk 4y ago
  "the fairness wonks"
- peanuty1 4y ago
  > the ranking algorithm considers campus aesthetics and food quality. wtf
  - Fomite 4y ago
    Having eaten some absolutely miserable dorm food in my time, I get it.
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    It is not true. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rank...
- jseliger 4y ago
  The gap between the schools' rhetoric and reality is pretty funny; I was just writing about it the other day: https://seliger.com/2022/07/06/nonprofit-boards-of-directors-usually-exist-to-be-controlled-by-the-organizations-executive-director/ https://seliger.com/2022/07/06/nonprofit-boards-of-directors...: You can see a lot of hypocrisy that’s uncritically accepted by a lot of organizations, including nonprofits. Exclusionary higher education is a particular notable example, given the soaring rhetoric of “inclusion” spouted by some people involved with higher ed, versus the reality of those same schools seeking to reject as many applicants as possible. Princeton University’s president, Chris Eisgruber, has, for example, blathered extensively about the school’s efforts to “combat systemic racism.” Princeton has a $37 billion endowment. The school’s undergrad acceptance rate is 5.6% and it charges a sticker price of $73,000 a year (yes, the school does accept a handful of token low-income students every year, but that the school’s overall demographics reflect its target: the wealthy). Does that sound like a school devoted to combating systemic racism to you? How can people make these kinds of arguments with a straight face? Colleges and universities are run largely for the benefit of their administrators. The other exclusionary schools are doing the same things, as are their private-school feeders, despite their vigorous marketing to the contrary. Regarding the above paragraph, let me be clear: describing how something is, is not the same thing as approving of it.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    It's truly mind-boggling. The Ivies were always bastions for maintaining the position of WASP elites. They still serve that function. Maybe there is a bit more wiggle room about skin color, but they still function to socialize the next generation of people to run WASP institutions like "JP Morgan Chase."
    - selimthegrim 4y ago
      I guess I must have hallucinated reading all those Stewart Alsop articles about the decline of the WASP Elite then.
    - lmm 4y ago
      There's nothing inherently white, anglo-saxon or protestant about the oligarchy that these institutions preserve; they will very happily pass on to a new generation of westernised, college-educated liberals of all races and genders but no more variation in thought than the one they replaced. The cultural focus on such ephemera gives them a very useful fig leaf for excluding the demographic that it actually matters to exclude: the working class.
- pyuser583 4y ago
  A big problem: admitting too many students actually decrease the number who apply.
- kart23 4y ago
  Is that really so wrong though? I'd like to go to a college where the food doesn't suck and the campus is nice. Those are definitely factors that went into my choice. Value was definitely the overwhelming factor in my decision though, I went to a UC. Also, even the value rankings are mostly just Ivies at the top. Funny enough, my school is in the ~30s for overall rankings, but in the low 100s for value, since they're looking at the out-of-state cost (which for UCs is around 50k vs. 15k in-state), and they include grants, which is extremely variable by individual student. If they looked at the in-state tuition, UCs would dominate the value rankings. https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/best-value https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive...
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  US News rankings considers neither food nor campus aesthetics. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rank...
burlesona 4y ago
Per the article this came in response to questions raised by a Columbia faculty member critiquing the university's data. I thought that report[1] was actually more interesting than the original article. As per the quote at the top of the report: > Rankings create powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behavior for the sole or primary purpose of inflating one’s score... It would be shocking to me if Columbia was the only institution that fudged its numbers a bit in pursuit of a higher US News ranking. Given how important that ranking has become in US culture, I wonder if it's time for the methodology to change to require audited/auditable metrics rather than continuing to allow self-reporting. 1: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hackyhacky 4y ago
  Your suspicion is correct. I've taught at several US universities, and it's an open secret that the administrative takes steps to manipulate numbers in order to secure better rankings. Typical example: a small, prestigious liberal arts college always has smaller class sizes in the fall semester than in the spring semester. Why? Because classes with less than 30 students are ranked higher by US News, but they only take into consideration the fall semester. No one cares about class sizes in the spring.
  - CogitoCogito 4y ago
    > Because classes with less than 30 students are ranked higher by US News, but they only take into consideration the fall semester. No one cares about class sizes in the spring. What a bizarre and totally unnecessary restriction.
    - genewitch 4y ago
      Parents helping/guiding their near-adult children in the final spring of highschool to apply at or choose universities, where they would start university that same fall seem to be the target audience, here. Fall is when "most" incoming freshmen will start.
hprotagonist 4y ago
tit for tat: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation...
function_seven 4y ago
In the same way that one restaurant flouted Yelp ratings[1], couldn't all the Ivy League schools just refuse to participate in US News' annual rankings? What would happen if Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, et. al. decided that this ranking is not helpful, so they won't supply any info? Readers of US News would more likely start to lose trust in the rankings rather than move their assessments of the Ivies downward, right? [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/why-this-tiny-italian-restaurant-gives-a-discount-for-bad-yelp-reviews/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/why-t...
- ketzo 4y ago
  But it’s a prisoner’s dilemma situation, right? If none of the Ivy’s are on US News, well, it’s probably a shitty ranking. But if e.g. just Penn falls off the list… most people are just gonna assume that Penn got worse.
  - mlinsey 4y ago
    This is why it is really just Harvard (likely Stanford, Yale, and Princeton too, but definitely Harvard) that can make a statement boycotting the list, just like a billionaire can get away with wearing a plastic $10 watch but mere millionaires feel the need to wear a Rolex to show off their money. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if Harvard did the least to game the US News metrics of any top 25 university, because the US News staff would just tweak their formula to keep Harvard in the top 5 regardless.
    - brewdad 4y ago
      Harvard doesn't need to game the rankings because Harvard grads own the friggin' board. The rankings will fall in line accordingly.
- lbarrow 4y ago
  These rankings consistently tell people that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc are the best schools in the country. Why would they boycott rankings that praise them?
twblalock 4y ago
The US News rankings were already a bit of a mess, but leaving out one of the Ivy Leagues is only going to be bad for US News. An Ivy League school does not need help from the rankings -- but rankings that leave out one of the most prestigious and well-known universities in the country are useless.
- prepend 4y ago
  > An Ivy League school does not need help from the rankings I tend to agree, but why then did Columbia fudge the numbers? I think there’s some envy from the “lesser ivys” that they wish they were Harvard or Princeton. A high USNews ranking proves little, but I guess Columbia wanted to be tied with Harvard.
  - genericone 4y ago
    Columbia incentivized administration MBAs to increase the rankings, perhaps attached to bonuses. They did it unscrupulously by fudging the numbers and so Columbia will hopefully will dis-incentivize the behavior in the future, and so perhaps will other schools... doubt it.
  - rr888 4y ago
    Ivy league is kinda obsolete now, esp with places like Stanford, Duke, John Hopkins better known than Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell.
bee_rider 4y ago
I wonder how much these measurements actually matter, for a place like Columbia. I mean, I can see why, like, people might want to look at the list and see "hey this school I've never heard of is actually OK." But like, people don't find out about Columbia from this list, right? It is, uh, older than the country "U.S. News" is named after and an Ivy League school. Not having them on the list just reflects poorly on the list.
- willhinsa 4y ago
  On the other hand, Coca-Cola spends 4 billion of dollars every year on advertising.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Yeah. I dunno, nothing about advertising makes sense to me, so I guess I have trouble evaluating this kind of thing. Common sense would tell you that you don't give 4 billion dollars to the guy who says "I'm really good at convincing people to part with their money -- whether they should or not!" But then I don't run Coca Cola, so I guess they've figured out something I've missed.
  - toast0 4y ago
    In 2010, Pepsi switched at least their superb owl advertising budget to feel good community projects and lost sales at 6% vs a 4.3% overall decline for soda. Advertising drives sales, even if you can't tie a sale directly to an ad.
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      I dunno, Pepsi always seemed more faddish anyway, I'm not surprised their marketshare would be less durable.
- peanuty1 4y ago
  I imagine there is value in being in the same company of more prestigious schools like Harvard and Princeton.
- 4y ago
throwawayzXwEt 4y ago
These rankings are rampant with manipulation. For instance, I heard of classes at Hopkins being taught half in-class, half pre-recorded, so that they could say the "classroom" size was half its actual enrollment. It's especially frustrating when this kind of manipulation actually hurts students' education.
endisneigh 4y ago
Unless a school is willing to accept a entirely random set of students all schools success or lack there of can be chalked up to selection and survivor bias. I’d have to find it but someone did an analysis of folks who got into elite schools and didn’t go for whatever reason and saw that by mid career they had more or less the same outcomes. Thiel Fellows entire premise is around this effect, as well.
labster 4y ago
One down, 99 to go. These university rankings are absurd, and just a status game that school administrators feel they are forced to play. Individual programs may be outstanding at otherwise middling colleges — it’s better to learn about specific departments than try to reduce the school as a whole to a number.
- kupopuffs 4y ago
  Aren't there rankings for specific schools in schools? like Engineering, etc...
  - labster 4y ago
    Sure, but excellence in computer engineering does not imply excellence in chemical engineering does not imply excellence in civil engineering.
    - sandstrom 4y ago
      But someone looking for a good chemical engineering school won't look in the computer science ranking table, no?
    - kupopuffs 4y ago
      OP was talking about how rankings are bad. are rankings for these schools more valid?
- culi 4y ago
  One of the heaviest part of their grading is just the opinions of academics. They just send a survey out and ask academics to rank universities. Of course they end up reproducing and reinforcing the existing rankings as always.
- unosama 4y ago
  Universities are a status game in general. Reputation and networking opportunities matter more than education quality.
dang 4y ago
Related: An Investigation of Columbia's U.S. News Ranking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30603287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30603287 - March 2022 (46 comments)
somethoughts 4y ago
Somewhat related - How Northeastern Gamed the College Rankings https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/ https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeast... There are probably some significant parallels to any executive who manages to game the compensation structure at any large corporation to their financial benefit.
kens 4y ago
There's a very interesting article "How to Game the College Rankings" about how Northeastern University's president focused on improving the university's ranking. In 1996, it was a "third-tier, blue-collar, commuter-based university" rated #162. The new university president had a singleminded goal: to improve the ranking. He got the university into the top 100 in 2006 and into the top 50 by 2013. https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/ https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeast...
- saalweachter 4y ago
  Now the interesting question: did Northwestern^H^H^H^H^H^H^Heastern get meaningfully better for students between 1996 and 2013? Did they graduate in higher numbers? Did they have better career outcomes? Did more get into better(?) grad schools? What is their median income? Are they happier, did they enjoy college more?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - myko 4y ago
    Northeastern. Northwestern was already relatively prestigious.
    - dannykwells 4y ago
      Northwestern also - by the way. The president's goal when he joined was to break into the top 10.
  - zerocrates 4y ago
    Just a note that this is Northeastern (in Boston) not Northwestern (in Illinois). Northwestern was and is typically a very high ranker. As for what the improvements are like... hard to say. Some ways to improve the rankings like getting more students you don't want to come to apply (so you can appear more selective) don't actually help at all, while things like small classes even if done to "game" the rankings could actually help. There's also just the cyclical aspect of things: the quality of your experience is going to be significantly determined by the quality of the student body, so if you have a better applicant pool because of your better rankings you maybe have a bit of a virtuous cycle that's somewhat disconnected from whether the things you changed actually improved anything real on their own other than the ranking.
dwater 4y ago
For context, U.S. News and World Report used to be a trusted periodical that reported national and international news. In the 80's they started ranking colleges and selling it as a separate publication, which turned out to be pretty profitable, so they repeated the trick by ranking hospitals (1990), cars (2007), and then states (2017). The news business went online only in 2011, then shuttered in 2015. Since then they've just been a rankings company, but they kept the name to trade on their reputation.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  I feel like it would not be possible to sell such a static and easily leaked thing as a ranking list
- uptownfunk 4y ago
  Wow fascinating - so US News is now a rankings company.
  - xanaxagoras 4y ago
    If you think of clickbait as a crowdsourced ranking of emotionally manipulative hyperbole, that could be said of any corporate press rag.
    - brewdad 4y ago
      US News was a clickbait company before there were clicks to bait.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  U.S. News and World Report was a highly respected & trusted news magazine in the 70s-90s, but it's online incarnation now is just another clickbait site (similar for Newsweek).
  - bluedays 4y ago
    They’re the #1 best rankings company.
danielmorozoff 4y ago
Having pursued a PhD at Columbia and having taught classes there. I am surprised it took this long for someone to speak up. Also the fact that there are no checks in place to certify top ranking academic institutions is fascinating.
- xiaolingxiao 4y ago
  could you expand on what you mean please?
taveras 4y ago
If folks are curious about how schools are ranked, I highly encourage you to listen to the following podcast: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/lord-of-the-rankings https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/lord-of-...
saagarjha 4y ago
Kind of sad that US News decided to unrank just Columbia rather than suspending the whole thing. If one college games your ranking to the point that a professor from the university is like "hey you guys this seems pretty sus", it's probably true that all the other universities have the same problem and just don't have anyone willing to talk about it. As it stands it seems like just Columbia did something wrong, when they are the only university that did something wrong but also had someone who did something right.
- wombat-man 4y ago
  Well, it's kinda their main business at this point.
- naniwaduni 4y ago
  Suspending the whole thing would be suspending pretty much US News's entire remaining raison d'être at this point.
data4lyfe 4y ago
The fact that U.S. News and World Report can pull a school from it's own rankings and it makes such a strong impact is really a strange phenomenon.
epgui 4y ago
For all of the ways we can easily criticize the incentive structures and possible intentionality behind these bad numbers (which I agree merit scrutiny), I think it's worth noting and remembering that the issue was flagged by a mathematics professor of the same university: there is at least some well-aligned incentives, some measure of self-regulation, with respect tenured positions and academic freedom.
lofatdairy 4y ago
If I'm not mistaken the news that Columbia "won't participate" in the rankings came a bit sooner[^1], but if anything that struck me as a "you can't fire me, I quit" sort of preempting of what was inevitable. Honestly though, college rankings are toxic, as is this whole prestige economy we've built around them. I don't even really care about colleges faking numbers, so much as other shady practices like sending students false promises to get their hopes up - pretty much for the express purpose of rejecting them down the line. As any unfortunate student who has either had to apply to college, or been the parent of someone applying, you can't avoid the "chance me" threads or the endless HYPSM dick measuring contest while trying to get legitimate information. [^1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/30/us/columbia-us-news-rankings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/30/us/columbia-us-news-ranki...
- raldi 4y ago
  Columbia announced they wont participate in next year’s rankings. The delisting was for this year’s report.
lpolovets 4y ago
The influence of US News on colleges is wild. One absurd tidbit that I've heard: the rankings weigh freshman stats much more than transfer student stats, so a lot of competitive schools that won't let you in as a freshman if you would hurt their SAT/GPA/etc averages will happily let you in as a transfer because they'll make more revenue and your stats no longer hurt their rankings. * The ranking formula is also changed arbitrarily based on the reactions of colleges and readers. My school went from #9 to #1 one year, there were a lot of "wth??" reactions, and the following year the formula was tweaked so that our ranking dipped down to #4. I'm pretty sure nothing changed materially in the school over those 3 years, but the ranking moved around a lot. The whole system is a farce. * I haven't researched freshman vs transfer data myself, but it's something I've heard from multiple startup founders in the college education space.
- ffguuficc 4y ago
  For UW this is 100% true. A 4.0 is like a 50/50 to get in the CS program but for transfers it’s easier.
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Depends on the school. At a place like Harvard or Yale it is incredibly difficult to get in as a transfer, much harder than to get in in the first place.
  - caddemon 4y ago
    Yeah but that's Tier 0, it's not surprising that HYPSM don't feel the need to engage in as many number fudging tactics. It's a lot more impactful to Tier 1 top schools (e.g. a Dartmouth) where USN ranks them.
- rr888 4y ago
  Yeah this was one of the whistleblower topics. Columbia has highest number of transfers http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation...
oneplane 4y ago
Wouldn't it make more sense to just make sure that all universities just pass the same requirements to be a university, and beyond that not add some ranking or other entertainment nonsense in the mix? This whole entertainifying business really isn't good for anyone, except perhaps for people making money off of numbers, which is still not good for most.
gumby 4y ago
I really wonder why Columbia even cares: it's a globally well known ivy league school obviously producing a good education and is in NYC.* Doesn't US News need Columbia more than the other way around? * No I have no connection to the school except I do have some friends who teach there and some others who attended decades ago.
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  I think professors and the actual scholars there don't really care. However, administration cares because ranking is tied to both how many undergraduates students apply and how much they can charge these students. If college rankings didn't matter financially then I hazard that Columbia would've had questionable numbers to begin with. That said I agree that being an Ivy in NYC certainly was a major contributor to its more recent rise in the rankings and applications.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Having high ranking is like the entire job of administrators. Especially at Ivys they’re selling prestige, being highly ranked gives you prestige.
  - gumby 4y ago
    If you're in the small top 'n' I think the prestige goes the other way. Will anyone care if MIT is +1 or -1 some year? I assume those top schools can just run themselves the way they want and still get highly ranked. And if US news were serious they could simply have kicked columbia out for a year, but it would have hurt them to do so. They'd probably do it for a small college ranked 100 or below though. I'd be embarrassed for Columbia that they gamed the numbers. Outside that small n though, I presume gaming the numbers is commonplace.
sam-2727 4y ago
The beginning of the conclusion of the original study [1] is worth repeating: No one should try to reform or rehabilitate the ranking. It is irredeemable. In Colin Diver’s memorable formulation, “Trying to rank institutions of higher education is a little like trying to rank religions or philosophies. The entire enterprise is flawed, not only in detail but also in conception.” Students are poorly served by rankings. To be sure, they need information when applying to colleges, but rankings provide the wrong information. As many critics have observed, every student has distinctive needs, and what universities offer is far too complex to be projected to a single parameter. These observations may partly reflect the view that the goal of education should be self-discovery and self-fashioning as much as vocational training. Even those who dismiss this view as airy and impractical, however, must acknowledge that any ranking is a composite of factors, not all of which pertain to everyone. A prospective engineering student who chooses the 46th-ranked school over the 47th, for example, would be making a mistake if the advantage of the 46th school is its smaller average class sizes. For small average class sizes are typically the result of offering more upper-level courses in the arts and humanities, which our engineering student likely will not take at all. [1]: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation... (section 8)
- lazyjeff 4y ago
  I've been looking at the bias in rankings for a little while. I think one way to identify and raise awareness of the biases, is just put rankings together side-by-side. I did this for computer science programs, and there's some interesting differences that I noticed: https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#bias-in-computer-science-rankings https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#bias-in-co...
  - evouga 4y ago
    The focus on best paper awards is odd as the major conferences of some CS subfields dole out awards as if they were party favors, and those of other subfields don't have best paper awards at all. For instance SIGCHI 2021 had 28 best papers out of 747 accepted papers (or 3.7%) whereas CVPR 2021 had one best paper out of 1660 accepted papers (0.06%). I have no opinion about whether it's "better" to be stingy or generous with best paper awards. But obviously any kind of ranking that doesn't account for differences between conferences and subfields is going to be quite suspect.
aiisjustanif 4y ago
This has been brought up multiple time now over that last decade. At least this is one step in the right direction. Adam Ruins Everything, Season 2, Episode 7 [1] 1: https://youtu.be/EtQyO93DO-Q https://youtu.be/EtQyO93DO-Q
willcipriano 4y ago
If colleges manipulate rankings like this en mass I think we have a solution to the student debt issue. A FTC review of college advertising would be interesting, if they are selling you a degree with basically no career prospects while proudly displaying these gamed rankings, that sounds like fraud and misrepresentation. Perhaps the students can get a refund?
NelsonMinar 4y ago
I'm proud of my alma mater, Reed College, for refusing to participate in the US News rankings since 1995.
resoluteteeth 4y ago
It's interesting to think what most universities would do to a student who tried to falsify their data like this.
deepzn 4y ago
A reminder that the growth and cost of College administration is one of the primary causes of the massive increase in College tuition across the U.S.
conqrr 4y ago
Explains how ASU has always been number 1 in innovation. It's a great school, but no.q for innovation is pushing it too much.
foolfoolz 4y ago
a huge shift over the last 10 year and most visible in technical roles is the elimination of college rankings. i used to work at a company that had a ceo mandate “all resumes must come from top 20 schools”. saying something like that now as an engineering manager would raise questions and probably make you look dumb. there’s many reasons for this but the biggest is it’s impossible to do this with a global workforce. this is great for high school students, one less area of pressure
geebee 4y ago
One interesting thing to come of these discussions - a lot of the problems with US News methodology arise from the attempt to push certain metrics from 90% to 100%. Class size, faculty with a "terminal" degree, class size, admissions rate. Many of these things are treated by the rankings as "the higher (or lower) the better." As an analogy, I'd use lean muscle mass percentage for elite athletes. Generally speaking, lower is better, and in many sports, all elite athletes are all under 10% body fat. But much below this starts to become harmful, and would eventually be fatal. I think this is kind of what's happening with Columbia here. For example, Columbia claimed that 100% of the faculty had a terminal degree. Prof Thaddeus (if you read his full blog post) questioned this from two angles. The first was to say it can't possibly be true. The second (which I found more interesting) was: why would you even want this to be 100%? Seems like Columbia has valuable faculty who don't have a PhD or MFA or whatever is the "terminal" degree int he field. The harm here isn't in wanting a terminal degree for a high percentage of faculty, it's trying to get this to 100%. I'd say that it probably is a good sign, overall, that most of the faculty has a doctoral degree, as this is the main training degree for research and teaching. But the way US news does it, you get more points for 95% than 90%, more points for 99% than 95%. Seems like a lot of harm comes from trying to wring out that last bit, since even if you do generally agree with the value of a PhD for research (or other terminal degree), it does seem like you'd build a stronger faculty overall with the ability to hire 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 based on some other credential. So much else fits this pattern. Small class sizes.. kind of the same thing. Sure, it's a good sign, but they're only an indicator, not a goal in and of themselves. Low admissions rates, high test scores. All good metrics, but things that can become not just harmful but harmful and maybe even fatal to a university if pursued with a single minded intensity as if total purity in the metric is the goal. Honestly, overall we just have to reject the US news rankings. I appreciate what Prof Thaddeus did here, and it was a useful and very well reasoned and sourced takedown. But now and then, I realized that there isn't much to be added, just new and interesting ways to say what everyone knows at this point - yousnoozeandworlddistort rankings are pretty well idiotic. I actually think college rankings in general can be useful if managed cautiously and read critically, but this one is just a turkey.
crikeyjoe 4y ago
aj7 4y ago
Columbia’s downfall began in a single moment in the early 50’s. When I.I. Rabi refused to let a poor Mr. Bader go to grad school in Physics part time so he could help his family out by working. Mr. Bader later became Feynman’s high school physics teacher, and taught him the principle of least action. So everyone knows that the world will still turn without Columbia.
- srl 4y ago
  This is a bit of a non-sequitur (not to mention silly), but I'm curious about the details. Do you have any links to this story of Rabi refusing to let Bader study part-time? The problem, of course, it that the timing doesn't make sense at all. You say this happened in the early 50's. That can't be the early 1850's, since Bader wasn't born yet. But by the 1950s, Feynman was already long gone from high school. Indeed, he'd already devised path integrals, and so he certainly knew about the principle of least action! Perhaps you meant 30's?
  - aj7 4y ago
    You’re right somewhere in here. I’m certainly wrong about the 50’s. Columbia was a bastion of antisemitism until the 70’s, it had the world’s best Physics Dept. for a long time, but frittered it away. Meanwhile, Cornell built a world-class research university, partly on Columbia’s leavings.
dnissley 4y ago
Polymatter did a great episode on the pressures that create outcomes like this in regards to rankings: https://youtu.be/cQWlnTyOSig https://youtu.be/cQWlnTyOSig
justinzollars 4y ago
Rankings do not matter. Unless you are going into Big Law, or if you are focused on staying in academia.
ken47 4y ago
What is the point of university rankings? To gratify the human need for someone to dumb down a complex system to a simplistic measure, just so we don't have to live with the "unbearable" uncertainty that one university may not be strictly superior to another? Once everyone starts optimizing for a metric, that metric ceases to be useful. It's only a matter of how long it takes people to realize that this has happened.
- skinnymuch 4y ago
  > just so we don't have to live with the "unbearable" uncertainty that one university may not be strictly superior to another? Unfortunately, yes > superior Key word unfortunately
jdnordy 4y ago
Just when you think it's time to count hire education out because of bloated administrative spending, overwhelming student debt, and poor technical training for real world jobs, a light shines in the darkness. I guess there's still hope if higher education can learn from Professors of the likes of Michael Thaddeus. He and others like him make pursing a degree valuable. The administration can go... Note: read the original document: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation...
spoonjim 4y ago
If Harvard, Yale, and Princeton mutually agreed to withdraw from these rankings it would go a long way towards killing them.
synergy20 4y ago
How to stay objective on these rankings? What about a list of independent|objective tests(for the 100 different majors out there) to rank students from any schools when you graduate that acts like SAT|ACT for jobs? do make it optional though, if employer finds that valuable, more college graduates will take it, it will work better than leetcode I hope.
waylandsmithers 4y ago
I honestly hope this starts an upheaval against the US News and World Report college rankings. That stupid magazine has way too much power in higher education for no reason .
fujidust 4y ago
I have an interest in researching CS programs within a specific geographical area in the states but am having trouble finding good data on student outcomes and associated metrics. If this ranking data is bs or gamed, then what’s the best available resource for helping to determine what programs are good, bad or otherwise?
y0ungarmanii 4y ago
Lol colleges are more expensive country club than place of higher education. We really shouldn't be surprised with the corruption anymore after we found out how easy it was to get on the rowing team of most of these places.
alexpotato 4y ago
This story is not necessarily related to fudging of numbers/stats etc but it does illustrate to what level schools will go to attract students: - Small liberal arts school - Is ranked Division 3 in the NCAA - Realized they are losing students - They start a football team! - Why? For a layout of $500,000/year for a coach + staff, using existing facilities (e.g. soccer stadium) etc they get ~100 additional students who want to be able to say "yeah, I played football in college" 100 students * full boat tuition is nothing to sneeze at and is a pretty good deal from an ROI perspective. It's not a small leap from "let's drop some cash for a very obvious improvement to our attendance" to "let's fudge some numbers that no one may ever really look at" for the same outcome.
equivocates 4y ago
Cool, now do all the Ivys.
mrtweetyhack 4y ago
fsckboy 4y ago
misleading headline (on the original article) from TFA: "on Thursday of last week, just before the July 1 deadline for submitting new data to U.S. News... Provost Mary Boyce, said [Columbia] would not submit data this year, adding that the university had “embarked on a review of our data collection and submissions process” and that is why they will not be in the rankings. It seems Forbes filled out this submission just like Columbia did theirs, to skew overall appearance. the "scandal" could very well still be the scandal everybody thinks it is, but it seems to be an overstatement to draw the bold lines that Forbes is juicing their article with. And as others have said, unless we know the extent of fudging at other schools it's difficult to judge the severity of this case. full disclosure, I have no Columbia or ivy affiliation, but I perceive it to be easily within the top 10
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  The article is correct. US News kicked Columbia out of the 2022 rankings. Columbia subsequently withdrew from submitting data for the 2023 rankings.
oldstrangers 4y ago
I worked for a marketing agency that gets paid a shit ton of money to run ads targeted at the US News voters. Always seemed so stupid to me, its just a popularity contest.
throwawayarnty 4y ago
University rankings are mostly bunk because they weigh mostly on perception and lagging indicators. A university can deteriorate for decades while remaining high on ranking. The only criterion that matters for a student that wants to select a university is the fraction of graduates that go on to do impressive things.
Ice_cream_suit 4y ago
"The picture coming into focus is that of a two-tier university, which educates, side by side in the same classrooms, two large and quite distinct groups of undergraduates: non-transfer students and transfer students. The former students lead privileged lives: they are very selectively chosen, boast top-notch test scores, tend to hail from the wealthier ranks of society, receive ample financial aid, and turn out very successfully as measured by graduation rates. The latter students are significantly worse off: they are less selectively chosen, typically have lower test scores (one surmises, although acceptance rates and average test scores for the Combined Plan and General Studies are well-kept secrets),43 tend to come from less prosperous backgrounds (as their higher rate of Pell grants shows), receive much stingier financial aid, and have considerably more difficulty graduating. No one would design a university this way, but it has been the status quo at Columbia for years. The situation is tolerated only because it is not widely understood. " https://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html https://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigatio...
fortran77 4y ago
mulmen 4y ago
Sure. But, why not doubt everything else US News said? It’s not like they uncovered their own incompetence. The takeaway here isn’t that Columbia cheated. Everyone cheated. US News failed in their duty and aren’t a worthy authority.
nottorp 4y ago
Nice cookie dialog you have there, Forbes. And I was mildly interested in the article. Not any more.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
[flagged]

440 points by selimthegrim 4y ago

https://www.theblueandwhite.org/post/michael-thaddeus https://www.theblueandwhite.org/post/michael-thaddeus

US colleges foresee a future where they are under attack for being absurdly selective, what some are now calling being "highly rejective". I think they want to avoid being targeted by the fairness wonks anymore than they already are. Also, US News and World Report rankings have major problems, for instance, the ranking algorithm considers campus aesthetics and food quality, but doesn't account for price, giving schools incentive to raise prices to fund campus improvements that boost rank, in turn boosting applications, in turn reducing % acceptance (the principal indicator of "quality" in US schools). This was how TCU went from a meh christian school to a "selective private college" in just a couple of years. World Report now publishes a "best dollar value" report to account for this, but few read it.

duk 4y ago
"the fairness wonks"
peanuty1 4y ago
> the ranking algorithm considers campus aesthetics and food quality. wtf
- Fomite 4y ago
  Having eaten some absolutely miserable dorm food in my time, I get it.
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  It is not true. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rank...
jseliger 4y ago
The gap between the schools' rhetoric and reality is pretty funny; I was just writing about it the other day: https://seliger.com/2022/07/06/nonprofit-boards-of-directors-usually-exist-to-be-controlled-by-the-organizations-executive-director/ https://seliger.com/2022/07/06/nonprofit-boards-of-directors...: You can see a lot of hypocrisy that’s uncritically accepted by a lot of organizations, including nonprofits. Exclusionary higher education is a particular notable example, given the soaring rhetoric of “inclusion” spouted by some people involved with higher ed, versus the reality of those same schools seeking to reject as many applicants as possible. Princeton University’s president, Chris Eisgruber, has, for example, blathered extensively about the school’s efforts to “combat systemic racism.” Princeton has a $37 billion endowment. The school’s undergrad acceptance rate is 5.6% and it charges a sticker price of $73,000 a year (yes, the school does accept a handful of token low-income students every year, but that the school’s overall demographics reflect its target: the wealthy). Does that sound like a school devoted to combating systemic racism to you? How can people make these kinds of arguments with a straight face? Colleges and universities are run largely for the benefit of their administrators. The other exclusionary schools are doing the same things, as are their private-school feeders, despite their vigorous marketing to the contrary. Regarding the above paragraph, let me be clear: describing how something is, is not the same thing as approving of it.
- rayiner 4y ago
  It's truly mind-boggling. The Ivies were always bastions for maintaining the position of WASP elites. They still serve that function. Maybe there is a bit more wiggle room about skin color, but they still function to socialize the next generation of people to run WASP institutions like "JP Morgan Chase."
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    I guess I must have hallucinated reading all those Stewart Alsop articles about the decline of the WASP Elite then.
  - lmm 4y ago
    There's nothing inherently white, anglo-saxon or protestant about the oligarchy that these institutions preserve; they will very happily pass on to a new generation of westernised, college-educated liberals of all races and genders but no more variation in thought than the one they replaced. The cultural focus on such ephemera gives them a very useful fig leaf for excluding the demographic that it actually matters to exclude: the working class.
pyuser583 4y ago
A big problem: admitting too many students actually decrease the number who apply.
kart23 4y ago
Is that really so wrong though? I'd like to go to a college where the food doesn't suck and the campus is nice. Those are definitely factors that went into my choice. Value was definitely the overwhelming factor in my decision though, I went to a UC. Also, even the value rankings are mostly just Ivies at the top. Funny enough, my school is in the ~30s for overall rankings, but in the low 100s for value, since they're looking at the out-of-state cost (which for UCs is around 50k vs. 15k in-state), and they include grants, which is extremely variable by individual student. If they looked at the in-state tuition, UCs would dominate the value rankings. https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/best-value https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-unive...
WillPostForFood 4y ago
US News rankings considers neither food nor campus aesthetics. https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/ranking-criteria-and-weights https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/rank...

burlesona 4y ago

Per the article this came in response to questions raised by a Columbia faculty member critiquing the university's data. I thought that report[1] was actually more interesting than the original article. As per the quote at the top of the report: > Rankings create powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behavior for the sole or primary purpose of inflating one’s score... It would be shocking to me if Columbia was the only institution that fudged its numbers a bit in pursuit of a higher US News ranking. Given how important that ranking has become in US culture, I wonder if it's time for the methodology to change to require audited/auditable metrics rather than continuing to allow self-reporting. 1: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation...

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
hackyhacky 4y ago
Your suspicion is correct. I've taught at several US universities, and it's an open secret that the administrative takes steps to manipulate numbers in order to secure better rankings. Typical example: a small, prestigious liberal arts college always has smaller class sizes in the fall semester than in the spring semester. Why? Because classes with less than 30 students are ranked higher by US News, but they only take into consideration the fall semester. No one cares about class sizes in the spring.
- CogitoCogito 4y ago
  > Because classes with less than 30 students are ranked higher by US News, but they only take into consideration the fall semester. No one cares about class sizes in the spring. What a bizarre and totally unnecessary restriction.
  - genewitch 4y ago
    Parents helping/guiding their near-adult children in the final spring of highschool to apply at or choose universities, where they would start university that same fall seem to be the target audience, here. Fall is when "most" incoming freshmen will start.

hprotagonist 4y ago

tit for tat: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation...

function_seven 4y ago

In the same way that one restaurant flouted Yelp ratings[1], couldn't all the Ivy League schools just refuse to participate in US News' annual rankings? What would happen if Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, et. al. decided that this ranking is not helpful, so they won't supply any info? Readers of US News would more likely start to lose trust in the rankings rather than move their assessments of the Ivies downward, right? [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/why-this-tiny-italian-restaurant-gives-a-discount-for-bad-yelp-reviews/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/09/why-t...

ketzo 4y ago
But it’s a prisoner’s dilemma situation, right? If none of the Ivy’s are on US News, well, it’s probably a shitty ranking. But if e.g. just Penn falls off the list… most people are just gonna assume that Penn got worse.
- mlinsey 4y ago
  This is why it is really just Harvard (likely Stanford, Yale, and Princeton too, but definitely Harvard) that can make a statement boycotting the list, just like a billionaire can get away with wearing a plastic $10 watch but mere millionaires feel the need to wear a Rolex to show off their money. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if Harvard did the least to game the US News metrics of any top 25 university, because the US News staff would just tweak their formula to keep Harvard in the top 5 regardless.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    Harvard doesn't need to game the rankings because Harvard grads own the friggin' board. The rankings will fall in line accordingly.
lbarrow 4y ago
These rankings consistently tell people that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc are the best schools in the country. Why would they boycott rankings that praise them?

twblalock 4y ago

The US News rankings were already a bit of a mess, but leaving out one of the Ivy Leagues is only going to be bad for US News. An Ivy League school does not need help from the rankings -- but rankings that leave out one of the most prestigious and well-known universities in the country are useless.

prepend 4y ago
> An Ivy League school does not need help from the rankings I tend to agree, but why then did Columbia fudge the numbers? I think there’s some envy from the “lesser ivys” that they wish they were Harvard or Princeton. A high USNews ranking proves little, but I guess Columbia wanted to be tied with Harvard.
- genericone 4y ago
  Columbia incentivized administration MBAs to increase the rankings, perhaps attached to bonuses. They did it unscrupulously by fudging the numbers and so Columbia will hopefully will dis-incentivize the behavior in the future, and so perhaps will other schools... doubt it.
- rr888 4y ago
  Ivy league is kinda obsolete now, esp with places like Stanford, Duke, John Hopkins better known than Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell.

bee_rider 4y ago

I wonder how much these measurements actually matter, for a place like Columbia. I mean, I can see why, like, people might want to look at the list and see "hey this school I've never heard of is actually OK." But like, people don't find out about Columbia from this list, right? It is, uh, older than the country "U.S. News" is named after and an Ivy League school. Not having them on the list just reflects poorly on the list.

willhinsa 4y ago
On the other hand, Coca-Cola spends 4 billion of dollars every year on advertising.
- bee_rider 4y ago
  Yeah. I dunno, nothing about advertising makes sense to me, so I guess I have trouble evaluating this kind of thing. Common sense would tell you that you don't give 4 billion dollars to the guy who says "I'm really good at convincing people to part with their money -- whether they should or not!" But then I don't run Coca Cola, so I guess they've figured out something I've missed.
- toast0 4y ago
  In 2010, Pepsi switched at least their superb owl advertising budget to feel good community projects and lost sales at 6% vs a 4.3% overall decline for soda. Advertising drives sales, even if you can't tie a sale directly to an ad.
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    I dunno, Pepsi always seemed more faddish anyway, I'm not surprised their marketshare would be less durable.
peanuty1 4y ago
I imagine there is value in being in the same company of more prestigious schools like Harvard and Princeton.
4y ago

throwawayzXwEt 4y ago

These rankings are rampant with manipulation. For instance, I heard of classes at Hopkins being taught half in-class, half pre-recorded, so that they could say the "classroom" size was half its actual enrollment. It's especially frustrating when this kind of manipulation actually hurts students' education.

endisneigh 4y ago

Unless a school is willing to accept a entirely random set of students all schools success or lack there of can be chalked up to selection and survivor bias. I’d have to find it but someone did an analysis of folks who got into elite schools and didn’t go for whatever reason and saw that by mid career they had more or less the same outcomes. Thiel Fellows entire premise is around this effect, as well.

labster 4y ago

One down, 99 to go. These university rankings are absurd, and just a status game that school administrators feel they are forced to play. Individual programs may be outstanding at otherwise middling colleges — it’s better to learn about specific departments than try to reduce the school as a whole to a number.

kupopuffs 4y ago
Aren't there rankings for specific schools in schools? like Engineering, etc...
- labster 4y ago
  Sure, but excellence in computer engineering does not imply excellence in chemical engineering does not imply excellence in civil engineering.
  - sandstrom 4y ago
    But someone looking for a good chemical engineering school won't look in the computer science ranking table, no?
  - kupopuffs 4y ago
    OP was talking about how rankings are bad. are rankings for these schools more valid?
culi 4y ago
One of the heaviest part of their grading is just the opinions of academics. They just send a survey out and ask academics to rank universities. Of course they end up reproducing and reinforcing the existing rankings as always.
unosama 4y ago
Universities are a status game in general. Reputation and networking opportunities matter more than education quality.

dang 4y ago

Related: An Investigation of Columbia's U.S. News Ranking - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30603287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30603287 - March 2022 (46 comments)

somethoughts 4y ago

Somewhat related - How Northeastern Gamed the College Rankings https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/ https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeast... There are probably some significant parallels to any executive who manages to game the compensation structure at any large corporation to their financial benefit.

kens 4y ago

There's a very interesting article "How to Game the College Rankings" about how Northeastern University's president focused on improving the university's ranking. In 1996, it was a "third-tier, blue-collar, commuter-based university" rated #162. The new university president had a singleminded goal: to improve the ranking. He got the university into the top 100 in 2006 and into the top 50 by 2013. https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeastern-gamed-the-college-rankings/ https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2014/08/26/how-northeast...

saalweachter 4y ago
Now the interesting question: did Northwestern^H^H^H^H^H^H^Heastern get meaningfully better for students between 1996 and 2013? Did they graduate in higher numbers? Did they have better career outcomes? Did more get into better(?) grad schools? What is their median income? Are they happier, did they enjoy college more?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- myko 4y ago
  Northeastern. Northwestern was already relatively prestigious.
  - dannykwells 4y ago
    Northwestern also - by the way. The president's goal when he joined was to break into the top 10.
- zerocrates 4y ago
  Just a note that this is Northeastern (in Boston) not Northwestern (in Illinois). Northwestern was and is typically a very high ranker. As for what the improvements are like... hard to say. Some ways to improve the rankings like getting more students you don't want to come to apply (so you can appear more selective) don't actually help at all, while things like small classes even if done to "game" the rankings could actually help. There's also just the cyclical aspect of things: the quality of your experience is going to be significantly determined by the quality of the student body, so if you have a better applicant pool because of your better rankings you maybe have a bit of a virtuous cycle that's somewhat disconnected from whether the things you changed actually improved anything real on their own other than the ranking.

dwater 4y ago

For context, U.S. News and World Report used to be a trusted periodical that reported national and international news. In the 80's they started ranking colleges and selling it as a separate publication, which turned out to be pretty profitable, so they repeated the trick by ranking hospitals (1990), cars (2007), and then states (2017). The news business went online only in 2011, then shuttered in 2015. Since then they've just been a rankings company, but they kept the name to trade on their reputation.

cuteboy19 4y ago
I feel like it would not be possible to sell such a static and easily leaked thing as a ranking list
uptownfunk 4y ago
Wow fascinating - so US News is now a rankings company.
- xanaxagoras 4y ago
  If you think of clickbait as a crowdsourced ranking of emotionally manipulative hyperbole, that could be said of any corporate press rag.
  - brewdad 4y ago
    US News was a clickbait company before there were clicks to bait.
UncleOxidant 4y ago
U.S. News and World Report was a highly respected & trusted news magazine in the 70s-90s, but it's online incarnation now is just another clickbait site (similar for Newsweek).
- bluedays 4y ago
  They’re the #1 best rankings company.

danielmorozoff 4y ago

Having pursued a PhD at Columbia and having taught classes there. I am surprised it took this long for someone to speak up. Also the fact that there are no checks in place to certify top ranking academic institutions is fascinating.

xiaolingxiao 4y ago
could you expand on what you mean please?

taveras 4y ago

If folks are curious about how schools are ranked, I highly encourage you to listen to the following podcast: https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/lord-of-the-rankings https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/lord-of-...

saagarjha 4y ago

Kind of sad that US News decided to unrank just Columbia rather than suspending the whole thing. If one college games your ranking to the point that a professor from the university is like "hey you guys this seems pretty sus", it's probably true that all the other universities have the same problem and just don't have anyone willing to talk about it. As it stands it seems like just Columbia did something wrong, when they are the only university that did something wrong but also had someone who did something right.

wombat-man 4y ago
Well, it's kinda their main business at this point.
naniwaduni 4y ago
Suspending the whole thing would be suspending pretty much US News's entire remaining raison d'être at this point.

data4lyfe 4y ago

The fact that U.S. News and World Report can pull a school from it's own rankings and it makes such a strong impact is really a strange phenomenon.

epgui 4y ago

For all of the ways we can easily criticize the incentive structures and possible intentionality behind these bad numbers (which I agree merit scrutiny), I think it's worth noting and remembering that the issue was flagged by a mathematics professor of the same university: there is at least some well-aligned incentives, some measure of self-regulation, with respect tenured positions and academic freedom.

lofatdairy 4y ago

If I'm not mistaken the news that Columbia "won't participate" in the rankings came a bit sooner[^1], but if anything that struck me as a "you can't fire me, I quit" sort of preempting of what was inevitable. Honestly though, college rankings are toxic, as is this whole prestige economy we've built around them. I don't even really care about colleges faking numbers, so much as other shady practices like sending students false promises to get their hopes up - pretty much for the express purpose of rejecting them down the line. As any unfortunate student who has either had to apply to college, or been the parent of someone applying, you can't avoid the "chance me" threads or the endless HYPSM dick measuring contest while trying to get legitimate information. [^1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/30/us/columbia-us-news-rankings.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/30/us/columbia-us-news-ranki...

raldi 4y ago
Columbia announced they wont participate in next year’s rankings. The delisting was for this year’s report.

lpolovets 4y ago

The influence of US News on colleges is wild. One absurd tidbit that I've heard: the rankings weigh freshman stats much more than transfer student stats, so a lot of competitive schools that won't let you in as a freshman if you would hurt their SAT/GPA/etc averages will happily let you in as a transfer because they'll make more revenue and your stats no longer hurt their rankings. * The ranking formula is also changed arbitrarily based on the reactions of colleges and readers. My school went from #9 to #1 one year, there were a lot of "wth??" reactions, and the following year the formula was tweaked so that our ranking dipped down to #4. I'm pretty sure nothing changed materially in the school over those 3 years, but the ranking moved around a lot. The whole system is a farce. * I haven't researched freshman vs transfer data myself, but it's something I've heard from multiple startup founders in the college education space.

ffguuficc 4y ago
For UW this is 100% true. A 4.0 is like a 50/50 to get in the CS program but for transfers it’s easier.
whimsicalism 4y ago
Depends on the school. At a place like Harvard or Yale it is incredibly difficult to get in as a transfer, much harder than to get in in the first place.
- caddemon 4y ago
  Yeah but that's Tier 0, it's not surprising that HYPSM don't feel the need to engage in as many number fudging tactics. It's a lot more impactful to Tier 1 top schools (e.g. a Dartmouth) where USN ranks them.
rr888 4y ago
Yeah this was one of the whistleblower topics. Columbia has highest number of transfers http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation...

oneplane 4y ago

Wouldn't it make more sense to just make sure that all universities just pass the same requirements to be a university, and beyond that not add some ranking or other entertainment nonsense in the mix? This whole entertainifying business really isn't good for anyone, except perhaps for people making money off of numbers, which is still not good for most.

gumby 4y ago

I really wonder why Columbia even cares: it's a globally well known ivy league school obviously producing a good education and is in NYC.* Doesn't US News need Columbia more than the other way around? * No I have no connection to the school except I do have some friends who teach there and some others who attended decades ago.

lofatdairy 4y ago
I think professors and the actual scholars there don't really care. However, administration cares because ranking is tied to both how many undergraduates students apply and how much they can charge these students. If college rankings didn't matter financially then I hazard that Columbia would've had questionable numbers to begin with. That said I agree that being an Ivy in NYC certainly was a major contributor to its more recent rise in the rankings and applications.
colinmhayes 4y ago
Having high ranking is like the entire job of administrators. Especially at Ivys they’re selling prestige, being highly ranked gives you prestige.
- gumby 4y ago
  If you're in the small top 'n' I think the prestige goes the other way. Will anyone care if MIT is +1 or -1 some year? I assume those top schools can just run themselves the way they want and still get highly ranked. And if US news were serious they could simply have kicked columbia out for a year, but it would have hurt them to do so. They'd probably do it for a small college ranked 100 or below though. I'd be embarrassed for Columbia that they gamed the numbers. Outside that small n though, I presume gaming the numbers is commonplace.

sam-2727 4y ago

The beginning of the conclusion of the original study [1] is worth repeating: No one should try to reform or rehabilitate the ranking. It is irredeemable. In Colin Diver’s memorable formulation, “Trying to rank institutions of higher education is a little like trying to rank religions or philosophies. The entire enterprise is flawed, not only in detail but also in conception.” Students are poorly served by rankings. To be sure, they need information when applying to colleges, but rankings provide the wrong information. As many critics have observed, every student has distinctive needs, and what universities offer is far too complex to be projected to a single parameter. These observations may partly reflect the view that the goal of education should be self-discovery and self-fashioning as much as vocational training. Even those who dismiss this view as airy and impractical, however, must acknowledge that any ranking is a composite of factors, not all of which pertain to everyone. A prospective engineering student who chooses the 46th-ranked school over the 47th, for example, would be making a mistake if the advantage of the 46th school is its smaller average class sizes. For small average class sizes are typically the result of offering more upper-level courses in the arts and humanities, which our engineering student likely will not take at all. [1]: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation... (section 8)

lazyjeff 4y ago
I've been looking at the bias in rankings for a little while. I think one way to identify and raise awareness of the biases, is just put rankings together side-by-side. I did this for computer science programs, and there's some interesting differences that I noticed: https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#bias-in-computer-science-rankings https://jeffhuang.com/computer-science-open-data/#bias-in-co...
- evouga 4y ago
  The focus on best paper awards is odd as the major conferences of some CS subfields dole out awards as if they were party favors, and those of other subfields don't have best paper awards at all. For instance SIGCHI 2021 had 28 best papers out of 747 accepted papers (or 3.7%) whereas CVPR 2021 had one best paper out of 1660 accepted papers (0.06%). I have no opinion about whether it's "better" to be stingy or generous with best paper awards. But obviously any kind of ranking that doesn't account for differences between conferences and subfields is going to be quite suspect.

aiisjustanif 4y ago

This has been brought up multiple time now over that last decade. At least this is one step in the right direction. Adam Ruins Everything, Season 2, Episode 7 [1] 1: https://youtu.be/EtQyO93DO-Q https://youtu.be/EtQyO93DO-Q

willcipriano 4y ago

If colleges manipulate rankings like this en mass I think we have a solution to the student debt issue. A FTC review of college advertising would be interesting, if they are selling you a degree with basically no career prospects while proudly displaying these gamed rankings, that sounds like fraud and misrepresentation. Perhaps the students can get a refund?

NelsonMinar 4y ago

I'm proud of my alma mater, Reed College, for refusing to participate in the US News rankings since 1995.

resoluteteeth 4y ago

It's interesting to think what most universities would do to a student who tried to falsify their data like this.

deepzn 4y ago

A reminder that the growth and cost of College administration is one of the primary causes of the massive increase in College tuition across the U.S.

conqrr 4y ago

Explains how ASU has always been number 1 in innovation. It's a great school, but no.q for innovation is pushing it too much.

foolfoolz 4y ago

a huge shift over the last 10 year and most visible in technical roles is the elimination of college rankings. i used to work at a company that had a ceo mandate “all resumes must come from top 20 schools”. saying something like that now as an engineering manager would raise questions and probably make you look dumb. there’s many reasons for this but the biggest is it’s impossible to do this with a global workforce. this is great for high school students, one less area of pressure

geebee 4y ago

One interesting thing to come of these discussions - a lot of the problems with US News methodology arise from the attempt to push certain metrics from 90% to 100%. Class size, faculty with a "terminal" degree, class size, admissions rate. Many of these things are treated by the rankings as "the higher (or lower) the better." As an analogy, I'd use lean muscle mass percentage for elite athletes. Generally speaking, lower is better, and in many sports, all elite athletes are all under 10% body fat. But much below this starts to become harmful, and would eventually be fatal. I think this is kind of what's happening with Columbia here. For example, Columbia claimed that 100% of the faculty had a terminal degree. Prof Thaddeus (if you read his full blog post) questioned this from two angles. The first was to say it can't possibly be true. The second (which I found more interesting) was: why would you even want this to be 100%? Seems like Columbia has valuable faculty who don't have a PhD or MFA or whatever is the "terminal" degree int he field. The harm here isn't in wanting a terminal degree for a high percentage of faculty, it's trying to get this to 100%. I'd say that it probably is a good sign, overall, that most of the faculty has a doctoral degree, as this is the main training degree for research and teaching. But the way US news does it, you get more points for 95% than 90%, more points for 99% than 95%. Seems like a lot of harm comes from trying to wring out that last bit, since even if you do generally agree with the value of a PhD for research (or other terminal degree), it does seem like you'd build a stronger faculty overall with the ability to hire 1 in 10 or 1 in 20 based on some other credential. So much else fits this pattern. Small class sizes.. kind of the same thing. Sure, it's a good sign, but they're only an indicator, not a goal in and of themselves. Low admissions rates, high test scores. All good metrics, but things that can become not just harmful but harmful and maybe even fatal to a university if pursued with a single minded intensity as if total purity in the metric is the goal. Honestly, overall we just have to reject the US news rankings. I appreciate what Prof Thaddeus did here, and it was a useful and very well reasoned and sourced takedown. But now and then, I realized that there isn't much to be added, just new and interesting ways to say what everyone knows at this point - yousnoozeandworlddistort rankings are pretty well idiotic. I actually think college rankings in general can be useful if managed cautiously and read critically, but this one is just a turkey.

crikeyjoe 4y ago

aj7 4y ago

Columbia’s downfall began in a single moment in the early 50’s. When I.I. Rabi refused to let a poor Mr. Bader go to grad school in Physics part time so he could help his family out by working. Mr. Bader later became Feynman’s high school physics teacher, and taught him the principle of least action. So everyone knows that the world will still turn without Columbia.

srl 4y ago
This is a bit of a non-sequitur (not to mention silly), but I'm curious about the details. Do you have any links to this story of Rabi refusing to let Bader study part-time? The problem, of course, it that the timing doesn't make sense at all. You say this happened in the early 50's. That can't be the early 1850's, since Bader wasn't born yet. But by the 1950s, Feynman was already long gone from high school. Indeed, he'd already devised path integrals, and so he certainly knew about the principle of least action! Perhaps you meant 30's?
- aj7 4y ago
  You’re right somewhere in here. I’m certainly wrong about the 50’s. Columbia was a bastion of antisemitism until the 70’s, it had the world’s best Physics Dept. for a long time, but frittered it away. Meanwhile, Cornell built a world-class research university, partly on Columbia’s leavings.

dnissley 4y ago

Polymatter did a great episode on the pressures that create outcomes like this in regards to rankings: https://youtu.be/cQWlnTyOSig https://youtu.be/cQWlnTyOSig

justinzollars 4y ago

Rankings do not matter. Unless you are going into Big Law, or if you are focused on staying in academia.

ken47 4y ago

What is the point of university rankings? To gratify the human need for someone to dumb down a complex system to a simplistic measure, just so we don't have to live with the "unbearable" uncertainty that one university may not be strictly superior to another? Once everyone starts optimizing for a metric, that metric ceases to be useful. It's only a matter of how long it takes people to realize that this has happened.

skinnymuch 4y ago
> just so we don't have to live with the "unbearable" uncertainty that one university may not be strictly superior to another? Unfortunately, yes > superior Key word unfortunately

jdnordy 4y ago

Just when you think it's time to count hire education out because of bloated administrative spending, overwhelming student debt, and poor technical training for real world jobs, a light shines in the darkness. I guess there's still hope if higher education can learn from Professors of the likes of Michael Thaddeus. He and others like him make pursing a degree valuable. The administration can go... Note: read the original document: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html http://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation...

spoonjim 4y ago

If Harvard, Yale, and Princeton mutually agreed to withdraw from these rankings it would go a long way towards killing them.

synergy20 4y ago

How to stay objective on these rankings? What about a list of independent|objective tests(for the 100 different majors out there) to rank students from any schools when you graduate that acts like SAT|ACT for jobs? do make it optional though, if employer finds that valuable, more college graduates will take it, it will work better than leetcode I hope.

waylandsmithers 4y ago

I honestly hope this starts an upheaval against the US News and World Report college rankings. That stupid magazine has way too much power in higher education for no reason .

fujidust 4y ago

I have an interest in researching CS programs within a specific geographical area in the states but am having trouble finding good data on student outcomes and associated metrics. If this ranking data is bs or gamed, then what’s the best available resource for helping to determine what programs are good, bad or otherwise?

y0ungarmanii 4y ago

Lol colleges are more expensive country club than place of higher education. We really shouldn't be surprised with the corruption anymore after we found out how easy it was to get on the rowing team of most of these places.

alexpotato 4y ago

This story is not necessarily related to fudging of numbers/stats etc but it does illustrate to what level schools will go to attract students: - Small liberal arts school - Is ranked Division 3 in the NCAA - Realized they are losing students - They start a football team! - Why? For a layout of $500,000/year for a coach + staff, using existing facilities (e.g. soccer stadium) etc they get ~100 additional students who want to be able to say "yeah, I played football in college" 100 students * full boat tuition is nothing to sneeze at and is a pretty good deal from an ROI perspective. It's not a small leap from "let's drop some cash for a very obvious improvement to our attendance" to "let's fudge some numbers that no one may ever really look at" for the same outcome.

equivocates 4y ago

Cool, now do all the Ivys.

mrtweetyhack 4y ago

fsckboy 4y ago

misleading headline (on the original article) from TFA: "on Thursday of last week, just before the July 1 deadline for submitting new data to U.S. News... Provost Mary Boyce, said [Columbia] would not submit data this year, adding that the university had “embarked on a review of our data collection and submissions process” and that is why they will not be in the rankings. It seems Forbes filled out this submission just like Columbia did theirs, to skew overall appearance. the "scandal" could very well still be the scandal everybody thinks it is, but it seems to be an overstatement to draw the bold lines that Forbes is juicing their article with. And as others have said, unless we know the extent of fudging at other schools it's difficult to judge the severity of this case. full disclosure, I have no Columbia or ivy affiliation, but I perceive it to be easily within the top 10

WillPostForFood 4y ago
The article is correct. US News kicked Columbia out of the 2022 rankings. Columbia subsequently withdrew from submitting data for the 2023 rankings.

oldstrangers 4y ago

I worked for a marketing agency that gets paid a shit ton of money to run ads targeted at the US News voters. Always seemed so stupid to me, its just a popularity contest.

throwawayarnty 4y ago

University rankings are mostly bunk because they weigh mostly on perception and lagging indicators. A university can deteriorate for decades while remaining high on ranking. The only criterion that matters for a student that wants to select a university is the fraction of graduates that go on to do impressive things.

Ice_cream_suit 4y ago

"The picture coming into focus is that of a two-tier university, which educates, side by side in the same classrooms, two large and quite distinct groups of undergraduates: non-transfer students and transfer students. The former students lead privileged lives: they are very selectively chosen, boast top-notch test scores, tend to hail from the wealthier ranks of society, receive ample financial aid, and turn out very successfully as measured by graduation rates. The latter students are significantly worse off: they are less selectively chosen, typically have lower test scores (one surmises, although acceptance rates and average test scores for the Combined Plan and General Studies are well-kept secrets),43 tend to come from less prosperous backgrounds (as their higher rate of Pell grants shows), receive much stingier financial aid, and have considerably more difficulty graduating. No one would design a university this way, but it has been the status quo at Columbia for years. The situation is tolerated only because it is not widely understood. " https://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigation.html https://www.math.columbia.edu/~thaddeus/ranking/investigatio...

fortran77 4y ago

mulmen 4y ago

Sure. But, why not doubt everything else US News said? It’s not like they uncovered their own incompetence. The takeaway here isn’t that Columbia cheated. Everyone cheated. US News failed in their duty and aren’t a worthy authority.

nottorp 4y ago

Nice cookie dialog you have there, Forbes. And I was mildly interested in the article. Not any more.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

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