An Investigation of the Facts Behind Columbia's U.S. News Ranking

The article comes as close as possible to accusing Columbia of fraud without outright saying it. I hardly think that's dry.

General rankings have limited use. The value of data depends on the interests of the reader, which for college 'rankings' vary widely. For example, if you are interested only in the status of your college degree among the public, then the ranking itself over time and the credibility of US News are probably most valuable, regardless of how they are calculated. But if you are interested in the status of your degree within academia then the 'peer assessment survey' seems most important. Your interests and thus the value of different data will vary by what you want to do (study? work? donate? evaluate research? hire researchers or teachers?), what field(s) you are interested in and at what level, how you learn/work, etc. For many people, the 'ranking' might rely almost completely on one department or just a few specific faculty members.

The US News & World Report's ranking system apparently depends (at least in part) on class size (8% of ranking), proportion of faculty with terminal degrees (3% of ranking), proportion of faculty who are full-time (1% of ranking), student-faculty ratio (1%), financial resources per student (10%), retention and graduation rates (35%), student debt (5%), and "'peer assessment survey' [20%] in which college presidents, provosts, and admissions deans are asked to rate other institutions."

All that data can be valuable but says little directly about the quality of education received by students or the quality of research, though the latter might be outside USN's scope. Sometimes, objectivity is a distraction because the objective data is too limited to inform us. For example, objective data about a play - number of words, etc. - doesn't tell you much about it.

In those cases, expert judgment is an excellent tool and I think USN's 'peer assessment survey' is the right approach for many purposes, but USN surveys people with narrow knowlede - administrators, including admissions officers.

I might look at Times Higher Education, which performs a 'reputation survey' that asks (IIRC) thousands of published, tenured faculty about the quality of other schools' departments in their field of expertise. These are people with expertise and significant access, though of course their understanding of the student's perspective will be limited. (Columbia rates around 10th, IIRC.)

Not only are they apparently lying to US News, they appear to be running a scheme of enrolling an unusually high amount of transfer students (who are not counted in the US News graduation rates) for the purpose of soaking them for tuition revenue.

Per the article, transfers get much less financial aid than non-transfers at Columbia and also have much lower graduation rates, which is the opposite of what is seen at other schools with large transfer populations like in the UC system.

Prof. Thaddeus is very courageous for bringing these facts to light, and/or has a deep love for his university that he feels is being corrupted by their pursuit of a higher ranking.

I can't speak for the math department, but I've noticed that there are general contentions between Columbia's faculty and administration that seem somewhat unique to the school. Professor Martin Chalfie has noted how cramped and run-down his lab is in an interview, which seems like soft-spoken criticism at the way Columbia has failed to use its enormous endowment towards acquiring more research and teaching spaces.

Perhaps someone at Harvard or MIT can chime in with whether such contentions exist outside of Columbia, but I'm not too surprised to see a professor criticize the school for somewhat blatant wrongdoing.

For an academic paper, it was really easy to read, and I say that as someone who has noticed that my own attention span has become alarmingly short.