Columbia Loses Its No. 2 Spot In the US News Rankings

Hmmmmmm writes: Without fanfare, U.S. News & World Report announced that it had "unranked" Columbia University, which had been in a three-way tie for the No. 2 spot in the 2022 edition of Best Colleges, after being unable to verify the underlying data submitted by the university. The decision was posted on the U.S. News website a week after Columbia said it was withdrawing from the upcoming 2023 rankings. The Ivy League university said then that it would not participate in the next rankings because it was investigating accusations by one of its own mathematics professors that the No. 2 ranking was based on inaccurate and misleading data. The biggest beneficiaries may be Harvard and M.I.T., which had shared the second spot with Columbia, and now have one less competitor. Princeton keeps its preening rights as No. 1. The rankings are influential among students applying to college because objectively comparing schools and visiting every campus they are interested in can be difficult. College presidents have bitterly complained that the rankings are misleading, yet few institutions have dropped out of the game.

Article that is not paywalled

[dhuv]

https://bwog.com/2022/07/colum... [bwog.com]

Re:

[JackieBrown]

I started using bypass-paywalls-chrome [github.com] and it got rid of that "problem" for me.

Credit to Riceballsan for steering me to it
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]

Education vs degree

[Krishnoid]

If you want the education before (or after) the degree, you can go to the free course websites that Harvard [harvard.edu] and MIT [mit.edu] offer. MIT was one of the earliest to start putting their course materials online, but there are also a lot of other prestigious universities that make their class materials available.

Will it make any difference?

[sizzzzlerz]

Will this impact Columbia's ability to attract students willing to lay down 60 large per year plus room and board and other expenses? Very doubtful. If someone is otherwise qualified to attend the school, it seems highly unlikely not seeing it's rankings in a magazine for a year is going to have any impact.

Scam Leagues

[Bahbus]

TBF, Ivy League schools have enjoyed a long pedigree of not having to give a fuck about the quality of their education. They, and their alumni, claim its great and prestigious, but I doubt anyone actually receives a significantly better education vs the costs and generally asshattery.

Re:

[saider]

Alumni can be very useful when you get your degree and go out looking for a job. It can open doors not otherwise open.

Of course that does not apply to everyone at the school - frats/sorrorities, clubs, professors also have varying degrees of clout that can place you somewhere that is closed off to the rest of the world.

Note that this is true of all schools, not just fancypants ivy leagues.

Re:

[AnOnyxMouseCoward]

But no one really cares about the quality of the curriculum. Sure, foundational knowledge in your topic of specialization is useful, but the most useful portion of going to a highly ranked school is the network (and the doors it opens) and the wealth of experience it provides. That means you have a higher chance of landing an "impressive" job (because there are school alums in those "impressive" companies), make money, and continue propagating the image of your school being great and prestigious.

And let's

Re:

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

This is absolutely true. It's frustrating to pay through the nose for "an education" that is largely taught by teaching assistants at the undergraduate level. The only thing of value I learned at Columbia was how to interact with wealthy people. The education itself was average.

Re:

[VeryFluffyBunny]

Elite universities don't & never have cared about the quality of the education they provide. They keep academic performance high by selective enrollment, i.e. only let in the students that are already performing well by themselves & then expect them to continue to perform well, pretty much by themselves. They're the easiest to teach students in the world. Lecturers barely need to try. This only applies to the majority of enrolled students, not the dumbfucks with rich parents who make "donations."

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

No surprise

[XXongo]

The article [nytimes.com] says "...Typically, less than 0.1 percent a year inform U.S. News that they have misreported data, [Robert Morse, chief data strategist at U.S. News] said. He provided a list of several dozen schools [usnews.com] that had admitted misreporting data since 2019, and had been suspended a year for their candor."

No surprise very few schools correct erroneous data, if correcting it means they will get suspended.

If rankings are based on self-reporting, I expect Columbia is not unusual in shading the figures in their favor.

--the Columbia math professor's analysis is here, for what it's worth: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~... [columbia.edu]

Re:

[Ecuador]

That analysis is quite scathing to Columbia. From a Columbia professor too - the school can't be very happy about that, but a good read nonetheless. Some great gems in there like Columbia at some point deciding to just count their medical center patient care as "instruction", showing instruction spent per student greater than their 3 rival universities combined.

Re:No surprise

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

The data bears little resemblance to reality anyway. The student to instructor ratio for undergrad classes at Columbia is complete fantasy. The popular classes could have 100-200 students packed to the gills (think "physics for poets") and core curriculum classes were often at 30-50 students per teaching assistant (not an actual professor).

And then you got nickel and dimed to death on fees, scholarships dried up after a year (because they knew you'd "find the money" rather than drop out), etc.

20/20 hindsight: it would have been better to go to one of the well regarded state schools in the country and invest the additional money I spent on tuition and NYC room/board instead. I won't be sending my kids there.

Re:

[careysub]

The data bears little resemblance to reality anyway..

^ ^ THIS ^ ^

Re:No surprise

[careysub]

This magazine's ranking has been a blight on U.S. education for decades, pushing universities to lie, and to distort how they conduct education to please a periodical that has no competence and no stake in education at all. This is basically Forbes largely fake "richest people" list but for education - it is an entertainment feature not a serious analysis of educational value.

The best thing would be to start a movement to refuse to be ranked by U.S. News, The notion of a meaningful one-dimensional ranking scale in which there is a meaniingful difference betwqeen any top ranked (or bottom ranked) schools is absurd on its face.

Not the only thing causing the deterioration of the U.S. higher educational system - driving up costs, and driving down actual education, but it is a big one.

Administrators are compensated partly based on these ranking for heavens sake,

University that refused to participate in rankings

[Chris Mattern]

is not in rankings. Shocking.