The removals from the 2022 rankings represent another setback for U.S. News and its powerful lists.
Many admissions professionals already abhor them. They say the rankings play an outsized role in students’ decisions about where to attend college and therefore institutions focus too heavily on boosting their list placement, to the detriment of their missions.
Recently, a former Temple University business school dean was sentenced to 14 months in prison and fined $250,000 for falsifying data submitted to U.S. News. And the University of Southern California fell out of the magazine’s graduate school rankings for its Rossier School of Education, which similarly provided incorrect information.
U.S. News removed six schools from its Best Colleges ranking, including Columbia. The other five and the publication’s justifications for the removals are as follows:
The publication also kicked four colleges off of its graduate school rankings for 2022. Here is what U.S. News said about them:
U.S. News said in a statement that it ranks more than 11,500 schools and programs and that less than 0.1% of institutions each year typically flag misreported data.
“In these rare cases, the misreporting by these schools resulted in their numerical ranks being higher than they otherwise would have been if the correct data had been used originally,” the statement said. “Because of the discrepancies, U.S. News moved the schools to the ‘unranked’ category, meaning they do not receive numerical ranks.”
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