One of the "Ivy League" famous schools, Columbia University in the United States is the dream school in the hearts of many students. It currently ranks second in the rankings of usnews national comprehensive universities, in line with Harvard and MIT.
Although the rankings come out, we will be amazed: although Columbia University is indeed excellent, it seems to be far from being able to compete with Harvard and MIT, crushing Yale and Stanford, and judging from the number of students admitted to Columbia University's master's degree each year, it seems that it is not as good as the sum of Hayeps's admissions...
And just recently, a new analysis by a professor in Columbia University's Department of Mathematics claimed that Columbia University provided false data to US News to improve the ranking...
Although Columbia university authorities still insist that their data meet US News submission criteria, Columbia Mathematics Professor Michael Thaddeus found that the university had a large amount of inaccurate or even completely false data in the data submitted to US News.
Michael Thaddeus
The report, which is tens of thousands of words long, lists six types of data provided by Columbia University that have been falsified. The whole report contains a lot of data, a huge amount of information...
As we all know, the data sources on which usNews university rankings are based are all reported by the universities themselves, while Columbia University's ranking in USNews has risen from 18th in the United States in 1988 to 2nd in 2022, although there are occasional twists and turns, but the overall trend is on the rise. Columbia's endowment fund is much smaller than the other top five schools. Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Yale, and Princeton all have 2-4 times the size of their endowments at Columbia. Still, Columbia is still tied with Harvard and MIT. There may be reasons why Columbia University itself is gradually getting stronger, and it may not be excluded that there is a possibility of providing false data in order to brush up the high rankings.
Michael Thaddeus, a professor in the Department of Mathematics at Columbia University, titled "An Investigation of the Facts Behind Columbia's U.S. News Rankings," from undergraduate class sizes, proportion of teachers with Ph.D., proportion of full-time teachers, teacher-student ratio, teaching engagement, Graduation rates and other outcome classes compare the differences between data reported by Columbia University across different channels. These differences are large, but none of them are not conducive to Columbia's rankings.
One stone stirs up a thousand waves! This scandal immediately became a hot search event on the entire Network in the United States, causing quite a stir. But US New and Columbia have yet to admit the allegations.
A Columbia spokesperson wrote in a statement: "All the data we provided met the standards. However, such an explanation seems a little pale in the face of a large amount of data.
Columbia is the only Ivy League university that has not made public the Common Data Set dataset public. The standard for this dataset was developed by multiple authorities and US News. The dataset includes all the admissions and operations data of the university. Colombia did complete its own internal dataset. However, Columbia's dataset is never shared with the public and is completely separate from the data shared by US News.
Professor Thaddeus said: "This is one of the pieces of evidence of serious problems with Columbia's management, an extreme lack of transparency. Columbia schools are more interested in improving people's perceptions of Colombia than in the schools themselves. ”
In the report, in the 2022 US News rankings, Columbia University provided the following data: 82.5% of undergraduate programs have less than 20 students, and 8.9% of courses have more than 50 students. But Professor Thaddeus, by directly counting course registration information on the Columbia Online, found that in fact, from fall 2019 to fall 2020 (the period of time for which Columbia provided data), only 62.7%-66.9% of undergraduate courses were under 20 students. He also said that 10.6%-12.4% of classes have more than 50 students.
Columbia's teacher-student ratio reported to USNews was 6:1, compared to about 11:1 in other ways; Columbia's non-medical full-time faculty reported to USNews was about 96.5%, while the proportion reported to the government was 74.1%;
The university also claims that 100% of its faculty and staff have the highest degree (PhD). However, according to Professor Thaddeus and statistics from the official website, Columbia actually has as many as 69 faculty members who only have bachelor's or master's degrees.
This year, Columbia University issued 29 offers to China, a total of 5 offers from the mainland, 1 from Beijing, 4 from Shanghai, and the American School in Shanghai won 2.
Last year, Columbia University's undergraduate admission rate was 3.9% ED admission rate of 10.10% The number of admissions was 650. Columbia Admissions Officer revealed that the number of applicants this year is 6305 ED admissions will be basically the same as last year.
Columbia Admissions last year
In the 2020-2021 application season, the median SAT score of 50% of admitted students is 1510-1560 (out of 1600), and 95% of students are 10% of grades.
So far, Columbia has not released data on this year's early applicants, but in the last application season, 60,551 students applied to Columbia, an increase of 51% over the previous year, the largest increase in the Number of Schools in the Ivy League. The class of 2025 has only 3.9% of new students, the lowest in the history of Columbia University, and the second lowest admission rate of the United Nations college, second only to Harvard's 3.4%.
Although Columbia is a sub-control, for Columbia, the score is only a threshold. Columbia is more concerned about the personality of the applicant, curiosity, leadership, teamwork ability of the applicant, many Columbia admissions let people at a glance to see the strong potential of this person, it can be said that this is a difficult school to try luck.
Returning to today's focus, in the latest rankings, the school and US News said that 96.5 percent of Columbia's non-medical faculty are full-time, but the figure reported to the federal government is much lower: 74.1 percent.
The report is tens of thousands of words long. For every indicator of problems and "moisture", Professor Thaddeus directly "punched" Columbia with data. This level of "real hammer" does have a great impact on schools of this level of Columbia University.
Columbia's problems are just the "tip of the iceberg" in the overall US News ranking system problem. If Columbia all needs to brush up its rankings through "fakes," what about other schools? Other schools will not have any problems at all?
Similar incidents are not surprising. Due to the excessive pursuit of rankings, almost all schools are paying more and more attention to certain ranking indicators, even at the expense of fraud.
Principals have slowly become CEOs pursuing KPIs (Job Performance Indicators), and they no longer need to focus on improving the academic level of the school; professors have become a tool to "brush up the average salary score" without anyone to evaluate their teaching level; and the rest of the university staff no longer wants to improve the post-enrollment experience of students, but thinks about how to attract more applicants by pre-promotion.
Back in 2019, the US. NEWS. has removed the University of Oklahoma from the rankings on the grounds that the school provided misinformation about alumni donations. The university admits that it has been providing incorrect data since 1999. According to U.S. News, the University of Oklahoma's latest report claims that its two-year rate of alumni giving is 14 percent, compared to just 9.7 percent in practice. U.S. News reports that the alumni endowment metric weighs 5 percent in the "Best Colleges" rankings. After being discovered, U.S. News removed Oklahoma from that ranking, including several other rankings such as "Most Valuable" College, "Top Public University" and "Best College for Veterans."
The school was kicked out of the rankings for a period of time due to false data. Sometimes some schools submit incorrect information but have no intent to deceive. But the University of Oklahoma is the second time in nearly two years that it has been found to have submitted false data to U.S. News — and has done so deliberately for years.
In 2019 a total of 6 universities were disqualified, namely:
University of California-Berkeley
Scripps College
Mars Hill University
University of North Carolina-Pembroke
Johnson & Wales University
University of Oklahoma
The University of California, Berkeley, and Marshill University exaggerated the alumni giving rate and falsified the false average alumni donation rate.
The University of North Carolina at Pembroke provides inflated "top 25 percent of high school class" student source data.
Johnson Welsh University, which overstated its budget for financial expenditures.
USNews' ranking results may be strong enough to make American "U.K. " U.S. " U.S. universities falsify , and it's not hard to see why rankings are the result of so many students and blind pursuits. But what we have to think about is: Are the rankings we see objective and real? Are the rankings from reliable data sources? Is there no problem with ranking your own metrics?
In the final analysis, ranking is only a reference and not all, school selection really needs our comprehensive consideration, ranking is only one of many reference indicators, not the only standard, do not overmagnify the weight of the ranking when choosing a school!
What we really need to consider when choosing a school is our future learning experience in school, suitability, and future job satisfaction and income of the profession. Based on the ranking alone, we actually can't draw conclusions.