Columbia U. just isn’t THAT good, says prof.
A Columbia University math professor took his red pen to the numbers that vaulted his school to a second-place ranking on the U.S. News and World Report list of best colleges — and argues the digits don’t add up.
In a lengthy article posted last week, Columbia math professor Michael Thaddeus sifted through data the university provided to U.S. News for its annual rankings and concluded “several of the key figures supporting Columbia’s high ranking are inaccurate, dubious, or highly misleading.”
Thaddeus found “discrepancies, sometimes quite large, and always in Columbia’s favor,” between figures Columbia supplied for ranking purposes and data the university has posted elsewhere.
A former Rhodes Scholar who’s taught at Columbia for more than two decades, Thaddeus said he’s trying to help the university he loves.
“I do actually have the best interests of the institution at heart, even though it might not seem that way,” he explained. “The way I look at it is it’s only fair to hold Columbia’s administration to the same standards of integrity as we hold our students to.”
Columbia spokesman Scott Schell said the university “stand[s] by the data we provided to U.S. News and World Report.”
“We take seriously our responsibility to accurately report information to federal and state entities, as well as to private rankings organizations. Our survey responses follow the different definitions and instructions of each specific survey,” he added.
U.S. News’s rankings are based on a complex formula that includes class sizes, financial resources, graduation rates, social mobility, a “peer assessment survey,” and other metrics.
Thaddeus said he was inspired to take a closer look when Columbia landed a coveted second-place spot last fall — tied with Harvard and MIT and trailing only Princeton.
The first data point that caught Thaddeus’s attention was Columbia’s claim that 82.5% of its undergraduate courses enrolled fewer than 20 students — a higher percentage than any of the other schools in the U.S. News top 100.
“That just instantly triggered by bulls**t detector, because that just doesn’t conform to my experience at all,” Thaddeus said.
When Thaddeus scoured the university’s Directory of Classes, an online catalogue of all the college’s courses that includes enrollment numbers, he found that only between 63% and 67% of classes reported fewer than 20 students.
“We can be quite confident” the true percentage is “nowhere near the figure of 82.5% claimed by Columbia,” Thaddeus wrote.
University officials countered that enrollment numbers from the Class Directory aren’t certified by the registrar and may deviate from the official count.
Thaddeus was also suspicious of the eye-popping $3.1 billion the university
claimed to spend on “instruction” during the 2019-20 school year — another metric in the U.S. News rankings. “This is a truly colossal amount of money,” he wrote. “It is larger than the corresponding figures for Harvard, Yale, and Princeton combined.”
Combing through the university’s financial records, Thaddeus concluded that Columbia’s $3.1 billion number must have also included the cost of providing patient care in the university’s hospitals — an expense he argues would be a stretch to classify as “instructional.”
Other universities, including NYU, explicitly left the cost of patient care out of the sum they reported spending on instruction, Thaddeus added.
Columbia officials didn’t explain how they arrived at the $3.1 billion figure.
University administration pushed back on other parts of Thaddeus’s analysis, including his suggestion that Columbia misrepresented its percentage of full-time faculty and faculty with the “terminal degree in their field” — arguing in both cases that Thaddeus misunderstood the data submission requirements from U.S. News.
Columbia instead says the university’s climb up the rankings was propelled by U.S. News’s recent shift to give more weight to the graduation rates of low-income students, an area in which Columbia representatives said the school performs well.
Thaddeus says U.S. News also bears some responsibility for the data discrepancies.
“If the institution in second place is shown to have inaccuracies, that really sheds some doubt on the value of the entire rankings,” Thaddeus said, adding that the magazine “should be vetting the tops schools very thoroughly.”
U.S. News chief data strategist Robert Morse said “we rely on schools to accurately report their data and ask academic officials to verify that data.”
Thaddeus hopes his critique can spur broader debate about the value of a ranking system that “gives this false sense of simplicity and clarity” to the complex, often subjective question of what makes a good college.
“My administration is more focused on perception than reality,” he said. “And this is a away to steer their attention back to reality.”