Five colleges lied to U.S. News
Tulane University officials were preparing to send statistics to U. S. News & World Report for its annual graduate school rankings when they noticed something peculiar in early December: sharp drops in admissions test scores and applications to their business school.
Their curiosity became alarm and then embarrassment, as the New Orleans university discovered and disclosed that the business school’s admissions figures from previous years had been falsified. Soon afterward, Bucknell University in Pennsylvania announced that for several years it had reported inflated SAT scores for incoming students.
These and similar revelations in the past year have come from Claremont McKenna College in California, Emory University in Atlanta and George Washington University in Washington, D.C. In each case, the highly regarded schools acknowledged that they had submitted incorrect test scores or overstated the high school rankings of their incoming freshmen.
At a time of intense competition for highachieving students, the episodes have renewed debate about the validity of the U.S. News rankings, which for three decades have served as a reference for parents and students shopping for colleges.
Much of the information colleges present about themselves to U.S. News, other analysts and the federal government is not independently verified. That makes it impossible to know how many may have misreported data over the years as they angle for prestige to stand out in a crowded market.
U.S. News Editor Brian Kelly said the number of schools that have corrected their record is “a pretty small universe,” which he considers a sign that reporting problems are not pervasive. He said he would not be surprised if a few more cases emerged.
“If it was a stampede I would be surprised,” Kelly said, “and that might cause us to rethink some things.”
Kelly acknowledged that revelations from five prominent colleges are unusual. But he said the disclosures should strengthen confidence in the rankings because they show schools take the data seriously.