Rossier leaves graduate school rankings
The Rossier School of Education will not participate in U.S. News & World Report’s annual graduate school rankings this year, citing data inaccuracies taking place over at least the last five years.
USC has informed the United States Department of Education and accreditors of the inaccuracies and is currently conducting an investigation through outside law firm Jones Day, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Charles Zukoski said in a statement to the Rossier community Wednesday.
“I support the university’s decision to conduct an independent investigation and appreciate that everyone who has been asked has participated fully,” said Pedro Noguera, Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean of Rossier, in the statement.
A Rossier faculty member familiar with the situation told the Wall Street Journal that the withdrawal may be related to the groups of graduate students included in the school’s submission. The flawed data would have falsely raised GRE scores, they said.
“Please know that this decision has no bearing on the quality or value of a Rossier education,” Zukoski wrote. “Rather, it reflects our responsibility, which we take very seriously, to adhere to the specific reporting requirements of the ranking organization when we submit our data.”
The investigation follows a series of college ranking controversies across the country that have placed rankings’ validity and effectiveness under question for some.
At Temple University, a federal judge found former TU Business School Dean Moshe Porat guilty of providing fraudulent information to ranking sites, according to the Wall Street Journal. A judge sentenced Porat to 14 months imprisonment March 11 and imposed a $250,000 fine for his role in inflating the ranking of the Richard J. Fox School of Business and Management — the school’s online M.B.A program ranked No. 1 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report from 2015 to 2018.
An adjacent controversy arose at Columbia University, where mathematics faculty member Michael Thaddeus accused the administration of reporting “inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading” data about class sizes and other factors considered in college rankings, according to reporting conducted by the New York Times. Columbia climbed from No. 18 in the U.S. News & World Report in 1988 to a tie with Harvard University and M.I.T. for No. 2 last year, which Thaddeus said is not proportionate to the improvement in the quality of the education offered at the university.
Rossier’s graduate program tied for No. 11 in last year’s report, rising in the ranks from a No. 15 position in 2015. The University will share the investigation’s findings within the next two weeks, Zukoski said.