On June 30, Columbia University announced it will not be submitting data to US News & World Report for its upcoming college rankings. The move came in response to March 16 allegations by Michael Thaddeus, professor of mathematics at Columbia, that the university was submitting false information to the site.
Discrepancies were found in statistics related class sizes, education level of faculty, and how much the university spends on instruction.
A few of these discrepancies were especially noteworthy.
Thaddeus notes that while Columbia reported that “82.5% of its undergraduate classes have under 20 students,” his investigations into the raw data available in the Directory of Classes indicated that the true number “probably lies somewhere between 62.7% and 66.9%.”
“We can be quite confident that it is nowhere near the figure of 82.5% claimed by Columbia,” he concluded.
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics." Samuel Langhorn Clemons