Dissension in the Ranks

Summary

Campus Files: "Dissension in the Ranks" – A Detailed Summary

Episode Release Date: March 26, 2025
Host: Audacy
Podcast Description: "Campus Files" delves beneath the surface of American higher education, uncovering scandals and controversies that challenge the mythic perception of college life. This episode, titled "Dissension in the Ranks," examines the intricate dynamics of university rankings and the lengths institutions may go to secure prestigious positions.

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Introduction: The Allure and Reality of College Rankings

Margo Gray opens the episode by highlighting the competitive nature of college admissions, using Columbia University’s recent admission surge and subsequent scandal as a case study.

Margo Gray [01:35]: "Columbia University celebrated its most competitive admission cycle to date... fewer than 6% made the cut."

She sets the stage by explaining the significant impact rankings have on university reputations and student choices.

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The Rise of University Rankings

Colin Diver, author of "Breaking How the Rankings Industry Rules Higher Education and What to Do About It," provides insight into the societal obsession with rankings.

Colin Diver [02:50]: "We are a competitive society and we are very much a consumerist society... status seekers."

Diver traces the origins of college rankings back to the early 20th century, emphasizing the pivotal role of U.S. News & World Report starting in 1983.

Margo Gray [04:15]: "U.S. News and World Report stepped in to fill the void, releasing its first ever ranking of the best colleges."

He critiques the methodology of these rankings as overly simplistic and arbitrary, questioning their validity.

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Columbia University's Ascent and Deception

The narrative shifts to Columbia University’s rapid climb to the number two spot in U.S. News rankings in 2021, juxtaposed with underlying data manipulation.

Margo Gray [13:26]: "In 2021, Columbia University had big news to celebrate... ranked number two."

Michael Thaddeus, a tenured math professor at Columbia, becomes suspicious of the reported statistics.

Colin Diver [10:25]: "Rankings create powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behavior."

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Thaddeus’s Investigation: Unveiling the Truth

Thaddeus embarks on a meticulous investigation, uncovering discrepancies in Columbia’s reported data versus his calculations.

Colin Diver [14:24]: "Two meant that we were tied with Harvard at MIT, that we were surpassed only by Princeton in this ranking."

Key inconsistencies included:

• Class Sizes: Reported 82.5% of courses with fewer than 20 students vs. actual below 67% [14:55].
• Student-to-Faculty Ratio: Reported 6:1 vs. actual 11:1 [14:55].
• Instructional Spending: Claimed over $3 billion annually vs. over $100,000 per student, an unrealistic figure [15:19].

Columbia University Professor [16:15]: "The money that Columbia doctors spend on patient care... was being inaccurately described as an instructional expense."

These revelations suggested intentional data manipulation to inflate rankings.

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Administrative Response and Escalation

After publishing his 21-page report online, Thaddeus receives minimal attention until reaching out to the Columbia Daily Spectator, which sparks broader media coverage.

Margo Gray [19:08]: "Thaddeus had to reach out to the media himself."

The administration’s response was evasive. In a critical Zoom meeting:

Columbia University Professor [22:07]: "Someone who was present at that meeting... described it as an infomercial."

Thaddeus’s inquiries about specific figures were met with vague assurances, leading to increased frustration and distrust.

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Consequences: Rankings Plummet and Legal Actions

By July, U.S. News temporarily removes Columbia from its rankings pending review. Subsequently, two Columbia students file class action lawsuits alleging data falsification.

Margo Gray [23:28]: "Columbia had plummeted from no. 2 to 18... its worst position since first appearing on the list in 1988."

This drastic drop not only tarnished Columbia’s reputation but also exposed the fragility and potential manipulation within the ranking system.

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Long-Term Implications and the Future of Rankings

Thaddeus reflects on the broader ramifications of the scandal, advocating for skepticism towards ranking systems.

Columbia University Professor [24:28]: "I think rankings are going to be with us for a long time to come."

He argues that rankings persist because they provide a semblance of validation and ease decision-making for anxious students, despite their inherent flaws.

Columbia University Professor [25:02]: "People look to the rankings as validation of the prestige of their own school and therefore, by extension, as validation of their own individual self-worth."

In June 2023, Columbia opts out of the U.S. News rankings, challenging the authority and influence of such rankings.

Margo Gray [26:50]: "Columbia's decision raised concerns for US News, but fears of a mass exodus never materialized."

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Conclusion: The Enduring Power of Rankings

The episode concludes with a critical examination of why rankings remain influential despite their questionable methodologies.

Columbia University Professor [27:51]: "I've spent much of the last few years just telling people university rankings are of no value and you should pay no attention to them whatsoever."

Thaddeus emphasizes that while the Columbia scandal has heightened public awareness and skepticism, rankings continue to wield significant power in higher education.

Margo Gray [28:25]: "Campus Files is an Odyssey Original Podcast... If you have tips or story ideas, write to us at [e-mail]."

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Key Takeaways

• Ranking Manipulation: Universities may distort data to secure higher rankings, misleading prospective students and altering institutional behaviors.

• Methodological Flaws: The simplistic and arbitrary weighting of diverse factors in rankings fails to capture the multifaceted nature of educational institutions.

• Administrative Resistance: Institutions often resist transparency and accountability when confronted with discrepancies in reported data.

• Skepticism and Change: High-profile cases like Columbia’s have sparked increased skepticism, though rankings remain entrenched due to their psychological and societal appeal.

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Notable Quotes:

• Colin Diver [02:50]: "We are a competitive society and we are very much a consumerist society... status seekers."

• Colin Diver [10:25]: "Rankings create powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behavior."

• Columbia University Professor [24:28]: "I think rankings are going to be with us for a long time to come."

---

For additional episodes and stories uncovering the hidden truths of American higher education, tune into "Campus Files" on Audacy.

Transcript

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[Margo Gray]

2022, Columbia University celebrated its most competitive admission cycle to date. Over 40,000 students applied for undergraduate spots and fewer than 6% made the cut. The reason for this unprecedented surge might have had something to do with the school's most recent accolades. US News and World Report had just named Columbia the second best university in the country, right behind Princeton and tied with Harvard. But just as Columbia's new freshman class settled into campus, a shocking revelation surfaced. Their university admitted that it had cheated its way to the top. I'm Margo Gray. This week on Campus Files, we explore the extraordinary measures that universities will take take to climb the college rankings. Think about the last time you bought something. A vacuum cleaner, a mattress, maybe a water bottle. Chances are you did a little research, sifted through brands and tried to find the best option out there.

[Colin Diver]

Well, I suppose we are a competitive society and we are very much a consumerist society, and many of us are status seekers. So all of those things contribute to this preoccupation with rankings that you see almost everywhere in our society.

[Margo Gray]

This is Colin Diver, author of Breaking how the Rankings Industry Rules Higher Education and what to Do About It. He also served as the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and as president of Reed College.

[Colin Diver]

We want to know whether we're buying good products, whether we're going to vacation in good places, and of course, whether we are sending our kids to good schools.

[Margo Gray]

Few investments feel as significant as choosing a college. It's a decision with long term consequences, one that shapes careers, friendships, and future opportunities. With so much at stake, it's only natural to want to make the best possible choice. But with thousands of universities to consider, the decision is anything but easy.

[Colin Diver]

Going back to the beginning of the 20th century, from time to time people thought, gee, there ought to be a ranking of schools. So they would come up with something and they would do it for a year or two and then they would abandon it. But none of them were anywhere near like the systematic, ongoing annual rankings that started with the U.S. news rankings.

[Margo Gray]

In 1983, U.S. news and World Report stepped in to fill the void, releasing its first ever ranking of the best colleges. The methodology was rudimentary, to say the least. The magazine sent a survey to university presidents, asking them to name up to 10 schools they believed offered the best undergraduate education. U.S. news then tallied the votes and published the results, declaring Stanford the best national university and Amherst the best national liberal arts college.

[Colin Diver]

You might say, well, that was pretty unscientific and pretty subjective, but a lot of schools suddenly took these very seriously. My own college, Amherst College, ordered something like 25,000 copies of the U.S. news ranking, which said that they were number one among liberal arts colleges, and sent them out to all the students who were thinking of applying to Amherst.

[Margo Gray]

The rankings quickly became a lifeline for the struggling U.S. news & World Report magazine. When schools like Amherst boasted about their top spot, it turned into free advertising for U.S. news, and the editors realized they could attract even more attention by making their methodology seem more sophisticated. They began sending out lengthy questionnaires to colleges asking for a range of statistics, things like graduation rates and the average SAT scores of enrolled students.

[Colin Diver]

The interesting thing was that in those days, colleges were not being required to report as many statistics to the government as they are now. So it was quite a big imposition on the schools to fill out these questionnaires every year. But in spite of that These colleges all did fill it out and submitted them to U.S. news. So that is another indication that they took them very seriously.

[Margo Gray]

Based on all these different statistics, U.S. news then had to create a formula to measure the quality of an institution.

[Colin Diver]

First, they had to decide which of these variables to use in their formula, but then they had to come up with weights to assign to these different factors so that they could combine them all into a single metric.

[Margo Gray]

In other words, US News had to decide which factors define the quality of an institution and how much each of those factors should matter. For example, if a school has a top tier engineering department but a subpar humanities program, or has a massive endowment but limited campus space, how should all of that be weighed?

[Colin Diver]

Higher educational institutions are enormously complex. When you think about it, they are providing a hugely complicated product, a life experience that's a whole range of educational experiences, but also social experiences, food and housing, entertainment. It seems to me way, way too complicated to reduce to a single ranking.

[Margo Gray]

As if assessing the quality of a single institution wasn't challenging enough, U.S. news set out to rank more than 1400 schools against one another, lining them up on a single scale from best to worst.

[Colin Diver]

These schools vary enormously in their character and in their mission in their history. There are huge research universities. There are athletic factory universities. There are small colleges that specialize in the liberal arts. There are engineering schools. It's a little bit like saying we're going to have a single ranking for all appliances and we'll just throw in stoves and vacuum cleaners and refrigerators. It would make no sense, but in some ways, that's exactly what the college rankings are purporting to do.

[Margo Gray]

So was U.S. news up to the Herculean task? Well, in 1997, the magazine hired an outside consultancy to review its ranking methodology. And the feedback wasn't exactly glowing. The consultancy concluded the principal weakness of the current approach is that the weights used to combine the various measures into an overall rating lack any defensible empirical or theoretical basis. In simpler terms, the magazine's supposedly scientific formula was largely arbitrary. But that didn't stop U.S. news. Instead, that same year, the magazine blasted out its rankings online for the first time.

[Colin Diver]

That was a big event because it expanded from the tens of thousands to the millions the number of people that looked at their rankings. It also, of course, reached an international audience, which was very important because a lot of foreign students wanted to attend American universities.

[Margo Gray]

With each year, the rankings reached larger and larger audiences, shaping opinions not just across the U.S. but across the world. And the Rankings prove to have real world consequences. Studies have shown that a school's ranking can directly impact application numbers, yield rates, and even the average standardized test scores of incoming students. So university administrators, whatever their personal feelings on the rankings, have a strong incentive to climb the list.

[Colin Diver]

When I was the dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, I felt as though I was a captive to the rankings. Everybody in legal education was complying with US News rankings, paying slavish attention to them.

[Margo Gray]

Penn Law didn't just pay attention to the rankings. They adapted their admissions process in a deliberate attempt to improve their standing.

[Colin Diver]

U.S. news was ranking law schools, and still is, by giving a fairly heavy weight to the average LSAT score of the incoming students. And we used to use that factor, of course, but we didn't give it as much weight. We tried to factor in less quantitative, more qualitative measures, and we found that because we were doing that, it affected our ranking. So I confess, and I confessed in the book, that we ended up changing the relative weights we gave to the various factors in admission.

[Margo Gray]

For that reason, it's worth pausing to acknowledge how shocking it is that one of the country's most prestigious law schools adjusted its admissions process based on a single magazine's ranking metrics. But Penn Law is hardly alone.

[Colin Diver]

I think that virtually everybody in higher education, if they're honest about it, would admit that they've changed their policies or their practices or their priorities to some extent in order to look better in the rankings.

[Margo Gray]

But there's an even quicker way to move up the ladder. Misreport the data to U.S. news & World Report. And that's exactly what Columbia University did.

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[Margo Gray]

In 2021, Columbia University had big news to celebrate. For the past decade, U.S. news & World Report had ranked the university at number four or number five. But this year, Columbia climbed to the coveted number two spot out of nearly 400 national universities. The university's dean of undergraduate admissions enthusiastically wrote on the university website, columbia is proud of all the Factors that led U.S. news and world Report to see us as one of the best universities in the world. We have been working on every level to support our students and are proud to be recognized for this.

[Columbia University Professor]

The fact that they were number two raised, if not alarm bells. At least it raised my eyebrows.

[Margo Gray]

This is Michael Thaddeus. He's been a math professor at Columbia since 1998.

[Columbia University Professor]

That was actually the first teaching position that I ever had. I've never taught a course at any other university besides Columbia.

[Margo Gray]

If Thaddeus knows two things very well, it's Columbia University and numbers. And the number two ranking wasn't sitting right with him.

[Columbia University Professor]

Two meant that we were tied with Harvard at mit, that we were surpassed only by Princeton in this ranking. And I knew that we at Columbia have certain objective disadvantages compared to those other schools. We have a smaller endowment. We have far less physical space, for example. So even though my admiration for Columbia is boundless, I think this is a wonderful institution. I've chosen to be here my entire career. I knew that we faced certain inherent disadvantages when it came to a linear ranking.

[Margo Gray]

Darius wanted to understand what had driven Colombia's rise in the rankings, so he subscribed to U.S. news and World Report to access the specific data Columbia had self reported. For instance, Columbia claimed that 82.5% of its courses had fewer than 20 students, meaning a large majority of courses were seminar style. From his experience of more than two decades at the school, Thaddeus was skeptical. So he set about calculating the percentage himself.

[Columbia University Professor]

This took me several days of hard work. I took the Directory of Classes, which is a website that lists every class in the university, together with its Enrollment and I just downloaded the HTML code of all of those web pages, concatenated them all together and I arrived at figures that were very, very different from what Columbia had reported.

[Margo Gray]

Thaddeus found that the real number was far lower than the reported 82.5%. The correct figure was below 67%. As he kept crunching the numbers, more discrepancies emerged. Columbia had reported a student to faculty ratio of 6 to 1. But Thaddeus calculations suggested it was closer to 11 to 1. Then came one of the most startling claims. Columbia reported spending over $3 billion on instruction and teaching related expenses per year. That would mean, according to his calculations, that Columbia was spending more than $100,000 per student annually.

[Columbia University Professor]

$3 billion was at the time at least more than the total amount that Harvard, Yale and Princeton put together reported that they spend on instruction. It's literally the single largest figure reported by any university.

[Margo Gray]

How did Columbia arrive at this 3 billion figure? Thaddeus has a theory.

[Columbia University Professor]

The money that Columbia doctors spends on patient care, which is obviously a ton of money because it's a large operation involving hundreds of doctors, all of that was being inaccurately described as an instructional expense.

[Margo Gray]

The list of discrepancies continued to grow. Graduation rates, the percentage of full time faculty, and the share of professors with PhDs or other terminal degrees, all misrepresented by Columbia. Eventually, Thaddeus compiled his findings into a 21 page report. At the very top, he included a quote from Colin Diver, who we heard from earlier in the episode. Rankings create powerful incentives to manipulate data and distort institutional behavior.

[Columbia University Professor]

I thought about trying to approach some magazine or something and publish an article in a magazine. I decided not to do that because if you look at what I wrote, it's a weird mixture of different genres. It's partly academic report, it's partly journalism, and it's partly a polemic.

[Margo Gray]

Instead, Thaddeus decided to upload the analysis to his website. And in February 2022 he hit submit. With the Venmo debit card, you can.

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[Margo Gray]

In February 2022, Michael Thaddeus published his findings under the title An Investigation of the Facts Behind Colombia's US News Ranking.

[Columbia University Professor]

That I decided just to post my report on my webpage, which is not exactly a high traffic location. It was mostly only math faculty and students who ever looked at it. But I figured the claims I'm making were so provocative that eventually someone will take notice.

[Margo Gray]

But he was wrong. Very few people took notice. So Thaddeus had to reach out to the media himself. He contacted the student paper, the Columbia Daily Spectator.

[Columbia University Professor]

They realized that me even saying that there might be a problem was something that was worthy of coverage, even if my claims hadn't been peer reviewed or appeared in any other publication. And they wrote a story about it. And that very, very slowly started the ball rolling.

[Margo Gray]

In March 2022, following the Columbia Daily Spectator coverage, national outlets began picking up the story. Publications like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

[Columbia University Professor]

It's one of these things. The growth was maybe exponential. First it happened very slowly, and then it happened very suddenly.

[Margo Gray]

The latest scandal began when a math professor who works at Columbia called into question his own employer statistics that it had submitted to U.S. news and World Report, saying he found. Thaddeus suspects that the report attracted even more attention because he wasn't an outside whistleblower but a tenured professor exposing issues at his own institution. For Thaddeus, this wasn't exactly new territory. He had a history of challenging Columbia's administration on a range of issues, from the presence of ROTC on campus to the mismanagement of the endowment. Some would say, as the New York Times put it, he has a hobby of provoking his employer.

[Columbia University Professor]

That expression has stuck to me, and I will own it. But I I don't see it as a hobby because I don't actually find it enjoyable at all. I don't like being pugnacious for its own sake. I have no personal animus against people in the administration. That's not the point.

[Margo Gray]

The point, he says, is to push the administration to be more transparent in how it operates and to take accountability when it makes mistakes.

[Columbia University Professor]

There's a pattern of conduct in my central administration that's Just extremely troubling that when bad things come to light, the university doesn't candidly address them. It doesn't openly discuss what the problems are. You might hope, oh, the more scandals you expose, the more you'll sort of pry open this kernel of secrecy. Right now, it just seems to be the opposite. Like, the worse the scandals get, the more our central administration hunkers down.

[Margo Gray]

That's exactly what happened after Thaddeus published his report. Silence from the Administration.

[Columbia University Professor]

I kind of thought that the issues that I raised would open a dialogue with the administration where the administration would have said, well, this is why we reported these figures. This is what we meant by these figures. Nothing like that has ever happened. They obviously were very concerned about their legal liability. And so it was just like this iron curtain of silence descending. So I reached out to the provost and I said, could we have discussion about it?

[Margo Gray]

Thaddeus had a one hour zoom meeting with the president, provost and several other faculty members.

[Columbia University Professor]

Someone who was present at that meeting, you know, described it as an infomercial. And I think that just about sums it up. The provost spoke in general terms about how she was confident that the figures were accurate. That was the position of the university, is that the figures are broadly accurate.

[Margo Gray]

When he asked about specific figures, like the supposed $3 billion spent on instruction, he hit a wall. Most of his questions similarly went unanswered.

[Columbia University Professor]

We still have no idea in practical terms who actually was responsible for gathering the data, who assembled the data, who filled out the survey form? Was it one person or many people? What offices of the university are they in? I would have loved to engage with those people, talk to them. But that was the only time ever that I had any kind of public dialogue with anyone in the central administration.

[Margo Gray]

The university couldn't bury its head in the sand forever. In July, U.S. news announced that Columbia would be temporarily removed from the rankings until the release of the next year's list, meaning it was losing its coveted number two spot. That same summer, two Columbia students filed class action lawsuits against the university, accusing it of deceiving students by falsifying data.

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[Margo Gray]

U.S. news and World Report college ranking was an important factor in their decision to attend the school. Then, in the fall of 2022, U.S. news released its latest annual rankings. Columbia had plummeted from no. 2 to 18, the lowest ranking of any Ivy League school and its worst position since first appearing on the list in 1988. Thaddeus wasn't happy about his school being embarrassed, but he did welcome the increased scrutiny of the rankings process.

[Columbia University Professor]

The fallout of the commotion has been that I think there's been a permanent change in how people think about university rankings in general. And there's a much broader sense of public skepticism about whether the rankings are meaningful or helpful. That's all extremely positive. I think people should take these rankings with a grain of salt. I mean, no, with a heaping teaspoon of salt. They mean almost nothing, and I'm glad people have woken up to that.

[Margo Gray]

Columbia's sharp drop highlighted just how easily the rankings could be manipulated. As Thaddeus told the New York Times, if any institution can drop from number two to number 18 in a single year, it just discredits the entire ranking system.

[Columbia University Professor]

There's just no way to measure the quality of what happens in the classroom without going into the classroom. Besides, everyone's opinion about what's a good education differs anyway. What makes a university good? That's so complicated. There's so many different cross cutting factors and reasons.

[Margo Gray]

But if the rankings are so flawed and more people are recognizing those flaws, why do they stick around? Thaddeus believes one reason is that they help prospective students feel more confident about their decisions.

[Columbia University Professor]

Anxious young people are just relieved of the need to make a decision for themselves. You just apply to five colleges and then you choose the one that appears the highest in the ranking. There's a sense of comfort that comes from that. There's a sense of ease, but there's also just something mesmerizing about it. There is something fascinating about a horse race.

[Margo Gray]

Finally, and maybe most importantly, Thaddeus thinks the rankings persist because of what they offer to individual college applicants, students and graduates.

[Columbia University Professor]

People look to the rankings as validation of the prestige of their own school and therefore, by extension, as validation of their own individual self worth. If I went to Duke University, say, and Duke University is ranked in the top 10, then I respond to this by thinking, oh, well, then I'm a top 10 kind of person. And if you look at message boards on Reddit or if you read articles in the press, you see this kind of rhetoric all the time. Columbia versus Cornell. Cornell was so happy when Columbia got knocked down the rankings, and therefore they surpass Columbia in their rankings. Oh, last week we were worse than you and suddenly we're better than you. And obviously a lot of people in society crave some kind of validation. They need it. They want to be told that they are prestigious or accomplished or important. And that's really what the rankings are selling.

[Margo Gray]

In June 2023, about a year and a half after Thaddeus published his expression explosive findings, Columbia University announced that it would no longer participate in the US News and World Report college rankings, making it the first Ivy League institution to opt out. While US News would still rank Columbia, it would now have to source data from elsewhere. In its statement, Columbia explained, synthesizing data into a single US News submission for its best college rankings does not adequately account for all of the factors that make our undergraduate programs exceptional. This decision raised concerns for US News. Losing the cooperation of prestigious schools threatened to undermine its credibility and influence, but in the end, fears of a mass exodus never materialized. Elite institutions continue to participate, allowing the rankings to remain a dominant force in college admissions.

[Columbia University Professor]

I've spent much of the last few years just telling people university rankings are of no value and you should pay no attention to them whatsoever. I often say that to journalists, and then their follow up question is, well, in light of that, what do you make of Columbia's rise from number 13 to number 12? I think rankings are going to be with us for a long time to come.

[Margo Gray]

Campus Files is an Odyssey Original Podcast this episode was written and reported by Margo Gray. Campus Files is produced by Ian Mont Eliot Adler and me, Margo Gray. Our executive producers and story editors are Maddie Sprunkheiser and Lloyd Lockridge. Campus Files is edited, mixed and mastered by Chris Basel and Andy Jaskowicz. Special thanks to Jenna Weiss Berman, J.D. crowley, Leah Reese, Dennis, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Hilary Schuff, Sean Cherry, Laura Berman and Hilary Van Ornam. Original theme music by James Waterman and Davey Sumner. If you have tips or story ideas, write to us atcampus files podmail.com.

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