Columbia University Cuts Ties With U.S. News

If you’ve been following along then you already know that Columbia University has had a turbulent year, to say the least. 

First, a discrepancy was found in the data they were submitting to the U.S. News & World Report rankings. This prompted the university to pull out of the rankings for the 2022 year while they sorted out these discrepancies. However, in a surprising turn of events,  U.S. News still ranked Columbia, dropping them from the NO. 2 position to NO. 18. Then, Columbia’s medical, nursing, and law schools, along with several other prominent university’s graduate schools, all decided to pull their data from the rankings. 

Now, in a further act of defiance, Columbia’s undergraduate program has announced that they will no longer participate in the rankings moving forward. In a statement, the university’s officials said, “We are convinced that synthesizing data into a single U.S. News submission for its Best Colleges rankings does not adequately account for all of the factors that make our undergraduate programs exceptional.”

If this statement sounds at all familiar it is because, over the past year, several other universities and critics have made similar public statements. Many have questioned the data that U.S. News uses to compile their list, while others have criticized the criteria (class size, number of faculty with terminal degrees, among others) the publication uses to determine the rankings in the first place.

In response to these criticisms, U.S. News has reported that they have changed several of their criteria. They will no longer be factoring class size, alumni donations, or the high school standings of admitted students into their data. 

It is important to note that even though Columbia will not be submitting data, the university will still be ranked. The same goes for all the graduate programs that have pulled out of the rankings. Instead of using data submitted directly from the universities, U.S. News will now use public data for the rankings. 

But it looks like Columbia has beat the publication to the punch. The university has confirmed that they will be compiling all their public data on their own so that students, parents, employers, and anyone else who relies on the rankings can see Columbia’s data first-hand instead of filtered through the lens of U.S. News.

To date, no other universities have followed in Columbia’s footsteps of completely refusing to cooperate with U.S. News. But no matter what, it will be interesting to see what the rankings will look like for the 2023 year. 

Stay tuned. We will continue to update you on any further developments. 

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