Columbia Will Pay $9 Million to Settle Lawsuit Over U.S. News Ranking
The lawsuit stemmed from a 2022 scandal over how Columbia earned a No. 2 spot in the magazine's annual 'Best Colleges' rankings that year, acing a process that is a powerful driver of prestige and applications for American universities. Believing there were flaws in the data underpinning the university's score, a Columbia mathematician investigated and published a blog post asserting that several key figures were 'inaccurate, dubious or highly misleading.'
The discrepancies caused Columbia to drop to No. 18 in the rankings. The next year, Columbia opted out of the rankings all together.
The proposed settlement, which was filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday, did not require Columbia to formally admit wrongdoing. But the university said in a statement on Tuesday that it 'deeply regrets deficiencies in prior reporting.'
The settlement agreement covers some 22,000 former undergraduate students who attended Columbia College, Columbia Engineering, or Columbia's School of General Studies between 2016 and 2022 and will be eligible to apply for a slice of the award. If all the students applied, taking into account likely lawyers' fees, they would each receive about $273.
The lawsuit claimed that Columbia had artificially inflated its ranking by consistently reporting false data, including that 83 percent of its classes had fewer than 20 students.
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