U.S. News and World Report "Unranks" University

By Evan Ritscher

U.S. News and World Report has changed the George Washington University’s national ranking in light of erroneous data the school provided to the news organization over the course of the past decade.

Earlier, U.S. News ranked the school as the nation’s 51^st-best university. However, in a statement released Wednesday, the news organization announced they will remove GW from that list and will classify the university as an “unranked" school.  U.S. News will not re-examine the university until next fall for the 2014 rankings, if the school can prove the accuracy of its new data submission.

The move comes as GW announced on November 8^th that for close to 10 years, it had been incorrectly calculating important information about students who decided to attend the university. As a result, the university had been giving flawed data on its admissions process and students to organizations like U.S. News and similar institutions that use the data in their ranking of colleges and universities.

Among the most important data GW incorrectly reported to the ranking organization was statistics on the portion of students who ranked in the top 10 percent of their class. In some cases the actual data was 20 percent lower than what the school reported.

For example, for the class of 2015, the university claimed 78 percent of students were in ranked in the top 10 percent of their high schools. In actuality, the number was 58 percent. Such flawed data, which U.S. News and World Report claims makes up 6 percent of its methodology in determining school rankings, lead to the organization’s decision to “unrank” the university.  

U.S. News classifies schools as "unranked" if they fall into the second tier of national universities, if they are liberal arts colleges, regional colleges, or regional universities, or if they fail to pass U.S. News’ own cutoff level. However, it is unclear what specific criteria U.S. News used in its decision to remove GW from its rankings.

President Steven Knapp released a statement Wednesday, saying the university was surprised and disappointed by U.S. News' decision to remove GW's ranking rather than adjust it.  Knapp also stated the university plans to improve safeguards meant to prevent these errors from occurring again.

Other schools had similar issues with misreporting data recently. Both Emory University in Georgia and Claremont McKenna University in California disclosed that they reported incorrect data earlier this year. But U.S. News did not remove either of those schools from its rankings.