U.S. News Ranked Columbia No. 2, but a Math Professor Has His Doubts; The New York Times, March 17, 2022

Anemona Hartocollis, The New York Times; U.S. News Ranked Columbia No. 2, but a Math Professor Has His Doubts

"The rankings have driven colleges to make relatively benign changes in culture, but there has also been some fraud, Mr. Diver said. “There’s been repeated evidence of not just gaming the system,” he said, but also “outright misrepresentation, outright lying.”

Last year, a former dean of Temple University’s business school was found guilty of using fraudulent data between 2014 and 2018 to improve the school’s national rankings and increase revenue. The school’s online M.B.A. program was ranked best in the country by U.S. News & World Report in the years that he falsified data.

Over the years, other schools like Iona College, Claremont McKenna College and Emory University have been found to have falsified or manipulated data."