Columbia University released it's Common Data Set for 2021-2022 Class of 2025 today!

Just a public service announcement. I'm still on sabbatical from answering questions.

Columbia University withdrew from participating in US New World report college rankings this year for a number of reasons. The most important one is that an untouchable tenured math professor ran his own data analysis and felt that its #2 ranking was questionable because some of the data didn't line up. Subsequently, USNews removed CU from last year's ranking as well.

This prompted Columbia to do their own investigation and voluntarily share their source data in a transparent manner vis a vis the "common data set". Something that 99% of top colleges provide year after year. However, Columbia hasn't done this for 7 years.

The math prof. alleged that there was no way that 100% of full-time professors had PhDs or other equivalent terminal degrees nor could 83% of undergraduate classes have 20 or fewer students.

The audited data in the common data set shows that nearly 95.3% of full-time faculty have PhDs and that nearly 77% of undergraduate classes have fewer than 30 students, not 20.

While this is certainly a painful pill for Columbia to swallow by publically apologizing for the inaccuracies and showing contrition, I personally do not think that there is much difference between 95.3% and 100% for faculty having PhDs. #1 ranked Princeton has 949/1007 full-time faculty or 94.2% with PhDs. And the other 2 schools that shared the #2 spot MIT and Harvard had 91.5% 1216/1328 and 92.7% and 90.9% 1614/1744. Stanford had

78.2% 1316/11684. Yale had 92.6% or 1168/1260. What this means is that despite the inaccurate 100% figure, it still remains the top school in the country for PhDs to Full-time faculty ratio. So that would not affect its ranking if it were adjusted down. This stat is worth only 3% of the USNews ranking.

The stat, Class Size Index is more problematic.

Princeton has 84.2% of classes under 30 students.

MIT has 80.2%, Stanford 78.4%, Harvard 79.7%, Yale 82.1%

So clearly the previous 83% number was wrong, but the revised 77% of classes under 30 students isn't far behind #2 Harvard and #4 Stanford so I don't think this changes the ranking more than 1-2 Slots since the "Class Size Index" is only worth 7-8% of the total ranking score.

When Columbia decides to rejoin the US News rankings again, I do not think its reputation and ranking will change much. It will be interesting to see if they achieve record ED and RD applications this cycle which is a function of their reputation score and demand for their product.

https://opir.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/content/Common%20Data%20Set/Common%20Data%20Set%20Columbia%20College-Columbia%20Engineering%2009-09-22.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1jZCbCrAyFYdF6g5xRz2x7WPWNXdr7ngSIzZQ6wZbYlmiBjXiiLwJTdpY