Columbia University has agreed to pay $9 million to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by students who claimed they had been overcharged for their educations as a result of incorrect data that they said the school had provided to U.S. News & World Report to artificially inflate its national 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.
Michael Thaddeus, the mathematician who first revealed the flaws in the data, said on Tuesday that he found the settlement gratifying “because it amounts to an admission that the students’ complaint has merit.”
“Columbia did report false data over many years, and it reported false data about several things, not just class sizes,” he said.
He added that it would have been even better if Columbia had made an “honest attempt to explain its actions,” perhaps with an independent investigation addressing questions like why and how the false data were reported in the first place.
“The discovery stage of this lawsuit might have illuminated those questions,” he said.
The scandal had a broader impact, leading to skepticism in how people view the U.S. News & World Report rankings, which largely rely on data self-reported by universities. At Columbia, it also prompted improvements in how the university reports its own data. Since 2022, the university has published “Common Data Sets,” which “are reviewed by a well-established, independent advisory firm to ensure reporting accuracy,” a spokesman said.
The lawsuit was first filed in Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York in July 2022 by Ravi Campbell, a student who claimed he had overpaid based on false advertising. Several other students then sued, and the suits were combined to create a class action.
The motion to settle the case must still be approved by a judge. A Columbia official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said that while the university denied the allegations of misreporting and other misconduct, it was entering into the settlement agreement to avoid protracted and costly litigation.
Sharon Otterman is a Times reporter covering higher education, public health and other issues facing New York City.
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