Oh for GAWD sake FINE ALRIGHT I mean GEEZ everyone cheats on these things and if it weren’t for that asshole math professor and by the way who hired that dude…

Manifold are the ways universities fuck with statistics so they can get higher US News rankings, and it’s just Columbia’s bad luck that it hired its own petard… I mean, someone at the school actually hired the math prof who figured out Columbia had to be cheating AND PUBLICIZED THE FACT ON HIS FACULTY WEBSITE. Now, months later, the school admits yeah we did that thing and we promise to stop.

Revenge of the Math Nerds

… U.S. News & World Report announced that it had “unranked” Columbia University, which had been in a three-way tie for the No. 2 spot in the 2022 edition of Best Colleges, after being unable to verify the underlying data submitted by the university…

The Ivy League university said then that it would not participate in the next rankings because it was investigating accusations by one of its own mathematics professors that the No. 2 ranking was based on inaccurate and misleading data.

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Background.

That’s but a trifle here.

Columbia University has far more serious problems these days than a not too expensive settlement of a class action suit. But since we’ve followed, on this blog, the story of one of that school’s own math professors who ran the numbers and figured out the place was gaming its rankings, we should take note of the way Columbia has resolved the matter.

Columbia University agreed to pay $9 million to settle a proposed class action by students who claimed it submitted false data to boost its position in U.S. News & World Report’s influential college rankings.

We expect jock schools like Clemson to game US News ratings.

Nobody was that shocked when, a few years ago, a Clemson administrator reported that ‘on surveys distributed by U.S. News, the Clemson brass “rates all programs other than Clemson below average.”‘ The main reaction to this revelation was laughter.

But when a math professor at Columbia accuses it of gaming rankings, things look more serious.

But still amusing. Michael Thaddeus describes, among other things, a school suddenly deciding that its entire immense medical faculty – overwhelmingly engaged in research and patient care – is actually an instructional unit.

Even on its own terms, the ranking is [for all schools] a failure because the supposed facts on which it is based cannot be trusted. Eighty percent of the U.S. News ranking of a university is based on information reported by the university itself. This information is detailed and subtle, and the vetting conducted by U.S. News is cursory enough to allow many inaccuracies to slip through. Institutions are under intense pressure to present themselves in the most favorable light. This creates a profound conflict of interest, which it would be naive to overlook… Even as Columbia has [lately] soared to 2nd place in the ranking, there is reason for concern that its ascendancy may largely be founded, not on an authentic presentation of the university’s strengths, but on a web of illusions.

An attempt to find nice things to say about for-profit colleges…

…generates scathing responses from readers.

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And speaking of scathing: The author links to a recent study of online education. Excerpts:

Students in the online courses were significantly better prepared at the outset … [H]owever, students in the online course performed more poorly than those in the face to face course…. Students who took developmental math and English courses online were much less likely to subsequently succeed in college level math and English. … [C]olleges that are focused on improving student success should proceed cautiously in expanding online course offerings.

The study’s author, Shanna Smith Jaggars, notes the pathetic lost-in-cyberspace nature of the online experience. One student says: “I didn’t feel like there was an instructor presence… I didn’t feel like there was anything I was learning from the instructor. The instructor was simply there as a Web administrator or as a grader.”
(Longtime readers know that UD calls online professors air traffic controllers.) Other student comments: “[I was] sort of on this island, all by myself.” “Alone and adrift.” “I know nothing about these people!”

Online would be a great way to study Samuel Beckett’s plays. It allows you to feel his theme.

Oh, and:

Online communication can be easily misinterpreted, due in part to the lack of visual and facial cues. Online teachers are encouraged to provide timely and detailed feedback. However … they often do not have any information about how the student responds to this feedback. In fact, students may misinterpret a high level of feedback as negative feedback when in reality a teacher is merely posing questions to stimulate student thinking.

Yeah funny thing about that. Online interaction ain’t really interaction, is it? Interaction means back and forth, doesn’t it?

Since a number of studies show these results, one researcher concludes that, for instance, “[t]eaching economics courses online in community colleges is probably not good policy.”

Here’s what the NYT columnist should have said in defense of online education, for-profit or not for profit. It’s really cheap.

Life at the Top

From the Burlington Free Press:

Charles Houston, the Burlington polymath who climbed K2, studied the effects of high altitude on the body and taught medicine at the University of Vermont, died Sunday. He was 96.

… He was a one-time director of the Peace Corps in India and of the Medical Peace Corps in Washington, D.C., before moving to Burlington in 1966 to join UVM’s medical school.

Sometimes called the “father of high-altitude medicine,” Houston was an expert on pulmonary edema, hypoxia and the effects of altitude and the resulting diminished oxygen.

His expertise stemmed from personal experience. In 1935, his first year of medical school at Columbia near his childhood home, Houston asked the dean if he could skip the last six week of classes to hike in the Himalayas.

The dean obliged, and when Houston again returned the following year, he reached the summit of Nanda Devi, a 25,645-foot mountain in India. At the time, it was the highest mountain ever climbed — a record that would stand until a 1950 ascent of Annapurna in Nepal.

His affair with climbing burned hot until the mid-1950s. Houston was part of two expeditions that attempted to summit K2, the world’s second highest mountain. The 1938 trip, whose climbers reached 26,000 feet, would produce a map to the top that was used 16 years later by the first team to summit the mountain.

… Houston’s daughter, Penny Barron, said his health had declined over the past decade. Macular degeneration left him virtually blind…

Ben Littenberg, a professor of medicine at UVM and Houston’s neighbor, wrote the article on Houston in Wikipedia. His wife, Anna Marie Littenberg, said that after Houston lost his sight, she read to him for an hour a day five days a week — “everything from Churchill’s history of the English speaking peoples to the “Raj Quartet,” she said.

… Houston also had medical students come to his house to read him journal articles so that he could stay current.

… “Several analyses have shown beyond question that the increasing cost of health care is due in large part to the desire of doctors to make higher incomes,” he wrote in a [newspaper opinion piece just two months ago]. As an antidote, he pointed to Grand Junction, Colo., where doctors contain costs by pooling their resources “without jeopardizing one of the good reasons for going into the health care profession: the fact that it is a healing activity which has been universal for centuries and can be restored.” …

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