How Linda McMahon Can Punish Columbia for Its College-Rankings Scandal

U niversities have lost the confidence of the American public. With President-elect Donald Trump having pledged to “impose real standards on colleges,” his education secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, has the opportunity to hold them accountable. There’s an obvious place to start: Make an example of a university that has brazenly misled its students by reporting inaccurate data to the U.S. News and World Report college ranking.

That school is none other than Columbia University — infamous for one of the worst outbreaks of campus antisemitism after the October 7 massacre, but the fount of other scandals as well. The New York–based Ivy League institution soared in the U.S. News rankings from 1988 to 2022, when it peaked in second place (tied with Harvard). Students — and their parents — are willing to pay for the privilege of attending such a high-ranked university: Columbia charges up to $93,000 per year. It’s no wonder schools like Columbia have taken drastic measures to leapfrog up the U.S. News list.

But pride goeth before the fall, and Columbia fell. The same year Columbia peaked in the rankings, Michael Thaddeus, one of the school’s own math professors, published a damning analysis of the university’s ascent. He compared the metrics Columbia reported to U.S. News with the metrics he calculated from other sources, such as the school’s financial statements. Thaddeus found that “several of the key figures supporting Columbia’s high ranking are inaccurate, dubious, or highly misleading.”

While Columbia reported a student–faculty ratio of 6:1 to the U.S. News Common Data Set, Thaddeus’s analysis revealed that the true figure is closer to 11:1. And while Columbia reported instructional spending of $3.1 billion in 2020 (over $100,000 per student), its consolidated financial statements showed that instructional spending was actually one-third lower. Columbia’s reported class sizes, full-time faculty percentage, and graduation rate also appeared suspect.

After Thaddeus’s report, Columbia’s U.S. News ranking dropped from second place to 18th. In 2023, the school announced it would no longer report data to the rankings service, though U.S. News continues to rank the school based on publicly available measures.

Many higher education analysts, including myself, are skeptical that the U.S. News rankings hold much value as an indicator of college quality. For example, I’d prefer not to reward colleges for spending more, as the rankings have done. But the sad reality is that students pay attention to these rankings and use them to guide their choice of school. Their behavior is rational, as employers often consider the prestige of alma maters when hiring new college graduates. Sought-after firms such as Bain and McKinsey hire a disproportionate number of alumni from colleges ranked in the top ten.

Fudging rankings data could therefore harm students’ economic prospects. A student who attended Columbia on the expectation that its No. 2 ranking would open up doors at elite employers could have enrolled in a different college, where their employment prospects might have been better. Columbia’s deception isn’t just bad in principle — it has harmful, real-world effects.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration largely ignored Columbia’s behavior. But the incoming Trump administration can treat this scandal with the gravity it deserves.

Secretary of education nominee Linda McMahon has a few options to go after Columbia and other colleges that have engaged in rankings fraud (including Temple University and the University of Southern California). First, she could levy a fine against the institution. Federal regulations allow fines against a school which “substantially misrepresents the nature of . . . its educational program.”

There is ample precedent: In 2023, the Biden administration fined Grand Canyon University $38 million for misrepresentation. Temple University itself reached a $700,000 settlement with the Education Department for its own rankings fraud. Next, it should be Columbia’s turn to own up to the consequences of its actions.

An even bolder strategy would utilize a regulation known as “borrower defense to repayment” (BDR). BDR allows students who were victims of misconduct by their colleges to have their federal loans discharged — and the department can recoup those discharged amounts from the college itself. Past BDR discharges have topped $17 billion, though the Biden administration has mostly used the regulation to discharge the loans of students who attended for-profit colleges that have now shuttered.

But there’s no reason McMahon couldn’t turn BDR — which the Biden administration set a precedent of using often, and expansively — against wealthy nonprofit schools like Columbia. McMahon could order an investigation into the rankings fraud, encourage its former students to submit BDR claims, and then send Columbia a bill for the balance. Given that Columbia uses over $300 million in student loans every single year, the school’s potential liability could run into the billions.

This would compensate the students Columbia deceived. But more importantly, it would send a clear signal to other institutions that similar behavior will not be tolerated. It’s possible that the antics at Columbia are just the tip of the iceberg — who knows how many other schools are sending bad data to college rankings but haven’t yet been caught? Fortunately, Secretary-designate McMahon has the tools to restore a small bit of integrity to elite higher education. It’s now her turn to use them.