Temple Gets Demoted in U.S. News Rankings
Here’s why its online MBA program is no longer no. 1.
Temple University.
When U.S. News released its 2018 ranking of online MBA programs this month, the program at Temple’s Fox School of Business was ranked no. 1. But now it’s being yanked from the ranking due to misinformation from the university.
According to U.S. News, the Fox School significantly overstated the number of new entrants for its 2016-2017 class who submitted GMAT scores. The school originally reported that all 255 new entrants (100 percent) submitted GMAT scores but later told U.S. News that only 50 students (19.6 percent) had actually submitted GMAT scores.
U.S. News says the misreported data “resulted in the school’s numerical rank being higher than it otherwise would have been in the overall Online MBA Programs rankings and the Best Online MBA Programs for Veterans rankings.”
The misreporting is further problematic because the ranking is designed to give test scores less weight if less than 75 percent of new students to the program submit GMAT and GRE scores. “This is because the lack of data for 25 percent of students or more likely means the standardized test scores are not representative of the entire class. These scores have a weight of 10 percent in the rankings formula,” wrote U.S. News.
Despite the inaccurate data, U.S. News has not changed the ranks of other programs. The Fox School of Business Online MBA will remain unranked until the 2019 list, if the school can confirm the accuracy of its next data submission.
“Once we discovered the error, we took the proactive approach to promptly self report in order to correct a mistake,” said Fox School of Business dean M. Moshe Porat in a statement. “The Fox Online MBA program still embodies all the qualities of the nation’s top program, regardless of the revised 2018 ranking. Our program has a long-standing reputation as one of the nation’s best online MBA programs.”
In a separate statement Temple University president Richard M. Englert said the school looks forward to “restoring the program to its rightful place among the top-ranked in the nation.”
Temple plans to hire an outside, independent firm to review all of its data reporting processes.
