Take a look at the U.S. News & World Report website today, and you’ll no longer see a ranking number for our neighbors at George Washington University. In previous years at 51st place, now GW is “unranked” on the website, due to their misreported class ranking data of incoming students.

Earlier this month, a disclosure revealed that GW had inflated its high school class standing information for over a decade. The incoming freshmen in the top 10 percent of the class was reported at 78 percent, while the actual after correction was 58 percent. For those freshmen reported to be in the top 25 percent of their high school class, GW reported 95 percent, which was corrected to 90. The total number of students who submitted class rank, according to initial data, was 51 percent, and 38 percent after correction.

According to the U.S. News & World Report update, this false data made GW’s ranking higher than it should be after newer statistics are taken into account. Last week, the President of GW Steven Knapp formally apologized for the data errors and the Provost stated that those who were responsible for the errors would be “held accountable.”

In a statement released today, Knapp expressed surprise at the ranking removal. “We were surprised by the decision of U.S. News to remove George Washington’s numerical ranking rather than to correct it in light of our disclosure,” he said. “We regret the error and have put safeguards in place to prevent such errors from occurring in the future.”

Today, U.S. News & World Report released its list of college rankings, with Georgetown University as 21st out of National Universities. We’ve seen 22nd place last year, we’ve even gone so far as 23rd in years past. It’s good to be back.

Emory University beat us to the punch, scoring 20th place. BUT WHY? We’ll just stick with tradition and blame it on the author of U.S. News, Robert Morse, who lives directly above Baked and Wired. The minority of hipster Hoyas who frequent this coffee shop probably give our campus a bad rep.

In worse college ranking news, Forbes gave Georgetown an overall placement of 38. Princeton Review recently ranked our students second most politically active among college campuses. The Hilltop scores first place for Princeton Review’s category “College City Gets High Marks,” even though apparently 90 percent of us are supposed to be on campus most of the time and “houses are shaking” when we try to use GUTS buses to leave.

U.S. News & World Report has contributed to the host of meaningful and equitable college rankings in the past, evaluating the best learning institutions in the country.

Looks like that wasn’t enough.

According to rankings published in late September, Georgetown is the 155th-best college in the world, sandwiched between University of Science and Technology of China and University of Sussex.

U.S. News’s methodology, which is based on QS World University Rankings, weighs academic peer review drawn from 15,050 surveys over a three-year period as its key indicator.

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After wallowing for five years as the 23rd best in the eyes of U.S. News and World Report, Georgetown is moving on up to the 21st spot.

For those who thrive on the arbitrary, possibly-rigged system, Georgetown’s bump in the U.S. News and World Report college rankings is a long-awaited victory, demonstrating the University’s academic strength and successes. (The rankings are calculated by “data sets,” including “academic reputation, graduation and retention rates, class size, selectivity, financial aid, alumni giving and faculty resources.”)

And if that’s not enough, high school counselors think Georgetown is the 6th best college in the country.

“Georgetown is pleased that we maintained strong rankings for our undergraduate programs and especially appreciate the input of high school counselors in this effort,” President John DeGioia said in a press release.

Make no mistake—we love Georgetown. But, we think these rankings encourage people to look for recognition in the wrong places. We don’t need U.S. News and World Report to tell us that our school is great, and neither do you.

On the other hand … suck it, Syracuse!

Today, U.S. News and World Report released its 2010 rankings of the World’s Best Colleges and Universities, where it’s ranked Georgetown University 129th among 400 other institutions, tied with the University of Aberdeen in the UK and Ohio State University.

In Art and Humanities, it ranked 75th; in Social Sciences, it ranked 57th; in Life Sciences and Biomedics, it ranked 162nd; and it was not ranked among Engineering and IT or Natural Science universities.

Interestingly, on the international list, Georgetown University is ranked below several schools which it ranks above on U.S. News & World Report’s better-known national Best Colleges list, where Georgetown is 23rd, like New York University and Purdue. The discrepancy must lay in the methodology. The international list doesn’t take retention rates, graduation rates, or admissions selectivity into account (but neither does it weigh financial resources, lucky for us).

Instead, the World list is based on academic peer review (40 percent), employer review (10 percent), student-to-faculty ratios (20 percent), citations per faculty (a measurement of faculty research output—20 percent), and ratio of international faculty (5 percent) and international students (5 percent). Georgetown scored based on responses to the employer survey, with a score of 90 out of 100, but had middling scores in other categories—65 out of 10 on academic peer review, 65 points for its student to faculty ratio, 50 points for citation rate, and 24 out of 100 for international faculty.

Via Morse Code

The U.S. News & World Report‘s annual college rankings came out today and—surprise, surprise— Georgetown is once again 23rd on the list of national universities. We’ve come in 23rd for the past five years straight (maybe we can get a consolation prize for consistency?).

The business school also held steady, coming in 21st, as it did last year.

There’s some reason for cheer, though. While last year we were tied with the University of Virginia, this year they’ve been bumped down to 24th, and good ol’ 23 is ours alone. Although there was some reshuffling of the Top 22, none of the schools who beat us this year weren’t also above us last year

Also positive: we came in 24th on the list of best values for national universities, up 8 positions from last year. The best values metric is determined using the “ratio of quality to price,” the percentage of students receiving need-based aid, and the average percentage of the total cost covered by financial aid.

If that intractable 23 is still bringing you down, though, let the survey of high school counselors cheer you up: they ranked us 9th. Granted, we’re tied with seven other schools, but being neck-and-neck with the likes of Cal Tech, Dartmouth and Penn ain’t bad.

Perhaps not 100% reliable

The world of Higher Education has been in a tizzy lately over a couple allegations of ranking rigging. I know what you’re thinking: ‘What? The U.S. News & World Report college ranking system isn’t a pristine, uncorrupted process that results in a completely accurate, objectively true portrait of how colleges and universities stack up? Preposterous!’ But that’s what some are claiming…

A couple of weeks ago at the annual forum of the Association of Institutional Research, Catherine Watt, a former institutional researcher for Clemson University, gave a startlingly frank talk about what Clemson had done to improve its U.S. News & World Report ranking. When James F. Barker took over as President of Clemson in 2001, he publicly vowed to make it a top 20 public research university—and he’s been pretty successful: they’ve sky-rocketed from 38th in 2001 to 22nd in 2008.

But according to Watt, Clemson’s success has been due to some sneaky tactics, including:

• Increasing the proportion of classes with fewer than 20 students by “manipulation around the edges”—cutting a few students from classes with 20-25 kids, but letting the enrollments of slightly larger classes to jump way up (for example, a class meant for 55 students could be bumped up to 70 students).
• Admitting students with an eye on how they’ll improve the school’s ranking, with the admissions committee reassessing the average SAT score of admitted students after every round to see if they’re on target.
• Making budgetary decisions by running “multiple definitions to figure out where we can move things around to make them look best.”
• Ranking all other programs “below average” on the reputational survey form in order to make Clemson look comparatively better.

After the jump, Clemson’s response and a second mini-scandal…

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14!

U.S. News and World Report just released it’s annual rankings of Graduate programs and it looks like Georgetown’s doing pretty well for itself. From the golden child of GU’s grad programs, Georgetown Law, which ranked 14 (same as last year), to the business school (up three to 19), Georgetown’s pulling a very respectable showing. Even the Medical school, something of a black sheep, managed to inch up one spot to 39.

After the jump, Georgetown’s rankings in every program it was evaluated on (Note: Some fields had sub-rankings. Unfortunately, you had to pay to see past the top 10 or so, and since Vox is (a) broke and (b) unwilling to shill out $14.95 to U.S. News, we’re only listing the rankings that are publicly visible):

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Whoops!: Disregard. These are old results from August.

The more things seem to change, the more they stay the same. Just like last year, U.S. News and World report has ranked Georgetown 23rd among national universities in their 2009 “Best Colleges” report. This year, instead of besting UVA (which U.S. N & WR ranked 24th in 2008) they tied us at 23rd. Some reshuffling occurred among universities 1st-22nd, but nobody bested us who didn’t in 2008.

How did the super-elites fare? Well, the lords of the 1st-and-2nd rankings, Harvard and Princeton, switched places in 2009. Harvard came out on top this year whereas Princeton placed first in 2008. Yale (always a bridesmaid, never a bride, eh?) placed third in both 2008 and 2009.

In the fall, Georgetown President Jack DeGioia explained he’s not one to obsess over independent rankings of Georgetown’s academic worth. (And columnist Kate Mays wholly agreed.) Good show!