NY Times: Columbia Settles Class Action Lawsuit Over Submission Of Incorrect Data That Inflated Its U.S. News Ranking; $6 Million To 22,000 Former Students ($273 Each), $3 Million To Lawyers

Following up on my previous post, Former Students Sue Columbia, Say They Were Misled By Misreporting Of Data That Inflated Its U.S. News Ranking: New York Times, Columbia Will Pay $9 Million to Settle Lawsuit Over U.S. News Ranking:

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.