LOS ANGELES — Two deans at the University of Southern California’s education school directed officials to omit key data submitted for U.S. News & World Report’s annual list of best graduate schools, moves that contributed to the school’s rise in the rankings, according to an investigation released Friday.
In March, USC announced that it pulled the Rossier School of Education out of U.S. News & World Report’s next annual rankings list after it discovered “a history of inaccuracies” in data reported by the school going back at least five years. The university commissioned an independent investigation to identity how the flawed data occurred.
Most recently, the school ranked No. 11 among education schools. The misreporting created the impression that the school’s “doctoral programs were much smaller and more selective than they actually were,” the report by the law firm Jones Day concluded.
