Education

A Warning Shot For Deans Who Game College Rankings


The federal government did what many would have considered unthinkable yesterday: It brought an indictment against a former business school dean and two of his subordinates for allegedly cheating on a college ranking.

The U.S. Attorney General for Philadelphia charged the ousted dean of Temple University’s Fox School of Business Moshe Porat with one count each of conspiracy and wire fraud for his role in one of the biggest rankings scandals ever. It also charged a former professor of statistics at Fox, Isaac Gottlieb, and a former manager of finance, Marjorie O’Neill, with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

If convicted, Porat faces a maximum possible sentence of 25 years in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, and a $500,000 fine. Gottlieb and O’Neill each face a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison, followed by three years supervised release; and a $500,000 fine.

It took a team from the FBI, the US Department of Education Office of Inspector General, and the Postal Inspection Service several years to unravel the fraud. The deceit would ultimately cost Porat his $600,000-a-year job as dean, destroy the careers of a pair of subordinates, lead to years of investigations, lawsuits, fines and headlines that would tatter the business school’s and the university’s reputation, and cost Temple a minimum of $17 million in “remediation costs.” It may now land Porat and two of his associates in jail (see Anatomy Of A Business School Rankings Fraud).

Those are hefty penalties for gaming a series of U.S. News & World Report rankings on online MBA programs, part-time MBAs, and undergraduate business education. But as one government official after another made clear, the gaming that allowed Fox to capture the No. 1 rank for its online MBA program over four consecutive years from 2014 to 2018 fooled and hurt many.

“Moshe Porat knew that burnishing the MBA programs’ rankings would make Fox more competitive, bringing in more students and more dollars,” said Lilian S. Perez, assistant special agent in charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Division in a statement. “Fudging the school’s data was a means to that end. But countless applicants, students, and donors made big decisions, financial decisions, based on the lies at the heart of this alleged conspiracy. This was an extended and extensive fraud, for which those involved must be held accountable.”

Porat, now 74, strongly denies any wrongdoing, maintaining that Temple University wants to make him a “scapegoat” for the fraud he blames on subordinates. “Dr. Porat dedicated forty years of his life to serving Temple University, first as a faculty member, and ultimately as Dean of the Fox Business School, and he did so with distinction,” Porat’s attorney, Michael A. Schwartz, said in a statement. “He looks forward to defending himself against these charges and to clearing his name.”

The highly detailed indictment, however, reveals a concerted scheme to game the rankings that started as early as 2010 when Porat renamed his “rankings committee” to “strategic communication group” because he did not think it sounded good to have a group devoted exclusively to boosting the school’s rankings. In 2013, he dispatched Marjorie O’Neill and two other employees to travel to Washington, D.C., to meet with U.S. News to express their concerns that the school’s programs were ranked too low.

O’Neill, according to the indictment, would return to tell Porat that U.S. News did not audit the data supplied for the rankings because it lacked the staff to do so. Porat then disbanded his internal rankings group to keep closer control of the data, appointing O’Neill as the sole provider of the information to U.S. News with assistance from Professor Gottlieb.

From at least July 2014 until at least July 2018, Porat conspired with Gottlieb and O’Neill “to devise a scheme and artifice to defraud and to obtain money and property from Fox applicants, students, and donors, by means of materially false and fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises,” according to the indictment.

In the 2012-2013 academic year, only 12 of 48 incoming online MBA students had submitted a GMAT score, an admissions standard that would cause U.S. News to penalize the school in its ranking. O’Neill would later inform Porat that at least 75% of the new students had a standardized test score, the school’s ranking would be impacted.

In the following year, when Fox enrolled 70 new students, only eight of whom had a GMAT, O’Neill told Porat that if Fox instead reported that all 70 of the students had taken a standardized test, Fox would get 100% credit for the school’s GMAT average and the program would go up in the rankings, according to the indictment.

Porat, prosecutors charge, told O’Neill to “report it that way.” In September of 2014, the school reported their stats to U.S. News and the inflated reporting allowed Fox to win a three-way tie for first place in the online MBA ranking for 2015.

Prosecutors said rankings became something of an obsession for Porat. E-mails and depositions submitted in a defamation case the former dean filed against the university show that Porat pressured his staff for years to find ways to increase the school’s rankings.

By 2013, Fox was reliably able to estimate where it would rank on U.S. News’ annual list, former administrators have said in depositions. The results of the fraud allowed the school’s online MBA program to gain top honors in 2014. At a champagne toast after its online MBA won the No. 1 spot for the fourth time, an administrator at Fox asked Porat if he was concerned about the validity of the ranking.

“Dean Porat said, ‘Well, if they haven’t caught it … what makes you think they will catch it now?’” recalled Christine Kiely, an assistant dean at Fox, in a deposition. “He seemed annoyed that we were talking about it — in essence, turning ourselves in.”

Fudging data for rankings, of course, is hardly new. Over the years, a number of schools have been caught gaming them. But this is the first time, the federal government has brought charges in a rankings scam. The indictment amounts to a loud warning shot to others tempted to tweak numbers in their favor.



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