When the University announced Thursday that it has been inflating freshman admissions data for more than a decade and submitting that flawed information to U.S. News & World Report, it was expected that at most, GW would slip slightly in national rankings.
But Wednesday, the magazine surprised everyone by kicking GW off the 2013 top colleges rankings list entirely.
Administrators, including University President Steven Knapp, prided themselves on being transparent and upfront with the community after discovering the error and apologized for the mistake.
But while those gestures were well-intended, the fact remains that this has been a public relations nightmare for GW.
What is perhaps most frustrating is that there is no way to know how the rest of this crisis will play out. Last week, U.S. News Director of Data Research Robert Morse said GW would likely just bump down a few slots in the rankings as a result of the faulty data. And then on Wednesday, the magazine took the almost unprecedented action of booting the University off completely. It seems that any hope of controlling this matter is out of GW's hands.
But GW does have control over its own information.
Throughout this mess, the Office of Admissions has been on lockdown.
Associate Vice President and Dean of Admissions Kathryn Napper declined to comment to a reporter Wednesday on the University being kicked off the rankings, after days of deferring all questions to the University’s media relations office. Napper has headed the admissions office for 15 years, and administrators have said the formula error that botched data goes back more than a decade.
As the long-serving leader of the admissions office, Napper is obligated to give the community answers. This public relations disaster will not go away if the admissions office hides from it.
Knapp and other University leaders have also refused to tell the community how it is holding the admissions office accountable.
While it is encouraging to see that the University will have another office check admissions data moving forward, it is also a shame to see that the only reason a system of checks and balances is being added is because of blunders. It is also worrisome that GW cannot trust its own admissions office to provide and maintain accurate records.
When students matriculate to GW, they put their faith and trust in the University to not only provide them with an education but also to ensure that their degrees carry value in the years after they receive their diplomas.
As an institution that is transitioning and looking to improve its academic standing and physical campus, GW has been highly concerned with its public image in recent years, building up a stronger public relations shop and rolling out a rebranding campaign and strategic plan. These kinds of sloppy errors make the University look unorganized and unprofessional, as if it cannot manage itself.
GW will be able to make it back onto the list next year, but that doesn’t change the fact that this incident is embarrasing. And it doesn’t change the fact that students and alumni feel let down.
Who could blame them? This mistake could damage the University’s reputation for years.
This is indeed a PR disaster and the students are rightfully outraged by it. This is not a time to hide and hope everything goes away. This is a time to explain yourselves, admit your mistakes, apologize to students and alumni and answer their questons. You messed up. Deal with the consequences like honorable professionals.
Honestly, this problem is not going to go away until they fire someone. Responsibility in this situation is not just saying you’re really really sorry that you lied to U.S. News & World Report, responsibility is finding the person who made the decision to lie and firing them publicly.
Fire somebody! Heads should roll!
Chill out.
I’m just as disappointed as anyone else. However, I’m proud of the fact that Knapp, on behalf of the entire institution, took the initiative to fess up. No moral victories here, but the institution did show a level of integrity no “scientific” ranking/metric could ever measure.
We all know rankings factored very little in our decisions to attend GW. If we did, many of us would be saving tuition dollars by attending UC Davis, UT Austin, Penn State among others – all which are ranked much higher. Not to sound like a snob, those school just do not compare.
Use this as an opportunity to come together as a community. Make the best of it. Alumni included. No reason to cry, whine and groan. Find a little humor in the situation and move on.
Problem is that GWU operates in a vacuum. It always brags it is only blocks away from the White House yet is seems to believe ‘diversity’ is only something to use as lip service. It needs to clean out the President’s suite starting from the top down and get a real diverse slate of leaders from various backgrounds, cultures, religions, races, viewpoints, etc. Jewish white males only need apply. Is this the 21st century folks or are we seeing Rip Van Winkle or Groundhog’s day?
This is cut and pasted from another article I read regarding GW:
“Mr. Maltzman, who has been overseeing admissions operations as the university searches for its first enrollment chief, said he was surprised when he saw that the admissions office had apparently obtained class-rank data for more than half of the students in the Class of 2015. Given that as many as two-thirds of high schools do not report class rank, he had expected the figure to be 30 to 40 percent.”
So if two-thirds of high schools do not report student class rank then how are the other colleges calculating their student class ranks that U.S. News requires annually?!?! Probably the same way! U.S. News needs to eliminate class rank as part of their formula.
By body-mass index, I was 10% of my high school graduating class.
If Kathryn Napper has been heading the office for 15 years, and this misreporting has been going for almost as long, then she needs to be dealt with. How can we know if the school is really being serious about this conflict or not when they are not doing anything about it? They need to prove to the student body by firing some officials instead of keeping it hush hush, like they have been doing for years. Kathryn Napper needs to address the student body NOW. Or she should be relieved of her duties.