Rutgers Business School Created Fake Jobs For Graduates To Boost MBA Program Rankings, Lawsuit Charges

A lawsuit charges that Rutgers Business School sought to improve its rankings by creating bogus temporary jobs for graduating MBA students. From a report: Rutgers Business School is always keeping score. On its website, it proclaims its No. 1 ranking this year by Bloomberg Businessweek as the top Public Business School in the Northeast. Fortune bestowed a similar honor in 2021. And U.S. News & World Report rated its MBA program among the top ten for Best Overall Employment Outcomes in the U.S., as well as No. 12 for its Supply Chain Management MBA program. But in a whistleblower lawsuit filed Friday, a Rutgers administrator charged that the university fraudulently burnished those national rankings by creating totally bogus jobs to show the success its business school graduates had in finding employment.

The lawsuit by Deidre White, the business school's human resources manager, alleged the program used a temp agency to hire unemployed MBA students, placing them into sham positions at the university itself -- for no other reason than to make it appear like a greater number of graduates were getting full-time jobs after getting their Rutgers diplomas. "The fraud worked," wrote White's attorney, Matthew A. Luber of McOmber McOmber & Luber in Marlton. In the very first year of the scheme, they said Rutgers was suddenly propelled to, among other things, the 'No. 1' business school in the Northeast.

Wow

[timeOday]

Now there's a business school that operates like an actual business!

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[VeryFluffyBunny]

Yes, exploiting Goodhart's law to fully appreciate how market forces work in practice.

schools & banks need to be the hook for the lo

[Joe_Dragon]

schools & banks need to be the hook for the loans when students default. It may be extreme but the school system is broken in some ways and now State University are acting like trade schools with inflated jobs numbers.

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[guruevi]

Students don't default, they can keep extending their loans which are backed by the government. Every government handout increases the amount of money the schools can charge.

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[timeOday]

This will create an inequality among disciplines - some will be much easier to get loans for than others. That in turn creates inequality among students - only those with wealthy parents can pursue some fields.

On one hand this is the whole point - allowing students to be informed/compelled by economic signals - but you can see how people will feel about it. People working in higher education especially.

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[ShanghaiBill]

This will create an inequality among disciplines - some will be much easier to get loans for than others.

Why is that a bad thing? An engineering degree is worth a lot more than a sociology degree, so it is reasonable that there is less risk for the lender. It also incentivizes students to seek useful degrees.

That in turn creates inequality among students - only those with wealthy parents can pursue some fields.

Why is that a bad thing? Wealthy Whitney can afford to study sociology because she can move back in with Daddy when she graduates. Poor Paula needs a degree that leads to a job that can pay the bills.

The "Tyranny of Metrics" book describes why

[Echoez]

I highly recommend the book "The Tyranny of Metrics" by an economist historian Jerry Muller. Basically, any time you try and reduce something to a metric or measurement, you should fully expect that everyone being measured will adapt their behavior to change that metric. If you measured productivity by lines of code changed, expect employees to create more simplistic lines of code to pad their number.

If you want to measure the "quality of colleges" by acceptance rates, class sizes, graduation rates, or job placement, then expect colleges to respond by focusing purely on those metrics to boost their scores. See the recent scandal about Columbia's undergraduate scores in US News about how they fudged all sorts of stats to bump themselves up.

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[MerlynEmrys67]

I've always loved this one:

I worked for an AntiVirus company that shall remain nameless. I had my wallet tied to what percent of my cases were inside the Service Level Agreement (SLA). Calculated daily and averaged over the quarter and paid out... Good Idea, Yes?

Well the daily number was calculated as #cases outside the SLA/#Cases

What becomes interesting is the company really wanted to influence that first number, However, being that there just are long running cases - the second number is really what is

This sounds like something...

[trudyscousin]

...Donald Trump would do. Trump University redux?

Sounds familiar

[wyattstorch516]

This is the same thing that coding bootcamps do to get their 95% employment rate.

Standard Operating Procedure for Law Schools

[hashish16]

Interesting that business schools are so behind the times. Law schools have been doing this for decades.