Monday, April 19, 2021

Temple University dean and two others indicted for giving false information to U.S. News & World Report about the school's MBA program

Inside Higher Ed:

[]the former dean, remains on the Temple faculty. He faces federal charges of one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of wire fraud. If convicted he faces up to 25 years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

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The three of them worked together "to submit false information about the school’s online MBA and part-time MBA programs to U.S. News & World Report in order to inflate Fox’s rankings in the annual U.S. News surveys of top OMBA and PMBA programs" 

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Temple has not admitted wrongdoing by the university in the case. However, in 2019 it agreed to pay $4 million to those who are or were students in the online M.B.A. program and another $1,475,000 to settle claims of students in other M.B.A. programs and several other master's programs and one online bachelor's program in the business school.

Speaking of school scandals, LA Magazine has a feature on one of the most expensive private schools in the city: 

In January, another anonymous letter from a parent complaining about the curriculum landed in trustees’ mailboxes, and word of it quickly spread through the school. “Our children should not be punished or re-educated like Khmer Rough [sic] captives or Uyghur Muslims in China,” it read. “We refuse to allow the mechanical and systematic dismantling of whole sections of education simply to pursue a point that may or may not be universally accepted, and may in fact be no more that a tautological hustle [sic].”

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Under [under the new] leadership, the number of students of color increased to 41 percent. (The school declined to provide a detailed breakdown of that figure. A faculty member claims that it includes Middle Easterners, a group the U.S. Census Bureau classifies as white.)