The yearly, joyous announcement of a national No. 1 ranking from Temple University’s Fox School of Business Online MBA program in the U.S. News & World Report was actually caused by data manipulation, incorrect interpretations and knowing misreporting, according to a months-long investigation conducted by law firm Jones Day. Jones Day interviewed 17 Temple staffers, scoured hard drives and pored over 32,000 documents at the North Philly university.

On Monday, Temple University President Richard Englert announced that Fox School Dean Moshe Porat had been asked to step down, and published a seven-page summary detailing the investigations into what Fox initially referred to as “an error in data.”

“It is my duty to report that the Fox School, under the leadership of Dean Moshe Porat, knowingly provided false information to at least one rankings organization about the Online MBA,” said Englert. “In addition to the misreporting of the number of students who took the GMAT from 2015 to 2018, the average undergraduate GPA was overstated, and there were inaccuracies in the number of offers of admission as well as in the degree of student indebtedness.”

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