The US News has publicly admitted that the data reported from University of Southern California is incorrect and thus, USC is currently ranked too high as the result of the incorrect data. However, the US News states that the company will NOT restate the current published ranking since the US News is claiming that it should not be held responsible for the incorrect data. As an educational institution, USC should be ultimately held responsible for reporting accurate data.
Although the US News only discovered the data was wrong in USC's school of engineering, the US News has raised the level of inspections of the reporting data received from each school. It would be interesting to see in the news if USC's business school has used a similar method that its engineering school had used to bump its ranking up. The US News will keep us posted for future investigation.
The following is the original article from the US News website.
http://www.usnews.com/blogs/college-ran ... kings.html