Statement on U.S. News college rankings

UC Berkeley issued the following statement on Friday, July 26:

UC Berkeley recently discovered an issue with the reporting of its alumni giving rate to U.S. News for the purposes of institutional ranking. As soon as we were aware of the matter, we reported it to U.S. News and provided corrected data. From our research, it appears that beginning in 2014 U.S. News required universities to report only cash donations (rather than cash donations plus multi-year pledges) as submitted to the nationally recognized Voluntary Support of Education (VSE) Survey. The then-new change in methodology was apparently overlooked, as we continued using the previously existing U.S. News reporting guidelines. We regret the oversight and look forward to working with U.S. News regarding any additional steps that need to be taken.