Rutgers Business School Inflated Regional Ranking by Submitting False MBA Student Employment Data, Class Action Alleges [DISMISSED]

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A proposed class action lawsuit alleges Rutgers Business School has perpetrated a “massive fraud” upon Master of Business Administration (MBA) students by submitting false and misleading employability statistics in order to artificially inflate the institution’s regional ranking. 

The 44-page complaint alleges Rutgers The State University of New Jersey and its business school intentionally reported false MBA graduate data to outlets such as U.S. News & World Report, falsely asserting that unemployed students were gainfully employed in full-time MBA-level jobs with various companies. As the case tells it, Rutgers Business School fraudulently “created an impression that post-graduation employment is virtually guaranteed,” and has even hired unemployed MBA students itself and placed them into “token permanent positions” to pad its hiring and employment statistics.

According to the lawsuit, “[t]he fraud worked,” as Rutgers Business School suddenly found itself ranked as the “No. 1” business school in the Northeast region of the United States in 2018, the first year of the alleged scheme. 

“As a result of Rutgers’ fraudulent and deceptive business practices, its students paid a premium tuition but received an education less than and different from what they expected given the tainted rankings,” the case charges. “Plaintiff and the Class members would not have enrolled and paid this premium but for Rutgers’ deceit.” 

The plaintiff, an Atlantic City, New Jersey resident, contends that for Rutgers Business School and its parent institution, “ensuring [that] each graduate student received a meaningful education is of little import.” Their area of focus, according to the case, concerns rankings, employment rates and other statistics that “keep students flocking to Defendant Rutgers under the guise that it will, or could, land them a highly coveted, highly paid job.” 

Worse, the suit says, students are greatly influenced by and rely upon Rutgers’ rankings and statistics, in both deciding on which institution to attend and whether to take out student loans to pay for it. 

“Staggering debt coupled with long odds of landing a high paying job are a recipe for economic disaster; indeed, many economists predict another recession due to the trillions of dollars in unpaid student-loan debt,” the lawsuit states. “But none of that matters to Defendants, so long as the [sic] Rutgers’ ranks’ higher than its competitors and the perks of working in higher education remain.” 

Compounding the problem of Rutgers Business School’s allegedly false reporting is that there is no place where prospective students can find the school’s “real” employment data, the complaint continues. Per the suit, Rutgers supplies the same “dubious statistics” to numerous news outlets who rank business schools.

The lawsuit looks to cover all persons in the United States enrolled as students in the Master of Business Administration and other master’s degree programs offered by Rutgers Business School between January 1, 2018 and the present. 

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