in Newswire Published on April 14, 2022

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

Last Updated on October 2, 2023

Budet v. Rutgers Business School et al.

Filed: April 12, 2022 ◆§ 1:22-cv-02134

A proposed class action lawsuit alleges Rutgers Business School has perpetrated a “massive fraud” upon MBA students by submitting false and misleading employability statistics.

Defendant(s)

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey Rutgers Business School

Law(s)

New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act

State(s)

New Jersey

October 2, 2023 – Rutgers Business School MBA Employment Data Class Action Dismissed

The proposed class action detailed on this page was dismissed without prejudice by a federal judge on August 30, 2023.

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In a 16-page opinion issued that day, United States District Judge Georgette Castner granted Rutgers’ August 2022 motion to dismiss the plaintiff’s amended complaint, which was filed in July of that year.

According to the document, Judge Castner found that the plaintiff failed to plausibly allege that he suffered a “concrete and particularized injury.” Because the man claimed that Rutgers Business School (RBS) falsified employment statistics only with respect to the full-time MBA program, the judge agreed with the defendants that “none of the alleged misconduct could have affected [the plaintiff] in a personal and individual way,” as he is only enrolled in Rutgers’s part-time program.

The judge pointed out that the plaintiff made no allegations suggesting that the defendants misrepresented part-time MBA employment data, and he did not claim to have relied on full-time MBA data when deciding to enroll in Rutgers’s part-time program.

“Without describing a measurable diminution in the value of his degree—demonstrated by, for example, a measurable drop in [the plaintiff’s] employability because of RBS’s fraudulent reporting or a quantifiable shortfall in the quality of education that [he] received—[the plaintiff] alleges an injury that is conjectural or hypothetical,” Judge Castner wrote.

Per the judge’s ruling, the court formally closed the case on August 30 of this year.

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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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