A diocese in Ohio is under siege — receiving numerous threatening calls as well as heated online criticism — and a veteran teacher is out of a job because of publicly revealing a lesbian relationship in violation of the Catholic school’s morality code.

But the firing has raised a fervent debate over tolerance both online and in the Columbus, Ohio, community where the incident took place.

Physical education teacher Carla Hale, 57, was fired in March after her name appeared in her mother's obituary, which also noted Hale's longtime lesbian partner.

Hale was summoned to a meeting with school administrators after she returned from her mother’s funeral.

At the meeting, she received a copy of her mother’s obituary that she and her brother had written. In addition, administrators gave Hale an anonymous letter from a parent calling the presence of a lesbian teacher at the school disgrace.

Hale was subsequently dismissed from Bishop Watterson Catholic High School after 19 years of service, with the school citing a morality provision in the contract between teachers and the diocese.

In the days since, the dismissal has received widespread attention on social media. A petition calling for her reinstatement on the Change.org website had received more than 55,000 signatures as of Wednesday evening.

The school district even asked for a police investigation after it received threatening calls, the Columbus Post Dispatch reported. The school’s Facebook page was removed as were employee email addresses from the school’s website.

Hale also filed a grievance to seek reinstatement but that was denied this week, she said. In a news briefing on Wednesday she said she would file an appeal with the central Ohio board of Catholic educators, NBC station WCMH reported. She also said she would file a discrimination complaint with the Columbus community relations department.

“I've committed my 19-year professional career to one thing,” she said. “ensuring that our next generation achieves its full potential. I love my job, I don't want money, I don't want fame, I simply want to return to Bishop Watterson.”

In a statement released last week, the diocese said personnel matters are confidential, but said school employees when hired agree to a church moral code. 

 “Personnel who choose to publicly espouse relationships or principles that are contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church cannot, ultimately, remain in the employ of the Church,” the statement said.

ALBANY, New York - A New York state high school English teacher who asked students to imagine they were Nazis and give reasons why Jews were evil could be reprimanded or dismissed, a school district superintendent said on Friday.

City School District of Albany Superintendent Marguerite Vanden Wyngaard apologized at a news conference and pledged officials would personally express regret to Albany High School students who were given the assignment and their families.

"This assignment for some of our students at Albany High School was completely unacceptable. It displayed a level of insensitivity that we will not tolerate in our school community," Vanden Wyngaard said.

"I'm deeply apologetic to all of our students, to all of our families and the entire community," she said, appearing with representatives of the Anti-Defamation League and the United Jewish Federation of Northeastern New York at the federation office in Albany.

Vanden Wyngaard declined to name the teacher but said the teacher was removed from class and faced disciplinary action.

"It can go anywhere from a letter of counsel, to a letter of reprimand, all the way through to termination. There is a broad spectrum," Vanden Wyngaard said.

A letter would go out to all families in the school district, she said.

Vanden Wyngaard first issued an apology through the Times Union on Thursday night after the newspaper reported the assignment on its website. She responded with "absolute horror" when a parent presented her with the assignment on Thursday.

The teacher gave three classes of 10th-grade students a persuasive writing assignment as part of a class project to demonstrate how Nazis thought and showed their loyalty to the Third Reich before World War Two.

"You need to pretend that I am a member of the government in Nazi Germany, and you are being challenged to consider that you are loyal to the Nazis by writing an essay convincing me that Jews are evil and the source of our problems," the assignment instructions said.

One-third of the students refused to complete the task, which was assigned following a class review of Nazi propaganda, said Ron Lesko, a spokesman for the district.

Students were asked for an introduction, a conclusion and a list of arguments and were advised, "Please remember your life (here in Nazi Germany in the 30s) depends on it!"

TeachAIDS

Students at the Shirimatunda Primary School in Tanzania use a Swahili version of an online course about AIDS created by a company called TeachAIDS.

Asia Jackson likes to learn at the computer because she can work at her own pace, which is usually faster than her classmates’. Al-Tariq Linton says, “It’s one on one. If I have a question, instead of competing for the teacher’s attention, I can go back and read it on my own.” Wanda Williams says her favorite part of the online course she’s taking is the narrator of the videos it includes. “Rufus made it funny,” she says. “It was fun.”

As interest in online education rages, these 17- and 18-year-old students at Newark, N.J.’s West Side High are guinea pigs in a global experiment to answer a key but surprisingly elusive question: whether and when it actually works.

Evidence is mixed about how well online courses teach core subjects such as science, math or reading, with a recent large-scale Columbia study showing disadvantages to online learning for community college students. (The study was done at Columbia’s Teachers College, which is also home to The Hechinger Report, producer of this story.) But new research shows that, in certain topics—as for these students in Newark — computer-based instruction is not only just as effective as the old-fashioned, in-person kind. It’s more effective.

These topics include sex, drugs and health — subjects in which privacy, personal comfort and customized information are especially important, and embarrassment or cultural taboos can get in the way of classroom teaching.

Simple video- and animation-based interactive courses in these disciplines turn out to be good ways of teaching subjects you may have giggled through in health class. And they’re increasingly being used all over the world with success now confirmed by peer-reviewed, controlled research. The results are important as online education continues to expand faster than its impact and effectiveness can be fully measured.

“We’re seeing significant and large effects on attitudes, knowledge, and also behaviors” from online courses in nontraditional subjects, says Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who coauthored one study of the subject.

Sex in Colombia
Gonzalez-Navarro, working with researchers at Yale and the University of Ottawa, found that Colombian students in an 11-week online course in safer sex created by Profamilia, part of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, knew more about safer sex practices than students who took the conventional, state-mandated health class. And their knowledge was put into practice. For every 68 students who took the online course instead of the traditional course, researchers estimated by reviewing students’ medical records and comparing them to those of peers who didn’t take the course, up to two sexually transmitted infections were prevented. The students were also 10 percentage points more likely than their counterparts to redeem vouchers for free condoms offered six months later.

It’s not just that students often feel embarrassed to talk about sex in conventional classrooms, the researchers found. Teachers don’t like teaching about it, making them less effective — assuming they even broach the topic.

“A lot of teachers are just not comfortable teaching these subjects,” says Gonzalez-Navarro. “The central education ministry might say you have to give this sex-ed course, but it’s not happening.”

Another series of independent research studies has confirmed the effectiveness of online education about alcohol awareness in the United States. In the largest, the researchers found a short-term reduction in harmful behaviors related to drinking among college freshmen at 15 colleges who took an online course called AlcoholEdu. Similar studies at the University of West Florida and Villanova and Roger Williams found similar results.

AlcoholEdu is produced by EverFi, a venture-funded startup backed by a group of high-profile Silicon Valley investors, including Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Google's Eric Schmidt and Twitter's Evan Williams. In addition to alcohol education, EverFi offers animation, video and game-based courses in sexual violence awareness, financial literacy and digital citizenship, reaching 69 of the nation's largest 100 school districts, and 33 percent of the nation's incoming freshmen.

Five and a half million students have already completed EverFi courses, according to CEO Tom Davidson, each of which includes eight to 10 hours of instruction. Some are used as part of for-credit courses while others are woven into freshman orientation.

“You can’t get your dorm key at NYU until you do our sexual violence prevention course,” says Davidson.

The NIH-funded study of the company’s online alcohol-awareness course found that it was most effective when more freshmen took the class at the same time, suggesting that peer pressure plays a role — though the results had dissipated by the spring semester, meaning more follow-up was needed.

Tackling cultural taboos
Other ongoing research supports the use of online courses for sex education. Students in China, India and South Africa who completed an online sex-education program called TeachAIDS were 91 percent more knowledgeable about HIV than before they took the course, compared to an improvement of 73 percent for students who were taught the conventional, state-mandated curriculum.

TeachAIDS became a nonprofit in 2009. It was founded by Piya Sorcar and her husband, Shuman Ghosemajumder, who had spent six years in high-level jobs at Google, along with several others. In her Stanford dissertation, Sorcar had examined the role of cultural taboos in dealing with issues of sexual and reproductive health in India.

“Sex education has been banned in some states in India,” she says. “There have been incidents of teachers burning curricular material in the streets.” In Andhra Pradesh, a state with a population of 85 million, HIV-positive students have been expelled.

Sorcar set out to create a curriculum for HIV/AIDS that would be both culturally acceptable and scientifically rigorous, and that would attack social stigmas by showing what AIDS is, how the virus is transmitted and how to protect against it.

The TeachAIDS course combines a 20- to 25-minute animated video with interactive quizzes. So far, she said, it has been produced in 15 languages and used in 74 countries. For added appeal and to make it more relatable for young people, each country and region features likenesses of and voiceovers by local celebrities. In Botswana, the program stars a hip-hop artist named Scar, who hosts the TV show Idols East Africa; in India, it features Shabana Azmi, an award-winning Hindi actress.

“Our culture doesn’t talk about love or what comes out of it,” says Tristha Ramamurthy, who uses the TeachAIDS curriculum with seventh- through 12th-graders in a network of private schools she oversees in Bangalore, India. “We have arranged marriages — we’re very caste-driven. Sex itself is very uncomfortable to talk about, and in school it’s not taught.”

What makes the TeachAIDS material acceptable to her students, Ramamurthy says, is the use of culturally specific euphemisms. For example, a honeymoon suite and two lovebirds kissing suggests intercourse; images of a woman holding a baby stand in for childbirth.

Digital downsides
There are downsides to using online courses to cover health topics. Both the software and the hardware cost money, and funding is often a problem in schools worldwide. TeachAIDS’ video-based course has been projected on a wall in villages in Nepal and shown on outdoor screens in Rwanda in between World Cup soccer matches, which extends the program’s reach but sacrifices the advantages of interactivity and privacy. Even at West Side High in Newark, Everfi had to provide a version of the course loaded on a jump drive, because the school had problems with its Internet connection.

EverFi licenses its material to colleges for a fee, but public schools like West Side High can get it free with the backing of corporate or local business underwriters, which have included the National Basketball Association and Capital One bank.  The sponsorships, which can include prizes and giveaways, are seen by some critics as an unwelcome intrusion of business into the classroom.

Nor do any of these courses constitute a hands-off, digital-only solution. The learning effects are strongest in most cases when the programs are used as part of for-credit courses, with teachers in the room to guide and motivate students, and when students take the courses together. And companies like EverFi need to provide ongoing support and professional development for teachers.

But the need for easy-to-use, compelling resources to cover topics that teenagers are not all that eager to discuss with adults is likely to grow, opening more markets to organizations such as EverFi and TeachAIDS.

EverFi is already expanding its offerings. And TeachAIDS is being adopted as part of the official high-school curriculum in Karnataka, an Indian state with a population of 60 million, and the company plans to grow to 50 countries with 90 percent of the world’s HIV cases by 2018.

“We see such a need for these ‘everything else’ areas outside the core curriculum,” Davidson says of the apparent effectiveness of using online education in this way, and continued research into it. “New mandates are coming down at the state level, and schools are having trouble getting their arms around them. This is a model that we're following with the development of all our courses:  develop, test, redevelop.”

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A grand jury indicted a former superintendent and more than 30 other educators Friday in one of the nation's largest cheating scandals that rocked Atlanta's public schools.

The indictment named the former Superintendent Beverly Hall as well as several high-level administrators, principals and teachers. Hall faces charges including racketeering, false statements and theft. She retired just days before the 2011 probe was released, and has previously denied the allegations.

A state investigation in 2011 found cheating by nearly 180 educators in 44 Atlanta schools. Educators gave answers to students or changed answers on tests after they were turned in, investigators said. Teachers who tried to report it faced retaliation, creating a culture of "fear and intimidation" in the district.

The cheating came to light after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that some scores were statistically improbable.

The criminal investigation lasted 21 months and the allegations dated back to 2005.

Most of the 178 educators named in a special investigators' report resigned, retired, did not have their contracts renewed or appealed their dismissals and lost. Twenty-one educators have been reinstated and three await hearings to appeal their dismissals, said Atlanta Public Schools spokesman Stephen Alford.

The tests were the key measure the state used to determine whether it met the federal No Child Left Behind law. Schools with good test scores get extra federal dollars to spend in the classroom or on teacher bonuses.

Georgia last year was granted a waiver from the federal law, which allowed schools to count a host of measures in addition to standardized tests.

State schools Superintendent John Barge said last year he believes the state's new accountability system will remove the pressure to cheat on standardized tests because it won't be the sole way the state determines student growth. The pressure was part of what some educators in Atlanta Public Schools blamed for their cheating.

Alford, the schools spokesman, said the district was moving on from the scandal.

As March Madness gets under way, a less widely noticed kind of intercollegiate competition is forcing students to churn endlessly through the higher-education system, wasting their own — and taxpayers’ — money.

In this game, the players score but it doesn’t count.

That’s what happens when students earn academic credit at one university or college, then try to transfer to another, which won’t accept it — even within the same states and systems. The result is that students end up spending far more time and money trying to finish their degrees, assuming that they even stick around to bother.

It’s a spectacle that may not have gotten as much attention in the past as NCAA basketball, but fed-up policymakers are starting to push for changes in the rules.

“One of the most common complaints a legislator gets from a constituent about higher education is, ‘My credits don’t transfer,’” says Davis Jenkins, senior researcher at Teachers College, Columbia University, who has studied the issue.

“This is so common, but it’s heart-rending,” Jenkins says. “And it also pisses me off as a taxpayer.”

That’s because the problem is as costly as it is unnoticed.

A third of students now transfer sometime during their academic careers, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center says, and a quarter of those change schools more than once.

When these students’ credits don’t transfer with them, they churn, seemingly endlessly, in college, piling up debt and wasting time repeating the same courses. It now takes full-time students, on average, 3.8 years to earn a two-year associate’s degree and 4.7 years to get a four-year bachelor’s degree, according to the advocacy organization Complete College America — further increasing the already high cost to families, and, at public universities, states. Only 61 percent of full-time students who set out to earn a four-year bachelor’s degree manage to do it within even eight years, Complete College America reports.

Part of the problem is that public universities are largely funded based on their enrollment, not on whether students actually graduate. So while an institution has a financial incentive to take transfer students to fill seats left vacant when other students drop out, it may not have a financial incentive to help them successfully finish college and move on.

“I don’t want to suggest that all that people are doing here is this cold calculation of costs and benefits, but there haven’t been explicit incentives to get the students out of there,” says Michael Lovenheim, a professor of policy analysis at Cornell who also has studied the transfer process.

Dragging out their degrees
Experts say the difficulty of transferring credits is a major reason students stay in college for so long. On average, students now accumulate — and pay for — a wasteful 80 credits toward associate’s degrees that should require only 60, and 136.5 for bachelor’s degrees that need only 120, Complete College America says.

Take Karen Hernandez. She started at St. John’s University in New York and transferred after a year and a half to Nassau Community College, where, after another year and a half, she received an associate’s degree. Then she moved again, to Columbia University, where she hopes to earn a bachelor’s degree in art history and human rights.

The first time Hernandez switched schools, only 27 of the 36 credits she had earned and paid for transferred. The second time, 55 credits transferred, out of 63. That means Hernandez lost 17 credits — and that, after three years in college, she is facing at least three years more to get a degree that is supposed to take a total of four years.

“It has definitely prolonged my educational career,” says Hernandez, 23.

Columbia wouldn’t accept credits for a class Hernandez had taken and passed in meteorology, for example, she says. “My dean said, ‘Well, we don’t know what that covers.’ I would think that would be so simple: It’s, like, about the weather.”

But university faculty at some institutions often question the quality of courses taught by university faculty at others.

“Snobbery,” Jenkins calls it.

 “Everybody feels that the way they do it is the right way,” says Janet L. Marling, director of the National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students at the University of North Georgia. “To admit that somebody else does it equally well can chip away at their foothold.”

Adds Dennis Jones, president of the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems: “There’s just the natural faculty hubris that says, ‘If I didn’t teach it, it can’t be any good.’”

Complications in the process
Even where transferring credits is possible, it can be extraordinarily complicated and misunderstood.

For example, while some credits from one school may be accepted by another, they may not count toward a major, something students often don’t find out until after they’ve transferred.

“Students are told, yes, your credits will transfer, and, yes, technically they do,” says Alison Kadlec, director of public engagement programs at Public Agenda, who has held focus-group sessions with students about the problem. “But if they don’t transfer toward your major, that’s a waste of time and money.”

That common experience stymied one frustrated student Jenkins met. “He probably wasted a year’s worth of courses,” Jenkins says. “It’s just a waste. These are motivated students, taking all these courses at their expense and ours, and they’re not getting anywhere. And that’s just wrong.”

A study in Texas found that students sometimes didn’t even learn if their credits were accepted until as long as four months after they transferred to a new school.

“It’s one thing if they’re swirling around because they don’t know what they’re doing,” Kadlec says. “But it’s another thing if these institutions can’t get their acts together to give them the information.”

Improving the advising process costs money, however, and forcing students to go through it — even if it’s for their own good — can be risky. When Klamath Community College in Oregon made orientation and advising mandatory, its enrollment fell 20 percent, costing it about $800,000 in state funding, the college’s president says.

Lawmakers step in to referee
Tired of waiting for universities and colleges to solve the problem, several state legislatures are now stepping in to impose reforms from the outside.

Florida has a statewide transfer policy guaranteeing that students who complete associate’s degrees at community colleges in that state can transfer all their credits to its four-year public universities. Legislators in Arkansas, Arizona, Kentucky and Tennessee have ordered similar changes.

But problems remain. It took Florida 10 years to bring its universities and colleges into line on transfer credits, for example. An analysis by a technical college in North Carolina found that only one of its English courses was accepted for core credit by all 16 of that state’s public universities. And some legislative efforts to make universities fix the transfer process have slammed up against the culture of competition.

Almost three years after California legislators demanded that anyone who earns an associate’s degrees at a community college be guaranteed transfer into the California State University system, for instance, students in two-thirds of all majors still don’t qualify, college and university officials there concede. The Campaign for College Opportunity, which pushed for the legislation, blames the California State campuses for being reluctant to accept community-college credit.

“We focus on losing time and money, but there’s also an impact on [students’] sense of hope and possibility,” Kadlec says. “Students are blaming themselves. And I’m listening to these stories and thinking, ‘Why aren’t you furious?’ And I think it’s because they’re thinking, ‘Maybe I should have known that these colleges are competitors.’”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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Crushed by a $1 billion education budget deficit, Chicago is closing 54 public schools, school district officials announced Thursday.

The official list of closings isn't due to be published until March 31, but parents were learning whether their schools were on the list in letters that were already being sent home with students.

The school district's chief executive, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, said the district is 20 percent under capacity — almost 100,000 students —  leaving many schools half-empty. The district will save $500 million to $800 million for each school that is closed, she has said in community forums and news interviews leading up to Thursday's announcement.

"We've got at least two decades of decay, of children not being able to receive the kind of education that they should," Byrd-Bennett told NBC 5 of Chicago.

Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, which has been protesting the coming cuts for weeks, said the closings would mean "utter chaos."

"This city cannot destroy that many schools," Lewis said in a statement. "These actions will put our students' safety and academics at risk and will further destabilize our neighborhoods."

Lewis blamed Mayor Rahm Emanuel for the schools' disarray, calling him "the murder mayor."

"He is murdering public services (and) murdering our ability to maintain public sector jobs, and now he has set his sights on our public schools," she said.

"But we have news for him: We don't intend to die. This is not Detroit."

The union has scheduled a citywide save-the-schools rally for Wednesday.

Emanuel said in a statement that Chicago couldn't afford to put off difficult decisions any longer.

"By consolidating these schools, CPS can focus on safely getting every child into a better performing school. Like school systems in New York and Philadelphia where schools are being closed, Chicago must make tough choices," he said. "Our children's futures are bright and consolidating schools is the best way to make sure all of our city's students get the resources they need to learn and succeed."

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The principal of a Massachusetts school was under siege Wednesday for a report that he had canceled the school's annual honors ceremony because it was unfair to pupils who weren't getting any awards.

David Fabrizio, principal of Ipswich Middle School in Ipswich, told NBC News that — contrary to a local news report that quickly spread nationally — he had, in fact, expanded the ceremony. 

High-achieving pupils will still get their awards at a special ceremony, just like always, he said. All he did, he said, was move Honors Night to Honors Day, so all of the pupils could take part.

It turns out that only children receiving awards could attend Honors Night, where they got to hear messages from inspirational speakers. By opening the ceremony up to all pupils, "the kids who need the inspirational speakers" can be there, Fabrizio said.

Fabrizio said the school had been inundated with complaints from parents and even people outside the region who'd read the inaccurate report, which was picked up by websites across the country and at least one national TV network. He said he been the target of particularly harsh personal criticism.

In a statement he sent later to NBC News, Fabrizio wrote:

Ipswich Middle School is dedicated to high achievement in every facet of our students' lives. 

We did not cancel honors recognition as erroneously reported on FOX News in Boston. We changed our Honors Night from an exclusive ceremony at night to an all inclusive ceremony during the day with the entire school present. During this ceremony we will honor those who have excelled academically, athletically, in the Arts and in the Related Arts.

Any reports to the contrary are incorrect.

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Once a year, a line of briefcase-wielding accountants in business suits files into an office at Texas Christian University.

They’re not there to check on income or expenditures. They’re auditing the admissions statistics.

Texas Christian’s dean of admissions says it is the nation’s only university to voluntarily have its admissions data — the number of applicants and their SAT scores, class rank, grade-point averages, and other measures — audited for accuracy. It has done so for the last dozen years -- and not just for show.

As consumers and the federal government push for greater transparency about such things as cost, average debt, and job-placement rates, major universities have been caught misrepresenting those and other numbers to improve the way they look to prospective students.

“We on the inside have a pretty good idea of who is reporting accurately and who is not. And quite a few schools appear to be cooking the books,” said Texas Christian Dean of Admission Raymond Brown.

That dirty little secret has started to slip out as competition intensifies to attract top students and scale the all-important college rankings. In an admissions battleground on which universities grapple for any advantage, rising by just one number in the U.S. News & World Report rankings leads to a nearly 1 percent increase in applications, a 2011 study at the Harvard Business School found.

Falsified data

In the past year alone, six top colleges and universities have admitted falsifying information sent to the U.S. Department of Education, their own accrediting agencies, and U.S. News, whose college rankings remain the nation’s most prominent. Another was caught the year before. For many of the schools, the misrepresentations had gone on for years.

A senior administrator at Claremont McKenna College resigned after admitting that he falsified admissions test scores submitted to U.S. News and the U.S. Department of Education. For years Bucknell inflated the mean SAT scores of entering students by an average of 16 points, the university’s president has admitted. Tulane’s business school gave U.S. News false data about its number of applicants and inflated their average scores on admissions tests by 35 points.

Emory University misreported student data to U.S. News and other organizations that rank universities and colleges, school officials said, providing the much-higher SAT averages of students who applied and were admitted, rather than those who enrolled. It also inflated entering students’ class ranks. Two former admissions deans and other administrators were aware of the practice, according to the university.

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George Washington University overstated the proportion of its entering freshmen who were in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. And the law school at the University of Illinois was caught providing inaccurate admissions information to the American Bar Association, or ABA, which accredits law schools; the same thing happened in 2011 at the Villanova University School of Law.

Illinois’s law school was publicly censured and fined $250,000 by the ABA, and Villanova’s was placed on probation for two years.  Meanwhile, 15 other law schools have faced lawsuits for fraud, unfair competition, and false advertising for allegedly misreporting graduates’ job-placement rates by including part-time and temporary work and employment unrelated to law.

“These educational institutions have lost the benefit of the doubt, and I think that’s sad,” says Kyle McEntee, co-founder and director of Law School Transparency, which pushes law schools to provide accurate admissions and job-placement statistics.

Legal groups intervene

So wide has the credibility gap become for law schools that the ABA and the Law School Admission Council responded this year by stepping in to check and certify law schools’ reported entrance-test scores and undergraduate grade-point averages.

But students and their families applying to other kinds of colleges and universities will have to rely on internal whistle-blowers, who exposed all the other instances of falsifications over the last year. Except at Texas Christian, and, now law schools, admissions statistics are not independently audited or certified. And besides bad publicity, the only penalty has been that schools discovered by U.S. News to have misreported data are “unranked” until the accuracy of their information can be confirmed in the following year.

Now the federal government has unveiled a new college-selection tool for families called the College Scorecard, lauded by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address last month and launched the next day, which streamlines and expands information about cost, graduation rates, average debt of graduates, and loan-default rates in a centralized, searchable government website. In spite of its government cachet, that information, too, is provided directly by universities and colleges themselves, and is not certified or audited, and there’s no penalty for misreporting it, said Daren Briscoe, spokesman for the Education Department.

“It is a voluntary reporting system, and like most voluntary reporting systems, it’s not penalty-driven,” said Briscoe, who adds that because the College Scorecard doesn’t rank competing schools, they shouldn’t have any incentive to fudge the numbers.

“I suppose if you’re super cynical you can think that a school might be nefarious enough to pump up their data,” he said. “We’re not taking a position that this is a perfect system. There are always opportunities for us to look at how things are working or not.”

Even if universities and colleges do correctly report the average loan debt of their students, there’s already a loophole in the College Scorecard they can take advantage of, university administrators say privately: It doesn’t require them to disclose the average debt of parents who also borrow to help their children pay tuition.

A loss of 'reverence'

The bottom line is that students and their parents should resist the inclination to blindly believe information provided by even well-regarded universities and colleges, said Jane Shaw, president of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.
“We do tend to revere professors and we revere the institutions where they teach, and I think that reverence is probably changing,” Shaw said.

A spinoff of the private education company Hobsons cashes in on this growing mistrust by providing an alternative to college and university admissions statistics. Called Naviance, it collects information from high schools about the qualifications of students admitted to particular colleges, allowing other applicants to measure themselves against those standards rather than relying on the data that admissions offices provide.

While Brown concedes that the number of universities and colleges caught misreporting data remains a tiny fraction of the total, he says the problem is considerably more widespread than that.

“This is illustrative of a broader issue, which is the pressure that is on these admissions offices,” he said. “People talk about how college football coaches are under the gun constantly. They’re under no more pressure than an admissions officer.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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