Former Dean Teng-Kee Tan was in charge when the allegations occurred
ITS ALL IN HOW YOU COUNT
The audit found that in the Bloch School also inflated the actual number of students in its entrepreneurship program. Instead of providing Princeton Review with the number of students enrolled in an entrepreneurship program, the school counted anyone who was taking a class in entrepreneurship. The upshot: UMKC reported that undergraduate enrollment in entrepreneurship programs increased from 99 to 438 in a single year when the Bloch School changed how it was filling out the Princeton Review form. A dean told the auditors that he knew that figure “isn’t right.”
John Norton, who at one point was managing director of the school’s entrepreneurship program, told PwC auditors that he felt pressure “to do things that were improper in relation to” submitting data to the Princeton Review for its annual ranking of the best business schools for entrepreneurship. The PwC report said Norton provided falsified data to the organization “for fear of job security.”
The investigation by PwC found that the business school told Princeton Reivew that in 2013, 59% of both undergraduate and graduate students launched a business while at school. A year later, the actual number was roughly one-sixth that number: a mere 10%. In 2012, the school reported that there were 55 clubs officially recognized for entrepreneurship students, more than ten times the actual number. Last year, the school conceded there were only five. The school also claimed to Princeton Review that in 2012 and 2013, there were 78 officially sponsored mentorship programs, more than twice as many as there were last year when the school admitted that the number just 33.
A WISH LIST OF CLUBS RAISES REPORTED NUMBER TO 55 FROM FIVE
Norton told PwC auditors that Michael Song, now a professor at the school but then director of Bloch’s Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation (IEI), put together a “wish list” of clubs and told a graduate student to post those clubs on the school’s website. The current director of the entrepreneurship institute, Jeff Hornsby, told the auditors that he had all but five of the clubs removed shortly after he succeeded Song; last year. “He believed 29 clubs never existed at the university in any capacity,” according to the report. “He stated that ‘there is no defending that number.’”
When PwC interviewed current Bloch School Dean David Donnelley for its report, the dean told the auditing firm that he “did not provide authority to the former IEI Director (Song) to submit the PRB responses and that it was ‘pretty clear’ that the former IEI Director was defining things in a way that was ‘not consistent with the way the normal person would.’”
Donnelley told PwC staffers that he was not involved in the submissions to the PRB until sometime in 2012 and that he was not actively participating in collecting information that would be submitted to the PRB. The former IEI Director informed him that he and the former Dean Tan agreed on the number of clubs at the University and initially Tan relied on the former IEI Director’s input.
CURRENT DEAN SAYS HE ‘COULD NOT TRUST’ SONG, THE FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE ENTREPRENEUR CENTER
“He went on to state that he was unsure how the PRB defined a club, but upon closer analysis felt that the former IEI Director was not being upfront with him,” the PwC report noted. “The Bloch School Dean could not claim that the former IEI Director wasn’t trying to purposely frame data submitted to the PRB so that it best reflected on the University. He stated that he ‘could not trust’ [the former IEI Director] and that he questioned the way certain answers were provided to the PRB when the former IEI Director and the former Bloch School Dean were providing the PRB with data.”
The increasing pressure to be ranked by the Princeton Review–whose rankings of entrepreneurship programs have been widely discredited for lacking transparency and credibility–occurred after the Bloch School fell off the Princeton Review list in 2010 after earning a place for the first time for its graduate entrepreneurship program a year earlier.
Several months later, in early 2011, former dean Teng-Kee Tan wrote an email to administrators stressing the need to see UMKC regain a spot on the list. “Henry Bloch gets very upset when our rankings go down,” Tan wrote, referring to the school’s main benefactor, H&R Block co-founder Henry W. Bloch. “We must do everything we can to increase it when we can by all means necessary.”
UMKC’s graduate and undergraduate programs both made the list later that year, but the audit shows that the application that year contained falsehoods suggested by Norton’s boss, Michael Song, who headed the Regnier Institute at the time.
In his statement today, UMKC Chancellor Morton said “the Bloch School will continue a journey that began more than a year ago to ensure that our rankings submissions follow best practices. Over the past twelve months, the Bloch School has implemented significant changes in our ranking applications procedures, including oversight of the process under a new leader of the Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and, as Bloch School Dean Dave Donnelly announced last week, he has also appointed someone to lead a special faculty committee to oversee all ranking applications and processes.”
DON’T MISS: THE SAD TRUTH BEHIND THE PRINCETON REIVEW RANKINGS SCANDAL AT THE BLOCH SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
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