A former dean at the business school of Temple University in Philadelphia was found guilty of fraud charges in a federal court yesterday after government prosecutors said he had used phony school statistics to inflate the positions of school programs in a popular national magazine ranking.
Moshe Porat, 74, the dean of the Richard J. Fox School of Business and Management from 1996 until 2018, was convicted by a jury at the conclusion of a trial in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. He was indicted in April on one count of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud after the U.S. Attorney said he deceived school donors, students and applicants with fraudulent stats about two school MBA programs.
Porat, of Bala Cynwyd, Pa., conspired with a professor, Isaac Gottlieb, and a business school employee, Marjorie O’Neill, to overstate the success of the online and part-time master of business administration programs, with the intention of goosing their rankings in a popular U.S. News & World Report survey, according to the DOJ. (Gottlieb and O’Neill were charged separately.)
As part of their effort, the three overstated the number of students in the online and part-time MBA programs who had taken the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT. Porat and his colleagues also exaggerated the average work experience of Fox’s part-time MBA students and the percentage of Fox students enrolled part time. “All because it was believed that better numbers for these metrics would result in better rankings for the programs,” the DOJ said in its statement. Previous settlement agreements said that the university also inflated the undergraduate GPAs of students admitted to Fox school programs, as well as their levels of debt.
The deceptions won Fox pride of place in the U.S. News ranking: the No. 1 spot in the country for online MBA programs four years in a row (from 2015 to 2018). The part-time MBA program rose in the rankings, too, and it reached the No. 7 slot in 2017.
“Porat boasted about these rankings in marketing materials directed at potential Fox students and donors,” said the Department of Justice. “Enrollment in Fox’s [online and part-time MBA] programs grew dramatically in a few short years, which led to millions of dollars a year in increased tuition revenues.”
Porat faces 25 years in prison and a fine of $500,000.
In 2020, Temple was ordered to pay $700,000 in a settlement with the Department of Education. In the agreement, the department said it “believes that, to increase enrollment, grow revenue, and harm competitors, Temple’s Fox School knowingly, intentionally, and substantially misrepresented the nature of certain of its educational program[s] by advertising the false rankings by U.S. News & World Report thousands of times via online portals, social media, fully wrapped buses and newsstands, three of seven highway billboard signs, and advertisements at airport terminals, on trains, at train stations, in magazines, in newspapers, and on television and radio. The department believes this advertising wrongly increased Temple’s enrollment and revenue, deceived consumers, and unfairly harmed competitors.”
The attorney general of Pennsylvania also settled with Temple, ordering the university to fund $250,000 in scholarships over the next decade, awarding $5,000 to five students per year. Temple also settled a class action lawsuit by Fox students for $5.4 million in December 2018.