Ex-Temple dean convicted of faking business school rankings to lure students, feds say
A former dean of the business school at Temple University in Philadelphia has been convicted on charges of defrauding applicants, students and donors into believing the business program was ranked higher than it was, prosecutors announced in a Nov. 29 news release.
Moshe Porat, 74, was convicted on one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of committing wire fraud that prosecutors said happened from 2014-2018 while he was dean of the Richard J. Fox School of Business and Management. He was charged in April 2021, the release said.
Porat served as dean of the business school from 1996 to 2018, according to the release.
Prosecutors said the Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, resident schemed with business school employees to submit incorrect information about the school’s online and part-time programs to U.S. News & World Report to increase the school’s ranking in listings of top business school programs, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania said in the release.
Porat’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment from McClatchy News on Nov. 30.
His conspirators, Isaac Gottlieb, a professor at the Fox School of Business, and Marjorie O’Neill, a Fox employee, were tasked with providing false information to the ranking publication about the number of students who took the Graduate Management Admission Test, the amount of work experience of the students and the percentage of part-time students at the university, the release said.
According to court documents, there was a direct correlation between the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings, and how many students enrolled in the program. U.S. News & World Report is one of the more “prominent” ranking publications, the documents said.
Court documents revealed that O’Neill met with U.S. News & World Report in summer 2013 because Fox employees believed the school had been ranked too low by the publication.
While the documents said O’Neill “did not succeed in convincing U.S. News to alter” its evaluation, the publication told her that it does not perform audits of data submitted — instead, it relies on schools to “accurately report their data.”
After hearing this, Porat created a smaller committee — him and O’Neill — to report data to U.S. News & World Report. According to documents, the fraud scheme began in 2014.
Prosecutors said the fraud scheme worked for the business school.
“And indeed, the scheme was successful,” the release said. “Relying on the false information it had received from Fox, U.S. News ranked Fox’s (online) MBA program Number One in the country four years in a row (2015-2018).”
This helped Fox’s enrollment grow each year, prosecutors said. After rankings showed Fox at the top of business schools, the enrollment “grew dramatically in a few short years, which led to millions of dollars a year in increased tuition revenues,” the release said.
“The goals of the conspiracy included attracting more students to apply to Fox, matriculate at Fox and pay tuition to Fox, and enticing Fox alumni and other benefactors to donate money to Fox,” court documents said.
The fraud was discovered in 2018 by U.S. News & World Report, court documents said. After the publication didn’t rank the online MBA program, Fox’s enrollment fell from 336 to 144 the next year.
Additionally, Temple has a policy in which each school in the college could keep most of its revenues. This led Fox to be able to keep 87% of the generated profits.
Porat’s yearly salary as dean was about $600,000 for the 2017-2018 school year, court documents show.
After Temple discovered the business school wasn’t ranked and incorrect numbers and hired investigators, Porat and his conspirators continued to lie to the school and officials, court documents show.
Even after Porat no longer served as dean after 2018, he still made about $316,000 a year as a tenured professor at Fox, even though he had not taught a class or published research since 2018, court documents said.
“Today, a jury reaffirmed that wire fraud is a federal crime even when perpetrated within the system of higher education in the United States,” U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams said in the release. “Moshe Porat misrepresented information about Fox’s application and acceptance process, and therefore about the student-body itself, in order to defraud the rankings system, potential students, and donors. This case was certainly unusual, but at its foundation it is just a case of fraud and underlying greed.”
This story was originally published November 30, 2021 at 4:04 PM with the headline "Ex-Temple dean convicted of faking business school rankings to lure students, feds say."
