Wednesday, March 12, 2014
John Yoo on the U.S. News Rankings: Peer Reputation Is the Only Thing That Matters
Following up on yesterday's post, 2015 U.S. News Peer Reputation Rankings (v. Overall Rankings): John Yoo (UC-Berkeley), Do Law School Rankings Matter?:
The US News and World Report rankings of graduate schools are out today. One part of me feels like Steve Martin in The Jerk, running out of his house proudly yelling that the phone books are out and his name is finally in it. (I also laughed hard at the advice that Martin's father gave him upon leaving home but that is another story).
Another part of me realizes that the rankings are to be taken seriously — because everyone else takes them seriously: law students choosing where to attend, law firm partners making hiring decisions, law school administrators, faculty, and especially alumni.
The problem with US News is that it factors in lots of odd things in calculating its rankings. For example, in the past they've weighed things like how big the library is, even though most law students only use the library as a study hall because most materials are online now. It has also used money as a proxy for greatness, though, as we have seen from K-12, money spent per pupil and educational performance do not correlate. The rankings also look at bar passage rates, employment outcomes (on which schools have "cheated" by hiring their own students for a year), average LSAT and GPAs, etc.
For all those law students who will spend the next few weeks considering where to go, one of the biggest factors will probably be academic reputation. After all, those obscure considerations above don't matter — and aren't even generally known — to most people on the bench or in a practice. If you were to choose a law school based on anything other than academic reputation (which is a function of the quality of the faculty and the success of the alumni) you are making a big mistake. ... [T]his and this alone should guide the prospective student in deciding where to go and steer the judge or partner on where to hire.
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/03/john-yoo.html
Comments
Why would peer opinions matter more than those of the bar or the bench? There is no justification for peer priority.
Posted by: Steve Sheppard | Mar 13, 2014 9:22:46 PM
For prospective students who hope to be Supreme Court clerks this might be good advice. For everyone else, it's just silly. Peer reputation is a poor measure of the quality of instruction and is often influenced by other factors (such as ideology, see, e.g., George Mason). Judges and law firms don't hire based on peer reputation -- there's actually a separate reputation score that measures lawyers' and judges' views, and it often deviates from the peer score. Finally, if you look at U.S. News over time, one sees that peer reputation scores tend to converge with the overall score over time, which shows that peer assessments are heavily influenced by the U.S. News rank -- hardly an indication of a reliable measurement. The U.S. News rankings have their problems, but Yoo's suggested approach is worse.
Posted by: Jonathan H. Adler | Mar 13, 2014 6:29:20 AM
It's kind of silly to claim that employment outcomes don't matter.
Posted by: Y | Mar 12, 2014 11:00:37 PM
We specifically remember John Yoo's other "analysis." See United States v. Altstötter.
Posted by: Harrison Bergeron | Mar 12, 2014 8:33:30 PM
The idea of a single national ranking is fundamentally misguided. Schools have varying missions. If Howard or Northeastern or St. Mary's or Arkansas or Louisville seek to be like Yale, in admissions, curriculum, instruction, career outreach, or many other functions of a law school, they will fail to pursue their missions. And who could properly judge one of their missions superior to the others?
Posted by: Steve Sheppard | Mar 13, 2014 9:26:44 PM