Thursday, June 6, 2024
U.S. News Law School Rankings Aren’t Useful Anymore To Applicants
Bloomberg Law Op-Ed: U.S. News Law School Rankings Aren’t Useful Anymore to Applicants, by David Lat:
"Once upon a time, the News & World Report law school rankings were critically important to law schools,” University of Kentucky’s Brian Frye and Indiana University’s Christopher “CJ” Ryan write in a new study. “Law schools literally lived or died” based on their US News rankings,” which Frye and Ryan say were “existential.”
But now, these law professors argue, U.S. News’ scoring of schools is dramatically less important to prospective law students—maybe even to the point of becoming irrelevant.
But now, these law professors argue, U.S. News’ scoring of schools is dramatically less important to prospective law students—maybe even to the point of becoming irrelevant. ...
Their claim that the rankings are “entirely irrelevant” might be overstated. In my interview with Frye and Ryan earlier this week, I suggested that perhaps U.S. News rankings remain relevant to students, but rank changes take longer than a year to manifest in the credentials of incoming classes.
The authors acknowledge this possibility both in their paper and our conversation, in which they referred to prestige rankings as “sticky”—i.e., slow to change. For example, many of us think reflexively of the top-14 or “T14” schools, which have been fairly consistent since the start of the rankings in 1987 (even if, in a given year, a traditional T14 school might drop out of that elite group).
I also wondered whether law schools responded to changes in their rank by simply adjusting tuition discounts. Almost 80% of law students receive some kind of tuition discount, and these carefully calculated discounts often reflect a school’s rank, with lower-ranked schools offering larger discounts to compete with their higher-ranked peers.
Frye and Ryan didn’t disagree that cost plays an important role in students’ decisions about where to enroll, but added that this factor is difficult to track, since schools are opaque about their pricing practices. ...
Despite such quibbles, my anecdotal sense is that Frye and Ryan are basically right: the U.S. News rankings aren’t as powerful as they once were. ...
[H]ere’s my suggestion to U.S. News for how to reclaim the relevance of its rankings: Get rid of its universal ranking of the “best” law schools and replace it with a robust interactive tool that would let prospective law students state what matters most to them in a law school.
Factors could include overall prestige, bar passage, debt upon graduation, geographical location, and placement success in different sectors, including Big Law and clerkships. The tool would then provide students with a customized ranking of schools based on their individual criteria.
The basis for this tool could be the “MyLaw Rankings” feature that’s already on the U.S. News website—but greatly improved. I took the tool for a spin, and to be blunt, it’s a joke.
David Lat, How To Make Law School Rankings Great Again
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2024/06/us-news-law-school-rankings-arent-useful-anymore-to-applicants.html