May 16, 2023
Given the new (inexplicable) USNews.com ranking stew...
...Derek Muller (Iowa) predicts what next year's ranking will look like. There is always the possibility that the reputational scores will fluctuate (arbitrarily), but my guess is this won't be far off what the 2024 rankings look like! Note some of the dramatic changes predicted!
May 15, 2023
Why did Yale's academic reputation score plunge from (tied for) 3rd to (tied for) 6th this year?
Was it because Yale led the charge on the boycott of USNews.com? Was it the accumulated effect of various embarrassing events, from judges boycotting Yale over free expression issues to the Amy Chua melodrama? Was it a reflection of a widely perceived decline in the strength of Yale's younger faculty compared to their elders? Was it all of these? What's clear is the drop this year was pretty dramatic by historical standards for USNews.com reputation surveys, and of course this year is way down from a decade or so ago when Yale was usually tied for 1st or 2nd in academic reputation.
May 11, 2023
More on the new USNews.com ranking stew
Prof. Derek Muller (Iowa) breaks it down. Basically, the editors chose to downgrade the importance of "input" metrics (like LSAT and GPA), and dramatically increase the weight for output measures (like bar passage and employment), which now count for more than 50% of the overall score. In a way, this is salutary, since it will incentivize schools to improve those metrics (or fudge more aggressively!). The whole formula still of course makes no sense, and is inexplicable in terms of the weightings. What is clear is that the results are even more detached from traditional criteria of excellence, like faculty quality. The rankings will also now be much more volatile, for reasons Professor Muller explains.
USNews.com has outdone itself: it has made its law school rankings even more absurd than before!
There's not much to say about what is essentially a random ordering of law schools within tier groups. Any student who made a decision on the basis of small (and, in some cases, even large) ordinal differences in this year's travesty really should have a cause of action against USNews.com. (Some of the swings in overall rank are beyond bizarre! UC Davis and Arizona dropped from the top 50? Emory and George Washington dropped out of the top 30? Is this a joke?) I won't belabor the obvious, and will just repost an updated version of something I posted a year ago. If anyone extends it beyond "the top 10," please let me know.
|
US News overall rank |
School |
Academic reputation rank in US News |
Avg. rank across the last four metrics [rank] |
|||
|
1 |
Stanford University |
6 |
10 |
3 |
1 |
5 [5] |
|
1 |
Yale University |
1 |
3 |
1 |
6 |
2.75 [3] |
|
3 |
University of Chicago |
2 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
2 [1] |
|
4 |
University of Pennsylvania |
8 |
14 |
15 |
9 |
11.5 [outside top 10] |
|
5 |
Duke University |
12 |
8 |
9 |
11 |
10 [10] |
|
5 |
Harvard University |
3 |
2 |
3 |
2 |
2 [1] |
|
5 |
New York University |
4 |
5 |
5 |
3 |
4.25 [4] |
|
8 |
Columbia University |
5 |
9 |
9 |
3 |
6.5 [6] |
|
8 |
University of Virginia |
9 |
5 |
5 |
9 |
7.0 [7] |
|
10 |
Northwestern University |
15 |
17 |
9 |
12 |
13.25 [outside top 10] |
|
10 |
University of California, Berkeley |
6 |
7 |
9 |
6 |
7.0 [7] |
|
10 |
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor |
13 |
13 |
5 |
6 |
9.25 [9] |
April 24, 2023
Did USNews.com miscalculate employment rates or did the schools misinterpret the data reported?
Derek Muller argues, plausibly, it was the latter.
April 21, 2023
Will the USNews.com law school rankings for this year ever appear?
Hopefully not! It appears that without the free labor supplied by law schools of reporting data, the thinly staffed USNews.com operation has been having trouble transcribing data from the ABA into its ranking formula. Among the problems: the ABA corrected some of its initial data, but that may have been missed; and USNews.com may not have calculated the employment data properly given its component parts.
April 06, 2023
Law Schools Unfairly Ranked by U.S. News
MOVING TO FRONT (ORIGINALLY POSTED OCT. 3 2011, SLIGHTLY REVISED IN THE INTERIM), SINCE IT IS TIMELY AGAIN
I've occasionally commented in the past about particular schools that clearly had artificially low overall ranks in U.S. News, and readers e-mail me periodically asking about various schools in this regard. Since the overall rank in U.S. News is a meaningless nonsense number, permit me to make one very general comment: it seems to me that all the law schools dumped into what U.S. News calls the unranked lower tiers--indeed, all the law schools ranked ordinally beyond the top 25 or 30 based on irrelevant and trivial differences-- are unfairly ranked and represented. This isn't because all these schools have as good faculties or as successful graduates as schools ranked higher--though many of them, in fact, do--but because the metric which puts them into these lower ranks is a self-reinforcing one, and one that assumes, falsely and perniciously, that the mission of all law schools is the same. Some missions, to be sure, are the same at some generic level: e.g., pretty much all law schools look to train lawyers and produce legal scholarship. U.S. News has no meaningful measure of the latter, so that part of the shared mission isn't even part of the exercise. The only "measures" of the former are the fictional employment statistics that schools self-report and bar exam results. The latter may be only slightly more probative, except that the way U.S. News incorporates them into the ranking penalizes schools in states with relatively easy bar exams. So with respect to the way in which the missions of law schools are the same, U.S. News employs no pertinent measures.
But schools differ quite a bit in how they discharge the two generic missions, namely, producing scholarship and training lawyers. Some schools focus much of their scholasrhip on the needs of the local or state bar. Some schools produce lots of DAs, and not many "big firm" lawyers. Some schools emphasize skills training and state law. Some schools emphasize theory and national and transnational legal issues. Some schools value only interdisciplinary scholarship. And so on. U.S. News conveys no information at all about how well or poorly different schools discharge these functions. But by ordinally ranking some 150 schools based on incompetently done surveys, irrelevant differences and fictional data, and dumping the remainder into a "second tier", U.S. News conveys no actual information, it simply rewards fraud in data reporting and gratuitously insults hard-working legal educators and scholars and their students and graduates.
March 14, 2023
CEO of company that makes its $$$ by peddling consumer misinformation to students...
...is morally indignant that schools won't cooperate with his enterprise. This is some real chutzpah! They don't provide information, they collect data, don't audit it for accuracy, and then throw it into a nonsensical and inexplicable formula to produce an illusion of precision regarding supposed "qualitative" differences. It's precisely because they are not providing information that they probably can't be sued under "consumer fraud" statutes.
March 02, 2023
More on gaming the USNews.com rankings via "median" LSAT and GPA
UPDATED: A reader sent along the site to which my colleague, below, is referring.
A colleague at a proverbial "top ten" law school writes with some interesting observations a propos yesterday's topic (esp. the issue raised in the "Update"):
Because US News ranks schools based on *median* GPA and LSAT, many schools game admissions to optimize their medians for the purpose of rankings.
A school can try to admit 49% of its class with LSAT scores at or above their target median, even if their grades are atrocious. They can admit another 49% of the class with GPAs at or above their target median, even if their LSAT scores are terrible. Then they admit 2% that are above the median in both — offer them scholarships if necessary. Any student who was just below the median for both GPA and LSAT would be rejected, even if they would be more likely to succeed than most of the students admitted.
March 01, 2023
These are *not* the "choosiest" law schools, these are the ones most busy gaming USNews.com rankings
This is, alas, fairly gullible "reporting":
No. 1 for the highest median undergraduate grade point average is the University of Alabama School of Law, which accepted students with a 2022 median undergrad GPA of 3.95. Yale Law’s undergrad GPA was 3.94, putting it in a tie with the University of Virginia School of Law and the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. In fifth place is the Texas A&M University School of Law.
The top five in terms of median LSAT are Yale Law (175), followed by Harvard Law School (174). Tying for third place are the University of Chicago Law School, Columbia Law School and Stanford Law School (173).
Most law schools figured out long ago that in the USNews.com formula, you get more benefit from a high median GPA than a high median LSAT: that's because the scores are normalized, and with the LSAT there's only about 20 places in play (175 to 155, say), while with GPA it's a much wider spread (sixty places or more), so that if you're near the top, you do better in the USNews.com formula. That's why, e.g., places like Alabama, Wash U, and Texas A&M can be in the "top five" for median GPA but nowhere near the top for five median LSAT: they made a choice to sacrifice LSAT in order to inflate GPA. That's a good strategy for rising in USNews.com rankings. It doesn't make them "choosy," it makes them strategic. And, of course, omitted from the picture is what majors these GPAs are in: a 3.95 GPA in chemistry or economics or philosophy is quite a bit different than a 3.95 GPA in communications or education. If it's more of the latter than the former, than once again it's not "choosiness" but strategy.
UPDATE: A colleague at Wash U points out that I am mistaken about Wash U, which has a very high median LSAT as well (although not "top five"). Since the combination of a high median LSAT and a high median GPA tracks past USNews.com rankings (plus location--which helps the coasts, not the midwest), and Wash U's combination is a real outlier in this regard, the question is how are they doing it? There are three (not mutually exclusive) possibilities I can think of: (1) they are paying a fortune to get these students; (2) they are admitting a very small 1L class, and increasing the number of transfer students to make up lost revenue (their credentails do now account in USNews.com land); (3) they are disregarding the demandingness of the curricular program when it comes to GPA.
ADDENDUM: These data suggest #1 is a key factor.
