Class A Lawyer: Students No Longer Care About U.S. News Law School Rankings Amidst Growing Acceptance of Lawyers with Felonies
Overview
For years, U.S. News & World Report was known for its prestige ranking of law schools, which was based on key data provided by schools and pumped into its methodology. However, as schools complained and programs calcified in the rankings, the publication began tweaking the methodology to provide more movement. This made for a more exciting release, but the changes alienated stakeholders, culminating in Yale turning on the venerable ranker, withholding critical information and prompting many law schools to do the same.
Publicly, Yale complained that the publication punishes public interest work
. However, the argument is disingenuous since law schools could promote real public interest work if they would just choose not to run students into six-figure debt. As USNWR and the law schools went to war and the rankings became increasingly janky, a funny thing happened: the prospective students stopped caring.
In fact, every time US News tinkers with its methodology, it loses its target audience a little more. There’s more data out there for prospective law students, and there’s no need to uncritically swallow the USNW
R rank when a student can cobble together a bespoke assessment.
So, if you don’t care much about prestige, you don’t need to rely on U.S. News. And if you do care about prestige, the changes to the USNWR methodology whittle away at its reliability as a measure of prestige.
The Decline & Fall of the US News Rankings study conducted by Kentucky Law professor Brian Frye and Indiana Maurer professor Christopher Ryan Jr. looked at how changes in U.S. News rankings manifested in changes to the following year’s class. They compared the change in a law school’s position in two consecutive years with its change in position in the revealed preference rankings in the immediately consecutive years. The results are surprising. At no point do the values they compared exhibit a strong correlation in either direction. The correlation coefficients this comparison produced are all in the range of weak to very weakly correlated. More surprisingly, they are often inversely (or negatively) correlated, meaning that as US News rankings change in one direction for a school, they move in the opposite direction in terms of the revealed preferences change in rankings in the subsequent year. The authors think the rankings have simply lost their relevance.
This study may be useful for law school administrators and faculty members making decisions about institutional priorities and the allocation of institutional resources. If the US News rankings are decreasingly salient to prospective law students, law schools may wish to deemphasize the effect of the US News rankings on institutional decision making. All this leaves law schools in a quandary. If the rankings aren’t actually influencing future classes, then what’s the point?
In conclusion, the US News ranking of law schools has lost its relevance, and prospective law students have stopped caring about it. The changes to the USNWR methodology have whittled away at its reliability as a measure of prestige. Law schools may wish to deemphasize the effect of the US News rankings on institutional decision making.