Make Law School Rankings Great Again

‘The prestige ranking, while maybe a bit gross, is the one really valuable thing that U.S. News still does,’ according to Professor Brian Frye.

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A version of this article originally appeared on Bloomberg Law, part of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc. (800-372-1033), and is reproduced here with permission. The footnotes contain material that did not appear in the Bloomberg Law version of the piece, which you can think of as bonus content for Original Jurisdiction subscribers.

“Once upon a time, the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings were critically important to law schools,” according to law professors Brian Frye of the University of Kentucky and Christopher “CJ” Ryan of Indiana University. “In fact, [the rankings] were existential. Law schools literally lived or died based on their U.S. News rankings.”

But now, as explained in their new paper, The Decline & Fall of the US News Rankings, the U.S. News scoring of schools is dramatically less important to prospective law students—maybe even to the point of becoming irrelevant.

Frye and Ryan analyzed a decade of U.S. News rankings and what they call “revealed preferences rankings,” which rank schools based on enrollment decisions of students with the strongest credentials (GPA and LSAT scores). They sought to determine whether a rise (or fall) in a law school’s U.S. News rank resulted in that law school matriculating a stronger (or weaker) class in the immediately following year. If prospective law students were paying attention to the rankings, one would expect to see strong correlation between rank changes and class quality.

But the authors instead found no real correlation between the two measures. This led them to conclude that U.S. News “is ranking law schools, but prospective law students don’t care about its rankings, and are making decisions about which law school to attend based on other factors.”

Their claim that the rankings are “entirely irrelevant” might be somewhat overstated. In an 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 didn’t disagree—and in fact acknowledge this possibility in their paper,¹ which describes prestige rankings as “sticky” or 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 percent 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. Again, 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).²

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. This is why Yale and Harvard Law felt comfortable declaring, in November 2022, that they would no longer provide U.S. News with certain data the publication needed to prepare what Yale dean Heather Gerken called its “profoundly flawed” ranking.³

After dozens of other schools followed suit, U.S. News announced major methodological changes to how it ranks schools—which could be viewed as an admission that its rankings were in danger of becoming obsolete.

I asked Frye and Ryan: what can U.S. News do to return its rankings to relevance? Or is that even possible, in an age where the idea of buying a hard-copy magazine would be laughable to many pre-law students?

“You have to think about who the rankings are for,” Ryan said. “They are for prospective and current law students—and I think U.S. News has lost touch with this fact. If you could survey pre-law and law students and ask them what matters to them, the results of that survey could be the genesis of a new ranking.”

The challenge, however—and the inherent problem with a “one size fits all” ranking system like that of U.S. News—is different students have different priorities when selecting schools.

“If you’re looking to go into Biglaw, for example, then you should prioritize prestige,” Frye said. “But if you’re interested in public service, you might want to focus more on cost—and pick a lower-ranked school in exchange for lower tuition.”

“Picking a law school involves a combination of many factors, including prestige, cost, and educational opportunity,” Ryan explained. “You need to choose the nexus that’s right for you.”

So here’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 Biglaw and clerkships. The tool would then provide students with a customized ranking of schools based on their individual criteria.⁴

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. It asked, for example, about the size of the law school I wanted to attend—a factor that, in my experience, most students don’t care about at all—and it didn’t ask a single question about what I might want to do professionally after law school.⁵

In years past, producing an interactive ranking tool of any sophistication would have been a daunting task. But in this age of artificial intelligence, turning MyLaw Rankings into something that’s actually useful to prospective law students wouldn’t be difficult.

Of course, customized rankings produced by an online, interactive tool might not generate the same buzz (or revenue) as a traditional, seemingly authoritative, numerical ranking of almost 200 law schools. If U.S. News insists on putting out a numerical ranking, it should simply rank America’s most prestigious law schools (comparable to the Vault 100, a ranking of the most prestigious law firms).⁶

After all, the prestige data—obtained by U.S. News through an expensive, labor-intensive process of sending out, collecting, and analyzing reputational surveys—is the only component of the rankings that’s proprietary to the publication. After the 2023 methodology overhaul, everything else in the rankings is based on publicly available information that’s not unique to U.S. News, such as employment and bar-passage data.

“The prestige ranking, while maybe a bit gross, is the one really valuable thing that U.S. News still does,” Frye told me. “As a prospective law student, you need to know about a school’s prestige because that prestige will have long-lasting career effects.”⁷

1. As stated in the paper, “it may well be the case that the disjunction between U.S. News rankings changes and revealed preferences rankings changes are observed in periods longer than immediately subsequent years.”

2. Frye and Ryan stress in their paper, and again emphasized in our conversation, that while many people think granularly and anecdotally about law school choice, they wanted to focus on the macro-level question of what students are doing, as opposed to why. It’s a fair distinction, although sometimes the factors will converge. For example, if a student chooses to go to a top-25 school on a full ride as opposed to a T14 school for “sticker price,” it’s not that the schools’ U.S. News ranks were irrelevant; they were just outweighed by six figures in (nondischargeable) student loans. And the schools calculate “scholarships,” i.e., tuition discounts, with an acute awareness of where they stand in the U.S. News hierarchy.

Although it wasn’t the focus of their paper, Frye and Ryan are critical of what Ryan described to me as “the incentive structure U.S. News has created in which schools are incentivized to enroll, through discounting, the students that will raise their metrics—and rely on the students who don’t raise their metrics to fund the opportunity given to students at the higher end of the class.” Or as Frye put it, “Schools have a sticker price, but it’s only for the weakest students they admit. The strongest students pay nothing. So you have a law-school funding system where the weakest students pay the tuition of the strongest students.”

And there’s no easy solution to this problem—at least under current antitrust law, which would bar law schools from getting together and agreeing on a uniform approach to tuition discounting (or to abolishing tuition discounts entirely).

3. I asked the authors if they had a view on whether the boycott, which featured multiple deans of top law schools assailing the rankings, might have contributed to students caring less about the rankings. They said it was a possibility, but their data didn’t allow them to draw a conclusion one way or the other on this.

4. Another noteworthy factor that might be worth including in customized rankings: ideological or religious affiliation. As Frye and Ryan wrote in their paper, “Our revealed-preferences ranking of law schools showed that at least some law students prefer law schools with a strong ideological brand. Law schools affiliated with religious organizations or ideological orientations tended to outperform their U.S. News rankings in our revealed-preferences ranking. That is, some prospective law students have a strong preference for a sympathetic ideological environment that can outweigh their preference for prestige.” (Schools that came to mind for me on this score: BYU, Notre Dame, and Scalia Law.)

5. While many high school students decide to apply only to large national universities or only to small liberal arts colleges, which offer very different experiences, I have never met a pre-law or law student who decided to apply only to big law schools or only to small law schools. It’s far more common to find a pre-law student trying to decide between Harvard and Chicago (a large school and a small school) rather than Harvard and Georgetown (two large schools).

6. Of course, from the perspective of U.S. News, a prestige ranking will be less profitable. As Frye explained in our interview, “U.S. News has a strong incentive to make their rankings more dynamic, to give students a reason to buy them each year. But one problem is that prestige rankings are super-sticky.” In other words, pure prestige rankings wouldn’t change that much from year to year, reducing the incentive for students to pay for them each cycle.

One suggestion that Frye made is that U.S. News should make its reputational surveys electronic, instead of sending them out by mail. This would make the process more efficient and less expensive—and if U.S. News can reduce the cost of producing the rankings, it won’t have to generate as much revenue from selling them. And if the argument of U.S. News is that it’s worried about survey integrity, I’d point out that numerous universities, including both my undergraduate and law-school alma maters, conduct elections for their leadership bodies using online or email-based processes (with various safeguards, of course).

7. Whether prestige should have these effects, as a normative matter, is hotly debated. For the case against prestige, see, e.g., Bill Henderson and Rachel Zahorsky, The Pedigree Problem: Are Law School Ties Choking the Profession? But as even Henderson and Zahorsky acknowledge, it’s definitely true as a descriptive matter that prestige has an outsized impact on legal careers.

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