Isn't there a secondary audience consisting of those people who judge the prestige? Collecting information in one place about things like school LSAT averages and the like no doubt has an effect on those prestige judgements and (hopefully) makes them less sticky.
The failure mode with just publishing prestige rankings plus a database that prospective students (and perhaps factulty hires) can consult is that it will tend to cement the current presitige rankings in place as every year the people evaluating prestige only get their own judgement repeated back to them as, since they aren't considering where to go to school, they won't consult the rest of the unranked data.
Now it's probably true that average LSAT score may not be the best way to move that needle but at least it's one way. IMO graduating student satisfaction surveys would be even better.
EDIT: I appear to have been unclear. I'm defending the current practice of publishing other information alongside prestige not attacking the system as it is now.
Fair point. But I would note that this already happens to some degree; I know some professors who fill out their U.S. News surveys with the prior-year rankings right next to them (to guide their responses for schools they don’t know).
And even if prestige is sticky, it does move (albeit slowly). There are shifts in the Vault ranking each year (although yes, they tend to be small).
Right, I think I wasn't very clear. I'm defending the current practice of publishing that other information alongside prestige because even if it's not relevant to students deciding where to go I think it helps the people who rank prestige update their rankings based on more information than just what prestige was the year before.
It's exactly because I think people do fill it out with last year's issue open that I think it's helpful. This way next year's prestige is a function of both last year's prestige and some other factors. Thus, if one school is able to massively improve their other metrics it will result in better prestige the year after.
I think it could be even better if they looked at other information but it was meant as a defense against what I took to be the implied suggestion they just publish the prestige info in the magazine and leave the rest to some kind of DB or tool students could consult.
But that's really a complaint about prestige failing to track some conception of actual excellence, right? It's not really about how closely the prestige rankings are tracking actual prestige.
I think people are just generally, and probably healthily, uncomfortable with the concept of a ranking of "places that are the best at being thought to be the best, without regard to any extrinsic measure of value." The paradox is that USNWR's one useful function might be providing a ranking of exactly that kind.
I didn't mean it as a complaint but as a defense of how they do things now where they provide extra ranking information as well in the magazine.
I agree that conveying prestive is the only useful function it serves to people choosing what law school to go to but the other info doesn't hurt them. I'm suggesting publishing the other ranking info is useful to the people who actually rank the prestige since they, unlike students, don't have the incentive to go consult other sources of info and putting it in a useful summary helps them update their conception of prestige.
Even if it's not the ideal extra information to present it seems like it's better than nothing.
I’m not sure why that’s a failure mode. It makes sense that prestige would change incrementally; why should it be a totally fresh consideration each year? If anything, stability and incremental change would tend to make a ranking more credible, I would think.
Some good stuff. Let me add one item. The best dynamic ranking tool I've seen is by AccessLex called "XploreJD": https://xplorejd.org/ It is imperfect in many respects (I think there could be more, or different, or more granular categories), but the things I really do like about it are that it allows for a lot of fairly refined preferences that students can choose, and weight, as they would like; and, it offers a "basket" of schools to consider rather than a "rankings," which reduces some of the strain that fairly fine differences make in ordinal rankings. Go check it out!
I didn't check out XploreJD because it doesn't appear to have a "tool around as a bystander" mode and I feel weirdly bad about pretending to be an applicant. But it sounds very cool.
I will say, though, that one limitation to the "customizable tool" approach is that it works best for applicants who have some basis for prioritizing some things over others by understanding which factors correlate with which outcomes. It's least helpful for First Gen and others with limited exposure to the legal field, who may benefit from a single ranking purporting to give each factor the weight it ordinarily should have for the average law student.
(BTW, Derek, really love your blog -- longtime reader.)
I think this whole piece is spot on. I just have a couple thoughts I'd like to add.
1. Coming to a legal career relatively late in life and without knowing many lawyers socially, something I was actually grateful for was how transparent -- one might say, shameless -- the profession was about its internal hierarchies, with regard to law schools, firms, clerkships, etc. It was way easier than I ever imagined it'd be to figure out as a complete outsider what led to what and where one needed to focus to obtain a particular career. Prestige is hierarchical, but *telling people* about prestige is in an important sense egalitarian. If nobody published a list of the "top" 14ish law schools, the T14 would still exist. But I would've had to schmooze and ingratiate to learn that, rather than just looking it up.
2. My sense is that prestige is really baked into the basic economics of the profession, it's not going anywhere, and we should try not to moralize or point fingers about that fact. Leverage depends on a client's willingness to value an associate's work equivalently to a partner's. At a crude level, that means trusting that a person who hasn't yet done stuff is an acceptable substitute for a person who has. Firms profit to the extent they can shift billables from people clients trust because of past performance (senior partners) to people (newbie associates) clients trust because of ... something else. That can be an individual marker of promise (clerked for Judge X, edited law review Y), or it can be the protective aura of a firm that regularly hires associates with those credentials. But prestige in one form or another is always going to emerge to fill that function.
Excellent points. In their paper, Frye and Ryan talk about how back when it started in 1987, U.S. News did perform a useful function in making longstanding hierarchies more transparent.
It is a major misconception that if you want to do public interest law you should go to a cheap school. Public interest lawyer jobs are very competitive. These jobs go to graduates of the most prestigious law schools. If that is what you want to do go to the highest ranking school you get into. Remember that the biggest cost of law school is three years of your life.
I think it depends partly on your risk tolerance. I know one well-known public-interest lawyer who told me she went to her (not highly ranked) law school because she knew she wanted to do public-interest work and wanted a guarantee that she wouldn’t leave law school with any debt. And that’s exactly what she did.
One thing that is a bit different compared to her (and my) day is that a lot of top law schools have generous loan-forgiveness programs to support public-interest careers, school-funded fellowships for public-interest work (this is big at Yale), etc. It’s schools in the middle where this might be more of an issue.
Ha! Back in my day, some people actually did go to law school because “you can do anything with a law degree.” But nowadays it’s too expensive for that.
(I was referring to Biglaw, small-firm practice, government, public interest, etc.)
LSD (Law School Data) has changed a lot since I practically lived on it four years back, but it's got a heap of admissions data from previous years and tools to compare your data/hypothetical numbers with other applicants and admitted students. It's also got an active community where current applicants can chat with one another for moral support and report their offers/rejections/waitlists real time. One of the handiest features lets you upload all your application login info then check the status on all of your applications with one click. I'm actually still in contact with some of the people I met on LSD and sweated through the hideous 2020-21 admissions cycle with. Admittedly, the folks who get geeky/obsessive about admissions skew towards those competing for T30 offers. That may not always be great for the psychology of someone with a lower GPA/LSAT, but the opportunity to connect with people going through similar trauma (and who are likely to go on to have neat/impactful/high-profile legal careers) has value.
Law School Transparency is more along the lines of the tool I think you have in mind. I haven't taken a look in a few years, but if I recall correctly they're pulling data from things like the school ABA 509 reports and making it searchable by a ton of parameters...including ones that many applicants care deeply about, but USNWR seems to overlook or bury behind their pay wall.
Re: Tuition cost as a factor - I'd say more than half of BYU's students name cost/scholarships as the #1 reason they enrolled. Friends at Alabama report it's similar there. So, I think you've got a bunch of folks who maybe aren't Big Law focused, but who've got great GPAs/LSATs/backgrounds. For such folks, BYU, 'Bama, and even AZ check a lot of highly desirable boxes: well ranked, cheap tuition, lots of scholarship offers, low cost of living...while still having plenty of "respected academia perks" (e.g., international connections), and doing well enough in other areas (e.g., clerkship placement) that students who come in without a firm career path aren't going to be limited the way someone at dinky/local/less respected school likely will be. I've got a friend who is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who was accepted to BYU, but graduated from HLS in 2021 and clerked in the 11th Cir. then for CJ Roberts. He fully acknowledges that securing his clerkships was easier because he was a HLS grad, but he pointed out that BYU has been placing a lot of students in federal clerkships. It might take a BYU student two prior clerkships (instead of one) to be competitive for a SCOTUS clerkship, but being at BYU doesn't put a SCOTUS clerkship out of reach... and we're graduating with little to no debt! (I also suspect that having little/no debt but needing to do two clerkships at lower pay is a long term net win for young grads.)
Re: Class Size - I'm not sure that's as minor a factor as many folks seem to think. I agree that it's not a factor as heavily weighted as it would be for an undergrad. They're choosing between schools with 1-5,000 students and places like Ohio State with 65,000+. That said, once I had full-tuition offers and was choosing between BYU and a T14, the difference between a 1L class of 130 and 700+ became a significant consideration. In a profession where personal connections count for a lot, it's a whole lot easier to get to know professors and classmates in a smaller law program... and many law school applicants are savvy enough to know it.
Just a few thoughts from someone in the trenches who's strangely fascinated with law school admissions! Thanks for another solid piece.
Isn't there a secondary audience consisting of those people who judge the prestige? Collecting information in one place about things like school LSAT averages and the like no doubt has an effect on those prestige judgements and (hopefully) makes them less sticky.
The failure mode with just publishing prestige rankings plus a database that prospective students (and perhaps factulty hires) can consult is that it will tend to cement the current presitige rankings in place as every year the people evaluating prestige only get their own judgement repeated back to them as, since they aren't considering where to go to school, they won't consult the rest of the unranked data.
Now it's probably true that average LSAT score may not be the best way to move that needle but at least it's one way. IMO graduating student satisfaction surveys would be even better.
EDIT: I appear to have been unclear. I'm defending the current practice of publishing other information alongside prestige not attacking the system as it is now.
Fair point. But I would note that this already happens to some degree; I know some professors who fill out their U.S. News surveys with the prior-year rankings right next to them (to guide their responses for schools they don’t know).
And even if prestige is sticky, it does move (albeit slowly). There are shifts in the Vault ranking each year (although yes, they tend to be small).
Right, I think I wasn't very clear. I'm defending the current practice of publishing that other information alongside prestige because even if it's not relevant to students deciding where to go I think it helps the people who rank prestige update their rankings based on more information than just what prestige was the year before.
It's exactly because I think people do fill it out with last year's issue open that I think it's helpful. This way next year's prestige is a function of both last year's prestige and some other factors. Thus, if one school is able to massively improve their other metrics it will result in better prestige the year after.
I think it could be even better if they looked at other information but it was meant as a defense against what I took to be the implied suggestion they just publish the prestige info in the magazine and leave the rest to some kind of DB or tool students could consult.
But that's really a complaint about prestige failing to track some conception of actual excellence, right? It's not really about how closely the prestige rankings are tracking actual prestige.
I think people are just generally, and probably healthily, uncomfortable with the concept of a ranking of "places that are the best at being thought to be the best, without regard to any extrinsic measure of value." The paradox is that USNWR's one useful function might be providing a ranking of exactly that kind.
I didn't mean it as a complaint but as a defense of how they do things now where they provide extra ranking information as well in the magazine.
I agree that conveying prestive is the only useful function it serves to people choosing what law school to go to but the other info doesn't hurt them. I'm suggesting publishing the other ranking info is useful to the people who actually rank the prestige since they, unlike students, don't have the incentive to go consult other sources of info and putting it in a useful summary helps them update their conception of prestige.
Even if it's not the ideal extra information to present it seems like it's better than nothing.
I’m not sure why that’s a failure mode. It makes sense that prestige would change incrementally; why should it be a totally fresh consideration each year? If anything, stability and incremental change would tend to make a ranking more credible, I would think.
No that's reasonable, but you do want it to change somewhat so I'm defending publishing other rankings alongside the prestige ones.
I fear that if US News only published prestige info then the rankers wouldn't bother to look up anything else and prestige might not change at all.
Some good stuff. Let me add one item. The best dynamic ranking tool I've seen is by AccessLex called "XploreJD": https://xplorejd.org/ It is imperfect in many respects (I think there could be more, or different, or more granular categories), but the things I really do like about it are that it allows for a lot of fairly refined preferences that students can choose, and weight, as they would like; and, it offers a "basket" of schools to consider rather than a "rankings," which reduces some of the strain that fairly fine differences make in ordinal rankings. Go check it out!
I didn't check out XploreJD because it doesn't appear to have a "tool around as a bystander" mode and I feel weirdly bad about pretending to be an applicant. But it sounds very cool.
I will say, though, that one limitation to the "customizable tool" approach is that it works best for applicants who have some basis for prioritizing some things over others by understanding which factors correlate with which outcomes. It's least helpful for First Gen and others with limited exposure to the legal field, who may benefit from a single ranking purporting to give each factor the weight it ordinarily should have for the average law student.
(BTW, Derek, really love your blog -- longtime reader.)
Oh interesting—thanks!
I think this whole piece is spot on. I just have a couple thoughts I'd like to add.
1. Coming to a legal career relatively late in life and without knowing many lawyers socially, something I was actually grateful for was how transparent -- one might say, shameless -- the profession was about its internal hierarchies, with regard to law schools, firms, clerkships, etc. It was way easier than I ever imagined it'd be to figure out as a complete outsider what led to what and where one needed to focus to obtain a particular career. Prestige is hierarchical, but *telling people* about prestige is in an important sense egalitarian. If nobody published a list of the "top" 14ish law schools, the T14 would still exist. But I would've had to schmooze and ingratiate to learn that, rather than just looking it up.
2. My sense is that prestige is really baked into the basic economics of the profession, it's not going anywhere, and we should try not to moralize or point fingers about that fact. Leverage depends on a client's willingness to value an associate's work equivalently to a partner's. At a crude level, that means trusting that a person who hasn't yet done stuff is an acceptable substitute for a person who has. Firms profit to the extent they can shift billables from people clients trust because of past performance (senior partners) to people (newbie associates) clients trust because of ... something else. That can be an individual marker of promise (clerked for Judge X, edited law review Y), or it can be the protective aura of a firm that regularly hires associates with those credentials. But prestige in one form or another is always going to emerge to fill that function.
Excellent points. In their paper, Frye and Ryan talk about how back when it started in 1987, U.S. News did perform a useful function in making longstanding hierarchies more transparent.
It is a major misconception that if you want to do public interest law you should go to a cheap school. Public interest lawyer jobs are very competitive. These jobs go to graduates of the most prestigious law schools. If that is what you want to do go to the highest ranking school you get into. Remember that the biggest cost of law school is three years of your life.
I think it depends partly on your risk tolerance. I know one well-known public-interest lawyer who told me she went to her (not highly ranked) law school because she knew she wanted to do public-interest work and wanted a guarantee that she wouldn’t leave law school with any debt. And that’s exactly what she did.
One thing that is a bit different compared to her (and my) day is that a lot of top law schools have generous loan-forgiveness programs to support public-interest careers, school-funded fellowships for public-interest work (this is big at Yale), etc. It’s schools in the middle where this might be more of an issue.
“it didn’t ask a single question about what I might want to do professionally after law school”
Well, duh, you want to be a lawyer! (Sorry, bad joke).
Ha! Back in my day, some people actually did go to law school because “you can do anything with a law degree.” But nowadays it’s too expensive for that.
(I was referring to Biglaw, small-firm practice, government, public interest, etc.)
Posting on behalf of a reader:
Great piece, but I saw no mention of LSD.Law or lawschooltransparency.com!
LSD (Law School Data) has changed a lot since I practically lived on it four years back, but it's got a heap of admissions data from previous years and tools to compare your data/hypothetical numbers with other applicants and admitted students. It's also got an active community where current applicants can chat with one another for moral support and report their offers/rejections/waitlists real time. One of the handiest features lets you upload all your application login info then check the status on all of your applications with one click. I'm actually still in contact with some of the people I met on LSD and sweated through the hideous 2020-21 admissions cycle with. Admittedly, the folks who get geeky/obsessive about admissions skew towards those competing for T30 offers. That may not always be great for the psychology of someone with a lower GPA/LSAT, but the opportunity to connect with people going through similar trauma (and who are likely to go on to have neat/impactful/high-profile legal careers) has value.
Law School Transparency is more along the lines of the tool I think you have in mind. I haven't taken a look in a few years, but if I recall correctly they're pulling data from things like the school ABA 509 reports and making it searchable by a ton of parameters...including ones that many applicants care deeply about, but USNWR seems to overlook or bury behind their pay wall.
Re: Tuition cost as a factor - I'd say more than half of BYU's students name cost/scholarships as the #1 reason they enrolled. Friends at Alabama report it's similar there. So, I think you've got a bunch of folks who maybe aren't Big Law focused, but who've got great GPAs/LSATs/backgrounds. For such folks, BYU, 'Bama, and even AZ check a lot of highly desirable boxes: well ranked, cheap tuition, lots of scholarship offers, low cost of living...while still having plenty of "respected academia perks" (e.g., international connections), and doing well enough in other areas (e.g., clerkship placement) that students who come in without a firm career path aren't going to be limited the way someone at dinky/local/less respected school likely will be. I've got a friend who is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who was accepted to BYU, but graduated from HLS in 2021 and clerked in the 11th Cir. then for CJ Roberts. He fully acknowledges that securing his clerkships was easier because he was a HLS grad, but he pointed out that BYU has been placing a lot of students in federal clerkships. It might take a BYU student two prior clerkships (instead of one) to be competitive for a SCOTUS clerkship, but being at BYU doesn't put a SCOTUS clerkship out of reach... and we're graduating with little to no debt! (I also suspect that having little/no debt but needing to do two clerkships at lower pay is a long term net win for young grads.)
Re: Class Size - I'm not sure that's as minor a factor as many folks seem to think. I agree that it's not a factor as heavily weighted as it would be for an undergrad. They're choosing between schools with 1-5,000 students and places like Ohio State with 65,000+. That said, once I had full-tuition offers and was choosing between BYU and a T14, the difference between a 1L class of 130 and 700+ became a significant consideration. In a profession where personal connections count for a lot, it's a whole lot easier to get to know professors and classmates in a smaller law program... and many law school applicants are savvy enough to know it.
Just a few thoughts from someone in the trenches who's strangely fascinated with law school admissions! Thanks for another solid piece.