Thanks for the very thorough reporting on this. A few things to add to the mix:
1) Law schools love to complain about the one-size-fits-all nature of USN. But the alternative many promote is "every law school is special in its own way", which isn't very helpful to applicants. USN exists because law schools have fought tooth and nail any effort to provide meaningful data to enable applicants to make informed choices.
2) as a result, over time, USN has evolved toward a mix of auditable data submitted to 3rd parties (like the ABA) which law schools cannot lie about - as they did routinely lie about the interview data used in early versions - and the reputation surveys, which are unique content to USN.
3) The reputation surveys are silly, no question. They ask people (specific positions at law schools, lawyers and judges nominated by law schools) to award every school a rating from 1 to 5. Nobody has an informed opinion about that many schools. And in any honest ranking, one would expect the top tier to all get 5.0 scores or close to them. That Yale, Harvard, etc. don't is probably because the voters at Harvard who didn't go to Yale are dinging Yale (and vice versa). They do tell us a little - but not much. Probably best ignored - but applicants can ignore those if they want focus on the other numbers.
4) job numbers are really helpful. Yale's complaint is valid although it doesn't strike me as particularly consequential. It could be readily addressed since USN isn't making up these job categories in a. vacuum - if Yale thinks well funded public interest fellowships should count more than helping mail out brochures in the admissions office (the type of job schools trying to goose their ranking often created), Yale is influential enough to get a new category created. And that might incentivize more schools to create more of those sort of positions! That it chose to take its ball and go home is, to me, a sign it doesn't care as much about change as it says and cares more about getting itself out of the USN box.
5) USN has many, many, many flaws. I've written articles about many of them. Schools lie and cheat to go up in the ranking (and your comment about Columbia is really too easy on them - Columbia didn't just withdraw from the USN university ranking, it was outed by one of its faculty for misrepresenting things in the survey.) BUT - and this is a huge "but" -- it is one of the few places that an applicant can see basic comparative data on law schools like the band of UGPA and LSAT scores the school has or some normalized bar passage data. Could USN do better? Yes! It would be awesome to see bar passage data by LSAT band, for example. Then schools that say they add value could be evaluated on whether they do. Or MBE scores by entering LSAT - another great way to see if there's been value add in terms of bar passage. You know who doesn't seem to want such data out there? Law schools! Or how about some more fine-grained data on what kinds of jobs people end up in from various parts of the class? Very useful information - but law schools don't seem to want to put that out there. At an AALS panel long ago, a faculty member denounced USN for ranking schools "46 and 47", forcefully saying there was no meaningful difference between 46 and 47. Hiram Chodosh, then dean at Utah and chair of the panel, asked him "Tell me, does your school rank students 46 and 47?" The faculty member paused, thought, and then said "I concede the hypocrisy, but I am still outraged."
I could go on and on, but I won't - I think a key point is that USN does impose some outside accountability on law schools and they generally just hate that. Just leaving US News won't fix the problems that Dean Gerken identifies. What would fix them would be if Yale put its prestige and effort behind creating an alternative basis for applicants to really understand outcomes relevant to them from the education at different schools. My prediction: it won't.
Thanks for these very detailed insights! But let me run something by you.
The T3, T6, and T14 barely change. They swap places amongst themselves, but it's not really significant.
Farther down the rankings, though, there are big moves over time. I mention George Mason and Pepperdine, but there are plenty of others.
So would it be such a bad thing if the T14 defect—they're the T14, everyone knows they are fine schools whose graduates have strong job prospects, applicants can see their ABA disclosures on their websites, etc.—and left the other schools to duke it out?
Again, I don't think applicants were getting much informational value out of minor year-to-year movement within the T6 or T14 (as opposed to, say, a fourth-tier school becoming top 30, a la George Mason—that's significant).
Yes, you are correct - I think USN for the T14 (and definitely the T6) is more a matter of one-upmanship by the various schools - presumably someone who gets into more than one of those schools is likely to make the choice based on the quite different educational environments they provide, the weather, lifestyle preferences, family and romantic constraints, and so on. So I don't think it will matter much for applicant information. Except.... Yale's claim is that it has fabulous fellowships and these are disincentivized by USN. So, Yale can take its ball and go home or it could push for a change to USN to include a better accounting of those fellowship -- which would pressure other T14 schools to try to do them more too. Win for the students!
I am sure Bob Morse - who is a very nice, reasonable guy and quite willing to engage with people not shouting at him - would be glad to work out a way that verifiable information could be provided that would distinguish among public interest fellowships and make work ones. Bob's interest is in improving the rankings (well, and some churn to sell more copies each year). He's very open to ideas.
One more point - I've (with others) tried to convince the FT, the WSJ, Forbes, and others to develop law school rankings (places that do business school rankings). All expressed mild interest, did some looking, and concluded that there wasn't enough verifiable information out there to create a ranking of law schools that wasn't just USN with different weights on the various components. If there were multiple rankings (like business schools), the rankings would be better for students and for law schools. But there won't be more rankings because law schools won't provide the verifiable information that enables them to be constructed. Tying this back to your question - there probably is a difference between, say, Stanford and Harvard in placing students in jobs in LA. If there was transparent placement information that was pretty detailed, an applicant who wanted to live in LA after law school might well benefit from knowing that. In the absence of information. my guess would be advantage Stanford. But that might be wrong. And I don't have a guess for whether Stanford or Harvard would be a better choice for someone wanting to work in Miami. Data would really help there.
I updated the post—Berkeley just joined—and I'm predicting that a good chunk of the so-called "T14" will go along. I am less sure about schools beyond that, since as I discuss, the utility of the rankings increases as you go farther down.
I'm a bit mystified by this comment from Dean Gerken:
"I raised this point with Dean Gerken, who said that she made the change with precisely these applicants in mind—applicants who might not have lawyer relatives or who might be first-generation professionals. She said that although YLS will no longer provide its data to U.S. News—a private, for-profit magazine—the school will continue to provide important consumer data to applicants and prospective students."
This is either self-deluded or astonishingly cynical. *Of course* Dean Gerken and her counterparts would enjoy a world in which applicants received all "important consumer data" through ex parte communications from the schools themselves. It's obvious why a seller of services about which reliable information is difficult to obtain might relish a situation like that. And it's obvious why the seller might, contemplating its advantages vis-a-vis first-time market participants, devise a strategy "with precisely [those buyers] in mind." But it's not clear how the buyer benefits from that scenario at all.
One possibility is that the ABA beefs up its required disclosures. The law school transparency movement of a decade or so ago already led to a lot of improvements in those, and I could imagine more to fill the U.S. News vacuum.
Thanks for the very thorough reporting on this. A few things to add to the mix:
1) Law schools love to complain about the one-size-fits-all nature of USN. But the alternative many promote is "every law school is special in its own way", which isn't very helpful to applicants. USN exists because law schools have fought tooth and nail any effort to provide meaningful data to enable applicants to make informed choices.
2) as a result, over time, USN has evolved toward a mix of auditable data submitted to 3rd parties (like the ABA) which law schools cannot lie about - as they did routinely lie about the interview data used in early versions - and the reputation surveys, which are unique content to USN.
3) The reputation surveys are silly, no question. They ask people (specific positions at law schools, lawyers and judges nominated by law schools) to award every school a rating from 1 to 5. Nobody has an informed opinion about that many schools. And in any honest ranking, one would expect the top tier to all get 5.0 scores or close to them. That Yale, Harvard, etc. don't is probably because the voters at Harvard who didn't go to Yale are dinging Yale (and vice versa). They do tell us a little - but not much. Probably best ignored - but applicants can ignore those if they want focus on the other numbers.
4) job numbers are really helpful. Yale's complaint is valid although it doesn't strike me as particularly consequential. It could be readily addressed since USN isn't making up these job categories in a. vacuum - if Yale thinks well funded public interest fellowships should count more than helping mail out brochures in the admissions office (the type of job schools trying to goose their ranking often created), Yale is influential enough to get a new category created. And that might incentivize more schools to create more of those sort of positions! That it chose to take its ball and go home is, to me, a sign it doesn't care as much about change as it says and cares more about getting itself out of the USN box.
5) USN has many, many, many flaws. I've written articles about many of them. Schools lie and cheat to go up in the ranking (and your comment about Columbia is really too easy on them - Columbia didn't just withdraw from the USN university ranking, it was outed by one of its faculty for misrepresenting things in the survey.) BUT - and this is a huge "but" -- it is one of the few places that an applicant can see basic comparative data on law schools like the band of UGPA and LSAT scores the school has or some normalized bar passage data. Could USN do better? Yes! It would be awesome to see bar passage data by LSAT band, for example. Then schools that say they add value could be evaluated on whether they do. Or MBE scores by entering LSAT - another great way to see if there's been value add in terms of bar passage. You know who doesn't seem to want such data out there? Law schools! Or how about some more fine-grained data on what kinds of jobs people end up in from various parts of the class? Very useful information - but law schools don't seem to want to put that out there. At an AALS panel long ago, a faculty member denounced USN for ranking schools "46 and 47", forcefully saying there was no meaningful difference between 46 and 47. Hiram Chodosh, then dean at Utah and chair of the panel, asked him "Tell me, does your school rank students 46 and 47?" The faculty member paused, thought, and then said "I concede the hypocrisy, but I am still outraged."
I could go on and on, but I won't - I think a key point is that USN does impose some outside accountability on law schools and they generally just hate that. Just leaving US News won't fix the problems that Dean Gerken identifies. What would fix them would be if Yale put its prestige and effort behind creating an alternative basis for applicants to really understand outcomes relevant to them from the education at different schools. My prediction: it won't.
Thanks for these very detailed insights! But let me run something by you.
The T3, T6, and T14 barely change. They swap places amongst themselves, but it's not really significant.
Farther down the rankings, though, there are big moves over time. I mention George Mason and Pepperdine, but there are plenty of others.
So would it be such a bad thing if the T14 defect—they're the T14, everyone knows they are fine schools whose graduates have strong job prospects, applicants can see their ABA disclosures on their websites, etc.—and left the other schools to duke it out?
Again, I don't think applicants were getting much informational value out of minor year-to-year movement within the T6 or T14 (as opposed to, say, a fourth-tier school becoming top 30, a la George Mason—that's significant).
Yes, you are correct - I think USN for the T14 (and definitely the T6) is more a matter of one-upmanship by the various schools - presumably someone who gets into more than one of those schools is likely to make the choice based on the quite different educational environments they provide, the weather, lifestyle preferences, family and romantic constraints, and so on. So I don't think it will matter much for applicant information. Except.... Yale's claim is that it has fabulous fellowships and these are disincentivized by USN. So, Yale can take its ball and go home or it could push for a change to USN to include a better accounting of those fellowship -- which would pressure other T14 schools to try to do them more too. Win for the students!
I am sure Bob Morse - who is a very nice, reasonable guy and quite willing to engage with people not shouting at him - would be glad to work out a way that verifiable information could be provided that would distinguish among public interest fellowships and make work ones. Bob's interest is in improving the rankings (well, and some churn to sell more copies each year). He's very open to ideas.
One more point - I've (with others) tried to convince the FT, the WSJ, Forbes, and others to develop law school rankings (places that do business school rankings). All expressed mild interest, did some looking, and concluded that there wasn't enough verifiable information out there to create a ranking of law schools that wasn't just USN with different weights on the various components. If there were multiple rankings (like business schools), the rankings would be better for students and for law schools. But there won't be more rankings because law schools won't provide the verifiable information that enables them to be constructed. Tying this back to your question - there probably is a difference between, say, Stanford and Harvard in placing students in jobs in LA. If there was transparent placement information that was pretty detailed, an applicant who wanted to live in LA after law school might well benefit from knowing that. In the absence of information. my guess would be advantage Stanford. But that might be wrong. And I don't have a guess for whether Stanford or Harvard would be a better choice for someone wanting to work in Miami. Data would really help there.
Don’t forget the rankings of my former site, Above the Law! I agree with you that it would be good to have more competition.
I'm rooting for U.S. News and I hope they crush this rebellion. Many reasons.
I updated the post—Berkeley just joined—and I'm predicting that a good chunk of the so-called "T14" will go along. I am less sure about schools beyond that, since as I discuss, the utility of the rankings increases as you go farther down.
I'm a bit mystified by this comment from Dean Gerken:
"I raised this point with Dean Gerken, who said that she made the change with precisely these applicants in mind—applicants who might not have lawyer relatives or who might be first-generation professionals. She said that although YLS will no longer provide its data to U.S. News—a private, for-profit magazine—the school will continue to provide important consumer data to applicants and prospective students."
This is either self-deluded or astonishingly cynical. *Of course* Dean Gerken and her counterparts would enjoy a world in which applicants received all "important consumer data" through ex parte communications from the schools themselves. It's obvious why a seller of services about which reliable information is difficult to obtain might relish a situation like that. And it's obvious why the seller might, contemplating its advantages vis-a-vis first-time market participants, devise a strategy "with precisely [those buyers] in mind." But it's not clear how the buyer benefits from that scenario at all.
One possibility is that the ABA beefs up its required disclosures. The law school transparency movement of a decade or so ago already led to a lot of improvements in those, and I could imagine more to fill the U.S. News vacuum.