Is This The Beginning of the End for U.S. News Undergrad Rankings, and Will Law School Rankings Survive the Collapse?
posted by Melissa Waters
The New York Times reports today that the presidents of dozens of liberal arts colleges have agreed to stop participating in U.S. News’ college rankings survey. According to the report, the Annapolis Group, an association of liberal arts colleges, released a statement that a majority of the 80 college presidents attending its annual meeting had declared their intent not to participate in the U.S. News rankings. The move follows on the heels of similar efforts by college presidents earlier this year, and of a widely-publicized critique of the rankings system last month in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Has the liberal arts world finally decided that enough is enough? The Times quotes Judith Shapiro, president of Barnard College: “Frankly, it had bubbled up to the point of, why should we do this work for them? … [T]his is not our project.” Of course, the jury is still out on whether the liberal arts colleges’ nascent rebellion will have legs. Not surprisingly, some schools at the top of the food chain – e.g., #2 Amherst – plan to continue to cooperate with U.S. News, and want further “discussion” of the issue. Still, this latest move by liberal arts colleges seems to be more than mere window dressing.
All of this has me wondering: If U.S. News loses its undergrad rankings cash cow, will the law school rankings be far behind? Or might the law school rankings survive, even if the undergrad rankings collapse? Put differently, are there reasons why the law school world will (and perhaps should) continue to “do U.S. News’ work for them”?
I can think of a couple of reasons why law school rankings might survive, despite the collapse of undergrad rankings.
First, perhaps rankings “work” in the law school context – perhaps they’re more appropriate and more useful than in the liberal arts context. After all, law students and liberal arts students are very different kinds of consumers: Most liberal arts students are looking for a particular kind of “experience,” and the varying “experiences” that liberal arts institutions offer are just not something that U.S. News-style rankings can adequately capture. But like it or not, most law school students aren’t looking for an “experience” – they’re looking for a job. As consumers, they look for the product (i.e., legal education) most likely to produce the largest number of high-quality job opportunities. And perhaps that is something that some kind of rankings system can capture, even if U.S. News’ particular version does a bad job of it.
Second, I suspect that law school deans and most law professors are simply less troubled by the rankings system than are our liberal arts counterparts – a fact that can be explained by the very different academic cultures that we inhabit. The legal profession itself attracts Type A, competitive personalities — and the vast majority of law school deans (and many, if not most, law professors) are certainly no exception. At a minimum, U.S. News offers an outlet for competition – and it is not surprising that the Type A personalities who inhabit legal academia might find that competition (as inane and meaningless as it often seems to be) appealing on some level. Simply put, legal academics may well be more comfortable working in an environment where rankings play a key role; many of us may even thrive in such a competitive environment. At a minimum, we’re less likely to have the instinctive allergic reaction to rankings that so many liberal arts types seem to have.
As a normative matter, I don’t really find these arguments convincing. Personally, I find the U.S. News rankings – and our obsession with them — to be silly and distracting, and I wish that law schools would follow our liberal arts counterparts’ example and simply refuse to continue to “do U.S. News’ work for them.”
But as a practical matter, I’m also betting that U.S. News will be able to milk its law school cash cow for a good while longer, regardless of what happens with the liberal arts rankings. To date, efforts to mount a law school rebellion against U.S. News have been weak, at best. Bottom line: If and when U.S. News goes down, it won’t be the law schools leading the charge – it will be phalanxes of angry English professors.
June 20, 2007 at 4:07 pm
Posted in: Law School (Rankings)
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Responses (11)
Jason - June 20, 2007 at 5:29 pm
I’ll just use this space to note that I find the attitude of schools like Amherst reprehensible. (And not just because I went to a school that had something of a one-way rivalry with Amherst, either.) What possible principled reason could there be for more “discussion”?
Al Brophy - June 20, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Thanks for this, Melissa–and for your characteristically thoughtful analysis.
I don’t think the end is near for US News’ law school ratings for a different set of reasons (having little to do with what law schools think about them). US News’ law school ratings are based largely based on data schools submit to the ABA and so I think it would be hard for schools to opt out of providing data to US News. That is, US News can get the information it needs several different ways. The peer and lawyer/judge assessment scores are, of course, the creation of US News and so it’s virtually impossible for law schools to shut off that source of information.
Frank - June 20, 2007 at 7:29 pm
As for Al’s point–perhaps Richard Epstein has a solution. Perhaps the schools could only hand over data on the condition that it be used in “responsible rankings.” Then the ABA could put the same condition on anyone to whom it gives the information to. As Epstein has argued,
“Where true information is obtained illegally– whether by trespass, fraud, or breach of confidence or contract–the presumption should shift sharply in the other direction, so that both damages and injunctive relief are made available to the party with the right to keep that information confidential.”
from 52 Stan. L. Rev. 1003 (2000).
I don’t think that would work, but this example gives me a bit more sympathy with Epstein’s position.
Frank - June 20, 2007 at 7:31 pm
PS: I should have stated that Epstein is basically proposing a shift in the law, not trying to represent what the law is.
Al - June 20, 2007 at 8:08 pm
Frank, thanks for joining the conversation. I need to look again at the data US News uses, but I think a great deal of it is available even in the LSDAS handbook (or whatever it’s called these days). I think some isn’t (like expenditures per student), but I’m not sure how much that contributes to the rankings–that may only contribute to the mystery (and therefore majesty?!) of the rankings. [There's a lot to be said about the relationship between mysteriousness and majesty--but that's a story for another time.] Of course, an important part of the US News rankings come from the surveys that US News puts together; will be extremely hard (in fact, I suspect impossible) to put a stop to them.
Melissa Waters - June 20, 2007 at 8:56 pm
Al, why would it be virtually impossible for law schools to shut off US News’ access to information regarding peer assessment scores? Don’t we have exclusive control over that data, at least? I.e., if law school deans and professors simply refuse to fill out the U.S. News surveys, U.S. News won’t have access to that information. Standing alone, of course, that won’t bring an end to the rankings — but I think it would make them somewhat less sexy, and would lessen their impact to some degree, at least. Or to use your terms (which I find very fitting here), the peer rankings greatly contribute to the mystery — and thus the majesty — of the US News overall rankings. Take that away, and the rankings themselves become less valuable.
Al - June 20, 2007 at 11:00 pm
Melissa,
Very interesting question. You’re right; “we” (as academics collectively) have control over the peer assessment scores. I don’t think, though, “we” have much control over what individual faculty will do. People in our business love the idea of being asked for their opinions. That’s what leads me to think that law schools won’t be able to shut off the peer assessment scores. You’d have to stop hundreds of people (at least I hope and expect that US News’ peer assessment is based on hundreds, not only a few dozen people).
Even if somehow “we” could stop ourselves from filing out those forms, I think there are some pretty good proxies that US News might turn to. (Apologies for up-coming product placement.) This paper, for instance, discusses the close correlation between citations to a law school’s main review and its peer assessment score. So I think US News might turn to some other measure like that, even if we were able to convince law profs to stop filing out the US News questionaires. (That measure wouldn’t have the mystery associated with the peer assessment scores and I also think that it’s increasingly problematic as schools are focusing more attention on their law reviews.)
WAL - June 21, 2007 at 1:18 am
Even if US News was shut off, it wouldn’t surprise me if students just referred back to the last ranking for years afterward and, to be honest, I think they would be foolish not to.
There’s a pretty good correlation between what a student’s job prospects at a school will be and what the reputation survey for a law school in the ranking indicates. When it comes to job prospects, I would argue that law school is much more hierarchical than undergrad and that this was the case before US News came up with this. There’s a lot that is annoying, but something along these lines was needed for an undergrad with a limited connection to practicing lawyers to distinguish between all 180 schools. (i.e., it’s easy to take it for granted that everybody applying will realize a school like Michigan and Virginia will give them great job prospects and just how large a difference there will be between those and other schools–but depending on your connections, whether you knew anybody practicing law, your school, the region of the country you’re going to college in, I think there was a time when it was easier to overlook that and without US News it would be easier for a 20 year old college student to overlook this sort of thing again.)
Jack Payne - June 21, 2007 at 6:03 pm
With the separation of illegal crime from “legal” crime such an important topic these days, how can we not do without every means of close scrutiny we can get to evaluate law grads?
–Jack Payne
http://www.sixhrs.com
Incoming Student - June 22, 2007 at 2:08 am
I believe that the answer is not just to boycott or hope for the destruction of USNews, but rather to come up with new and inventive rankings that might be of better use to prospective students and make them available. I just went through this process and don’t really know whether I made the, objectively, best decision available. I’m sure we all have ideas as to what would be “best” for the prospective student in deciding where to apply and, eventually, matriculate. Certainly, if one is to apply to law schools after getting a 160 on the LSAT, it would be nice for that student to know where he or she might be throwing away $80+ each.
USNews spells out the difference between schools so much that the results appear hasty and overconfident, U Indiana-Bloomington’s interactive ranking leaves far too much to the imagination to get a meaningful result. I put together a simple excel spreadsheet weighting the various attributes of the schools and putting together a cumulative score. Now, if I were an informed professor, I might have been able to put together a better spreadsheet (hint hint!).
Robert Rhee - June 23, 2007 at 2:39 pm
The law school rankings are just a part of broader rankings on graduate programs. Even if law schools do not cooperate, it would be difficult to shut down the US News enterprise. It may just leave the section on “law schools” more ambiguous and unreliable, which may be a disservice. The magazine may apply different, publicly available factors, and the enterprise will continue along with rankings of medical, business, education schools, etc. In fact, it could be argued that the US News does not focus on some important factors such as, for example, the ratio: Salary * COLA / (Post-Graduation Debt), or something along this line to give students information on breakeven and expected financial gain.
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