Not Law Students, It Seems
Ben Thomson, LawFuel contributing editor
These are not happy days for the US News Law School rankings. First the debacle over the way they are assembled. Second, the law school pulling out of the rankings and now – third – law students who seem to think they’re all so yesterday.
US News ran into all sorts of headwinds as they changes the collection and reporting methodology for their rankings, usually lead by Yale Law School, in order to create some decent (and reader-attracting) movement.
The problem was that the law schools rebelled and pulled their data from the computation undertaken by the website, creating a maelstrom of Trump-sized trouble for the once venerable rankings which delayed publication of the rankings, released only in May.
The previous year had seen delays and problems as law publications like AbovetheLaw took aim at the methodology changes and the rankings’ reliability.
Recently, two professors have taken a good look at the US News rankings in terms of their relevance to today’s law students and the verdict is in: they’re not regarded as a valuable guide to law schools.
University of Kentucky law professor Brian Frye and Indiana University law professor Christopher Ryan released their report on the rankings after tracking changes for all of the 197 law schools tracked over the past decade, looking at the relationship between the academic credentials of the entering classes rising or falling in correlation with the law school’s movement so as to measure the desirability of the schools for applicants.
Their conclusion:
“In a nutshell, our study shows that the U.S. News law school rankings have been largely irrelevant to prospective law students for a decade, and have recently become entirely irrelevant,” reads the study, titled The Decline and the Fall of the U.S. News Rankings.
The U.S. News & World Report law school rankings were created to provide prospective students with information about the relative quality of different law schools to help inform their decision of where to attend. Law schools care deeply about their ranking because it impacts prestige and the credentials of the students they can attract.
A higher ranking means more prestige and better students, while a lower ranking has the opposite effect.
However, an analysis comparing changes in a school’s U.S. News ranking one year to changes in prospective student preferences for that school the following year found very little correlation between the two factors.
In fact, the correlation was often slightly negative, meaning when a school’s ranking increased, prospective students were less likely to prefer it the next year, and vice versa.
This lack of correlation suggests that prospective law students are not heavily weighing the U.S. News rankings when deciding where to apply and enroll.
They seem to be looking at other sources of information beyond just the rankings. As a result, law schools may be able to safely stop obsessing over their U.S. News ranking, since it does not appear to be a major factor driving student decisions and preferences anymore.
Which leaves US News in the predicament of having to recalibrate itself and work on providing information that is more reliable – like US news, for instance.
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