On March 12, 2013, University of Pittsburgh Law School Dean William Carter gave a thirty-six minute long talk to students and others to address the dreadful news that his school had declined from 69th to 91st in the annual US News and World Report law school ranking. And Carter did not even bear any responsibility for the catastrophe, having just been appointed dean a few months earlier.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQxxNBCUqJ8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQxxNBCUqJ8
I figured that Dean Carter’s presentation would be a hilarious and exasperating fog of crisis management PR plus boosterism. But instead I found myself nodding in agreement at many of his points. Carter attacked the flawed nature of US News ranking metrics, which is hardly surprising under the circumstances, but he did so in an a manner that I found to be thorough and informative. To be clear, Carter’s presentation was not scam-free--I mean, he is a second tier law school dean. Still, when a second tier law dean is battling US News’ ranking guru Bob Morse, he may well be the lesser of two very evil evils, like Scylla or the Democratic Party.
Carter went through the components and sub-components that comprise the US News law school ranking, and argued that US News' metrics are highly unreliable-- indeed, that an effort to look good for US News by changing law school practices in certain ways could actually hurt students. Carter's presentation is a good springboard for a discussion of exactly what the US News law school ranking measures. Carter’s points are in roman, and my comments are in italics.
I. Reputational Survey of Law School Deans and Faculty (25%):
The US news reputational survey consists of a bubble sheet sent to law school deans and selected faculty. These survey-takers are asked to rate every law school on a 1-5 scale, though there is a "don't know" option. Academics who fill out the survey are usually only familiar with a handful of schools. As for the rest, their primary knowledge of a school is often its place in the previous year’s US News ranking, thus creating an "echo chamber" effect in the current year’s ranking.
The importance of this factor--25%!--sheds light on why law professors have such disgusting (I mean, collegial) personalities and why you will often find them traveling to, speaking at, or hosting schmoozefests, aka conferences. You see, a law school’s reputation may depend on its professors generating favorable chatter and gossip among colleagues, leaving a dim impression, reinforced by promotional material (aka "law porn") that significant and exciting scholarship is happening at those professors' home institutions. That way, later on, those colleagues may color in the "4" or "5" bubble on the US News reputation survey, even if they have no direct experience of the school.
II. Reputational Survey of Lawyers and Judges (15%):
US News does not disclose which lawyers and judges are asked to fill out the survey, though the lawyers are known to be Big Law partners. Only 9% of those asked to fill out the survey actually responded-- kudos to the practicing bar for so thoroughly disregarding this nonsense. The lower the response rate, the greater the opportunity for skew.
III. Selectivity (25%):
a. LSAT (12.5%);
b. Undergrad GPA (10.0%);a. LSAT (12.5%);
c. Percent Accepted (2.5%)
Carter complained that his school was punished by US News because his school’s median LSAT fell from 159 to 158. He said: "Do I think that there is a substantive difference between a class that had a median of 159 and a median of 158?. . .I simply refuse to accept that."
Carter is wrong here. Selectivity matters; it is the only thing that does, other than placement and cost. By punishing schools that lower admissions standards, the mischief-making US News ranking can actually have a virtuous effect. Schools are no doubt sorely tempted to lower, or even abandon, admissions standards, as law school applications dwindle due to growing awareness of the scam. The one thing that prevents them from doing so is the prospect of a tumble in the US News ranking. "Percent accepted," particularly, should be worth way more than 2.5%. I mean, the LSAT can be taken again and again, and a high GPA may only mean that a kid took easy classes in college, but there is no getting around a law school rejection. So I say: bonus US News points when a law school refuses to accept some young moron’s borrowed fortune in the interest of maintaining its selectivity.
IV. Placement (18%):
a. Jobs Nine Months After Graduation (14%);
b. Employment Rate on Date of Graduation (4%)
US News changed its methodology this year as to how it calculates employment rates. Formerly, employment was calculated in absolute terms, with full credit for all jobs, including short-term jobs. Now, however, placement success is calculated by assigning various weights to the numbers of graduates employed in 22 different categories of jobs and durations of jobs. US News provides full-credit for JD Advantage jobs lasting more than one year. As well, US News does not discount law school funded jobs, giving an enormous advantage to schools that subsidize fellowships for recent grads.
US News gives full-credit for JD Advantage jobs? If US News is going to make such a monumental blunder, who cares about its careful weighting of 22 different categories of jobs and job durations. Since the definition of a JD Advantage job is so imprecise, schools have every incentive to scam-up their employment success rates by characterizing any old kind of job as JD Advantage. Thus, a third tier scam school can characterize a graduate's job peddling insurance as JD Advantage and the school will receive the same US News credit in the placement category as Stanford receives when it places a grad in a SCOTUS clerkship.
US News gives full-credit for law school funded "jobs"? That means that a law school that charges above average tuition, and uses the extra tuition money to subsidize one year long "fellowships" (i.e. stipends for some of its unemployed recent grads to go volunteer full-time somewhere) gets rewarded by US News as it calculates the rankings. I would rather law school be compressed into two years, after which grads can volunteer their services to practitioners in exchange for training, with a substantial savings in time and money.
V. Faculty Resources: Expenditure Per Student (9.75%):
This measure, an alleged proxy for quality, is based only on a law school’s budget divided by number of students enrolled. It doesn’t matter what the school actually did with money and, of course, the money need not be spent on students per se. A school can immediately boost its score in this category by either: (a) reducing the number of students or (b) increasing its budget. Carter stated that he could boost his score in this category by increasing tuition, but would rather take a US News hit than impose additional tuition burdens on his students. Carter asserted that he could make Pitt a US News top 50 school within two years by boosting tuition by $5,000 a year, but he refuses to do that.
Carter is correct. This factor is crude and monstrous. Any school can get a US News rating bump by increasing tuition. A prospective law student who attaches importance to a school’s US News ranking may want to think that one through. He or she may choose a school based on its being ranked slightly higher than some other school, without realizing that that school is ranked slightly higher solely because it charges higher tuition (producing a higher average expenditure per student). So that edition of US News may end up costing a kid thousands of dollars, not $9.95 (or $29.95 for the expanded online edition).
To show how much US News really cares about actual quality education, as opposed to its phony-baloney proxies, consider: it doesn’t matter to US News what the money is spent on, only the average expenditure per student. The money can be spent on renovating the Dean’s Office or on free booze for the faculty. Hell, a school can double tuition and spend the whole increase on a 40-foot tall solid gold statue of a naked Bob Morse with an extended middle finger. The boost in this category would be no different than if the additional money was spent on some pedagogical miracle capable of turning every dim-bulb Cooley student into Clarence Darrow.
VI. Faculty Resources: Student-Faculty Ratio (3%):
In this category, schools are ranked based on how many full-time faculty they have relative to the size of their student enrollment. Carter notes that U.S. News doesn’t count adjuncts, "who can often be some of the most valuable teachers in the building."
A law school with the maximum permissible number of adjuncts would strike out with US News in this category, and yet probably provide a better and more cost-effective professional education than one filled to the brim with tenured six figure salaried windbags, many of whom would not know the difference between a courtroom and a faculty lounge. Here, again, Morse’s formula has a deleterious effect on legal education as it exists in actual reality, in favor of his imaginary world where prestige and quality can be precisely measured and assigned a numerical rank.
VII. Library (0.75%):
This category does not seek to measure how much support a school provides to its library. It measures only one thing: number of bound volumes in the school’s library. It does not measure the quality of information services, only the number of books. Even law librarians think this is nuts in the digital age. Carter quotes the chief librarian at his school as saying. "I don’t need more books...this is the year 2013."
Okay. 3/4 of 1% of a law school’s US News rank is based on the number of bound volumes gathering mold in the stacks. Bound volumes--in the high noon of the digital age. Has Bob Morse heard of Westlaw? Kindle? I truly hope that Bob Morse is having an affair with some legal books dealer. Because the only other explanation is that he is raving mad.
VIII. Bar Passage Rate (2%) (based on plus of minus deviation from average pass rate in the state):
IX. Financial Aid (1.5%):
X. Conclusion:
Until only two years ago, US News was basically all that prospective law students had to go by. Now, however, there is much more data available because, starting with the Class of 2011, the ABA has required law schools to survey their graduates, nine months out, as to employment status. There are some fine sites to help prospective students and their influencers access and interpret the data (below), and the US News ranking is not one of them. If you must have a ranking, check out Above the Law's-- it is superior to that of US News in many ways, chief among them that it does not count alleged JD Advantage jobs.
Nobody should care about US News’ idiotic survey of academic gossips, or its obnoxious "expenditures per student" proxy for quality, or its concern for the vastness of each law school's collection of bound volumes.
Nobody should care about US News’ idiotic survey of academic gossips, or its obnoxious "expenditures per student" proxy for quality, or its concern for the vastness of each law school's collection of bound volumes.
http://www.lstscorereports.com/?r=other&show=jobs
http://abovethelaw.com/careers/law-school-rankings/
http://educatingtomorrowslawyers.du.edu/law-jobs/
http://thirdtierreality.blogspot.com/
http://www.lawschoolcafe.org/
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