It is awaited with great anticipation each March. The colleges are ranked, sorted and pitted against each other in competition, with potential recruits following the action closely.
No, it’s not the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. It’s the annual release of the U.S. News & World Report’s Best Law School Rankings. The 2015 rankings were released earlier this month, and they contained welcome news for the University of South Carolina, which climbed five places into a tie for 93rd place. It is the second straight year in which South Carolina has increased its ranking.
The top 146 law schools each received numerical rankings, and no rank is published for the remaining schools. Charleston School of Law, whose sale to InfiLaw is pending, remained among those whose ranks were not published.
Just as March can be counted on for scrutiny of minor changes in the ranking, the annual announcement also predictably brings renewed criticism of the U.S. News rankings themselves. Almost everyone involved in legal education has criticisms of the U.S. News methodology, although those criticisms cover a wide, even contradictory, range of concerns. Some think the rankings are too subjective, while others think that the objective criteria used are poor measures of a school’s value.
Of the criteria that goes into the U.S. News ranking, 40 percent of a school’s rank is subjective — 25 percent is based on a school’s reputation among its peers and 15 percent is based on its reputation among attorneys and judges. The other 60 percent of a school’s rank is objective, including things like median LSAT score and GPA, acceptance rate, job placement success, bar passage rate, expenditures per student and student-faculty ratio.
Objective vs. subjective
Rob Wilcox, the dean of South Carolina’s law school, said that two areas in which the school had improved that likely contributed the most to its higher ranking were two of the objective factors—job placement success and student-faculty ratio.
“We feel like our school is one that is on the rise, and to the extent that rankings confirm that, we’re very pleased,” Wilcox said. “When you look at the things that are really important to students, those are the areas in which we have really improved most significantly.”
Some law school deans are vocally critical of the use of subjective components to rank law schools. Rich Leonard, dean of Campbell Law School in Raleigh, said that the objective measurements are what really matter to students. Campbell was, nationally, one of the schools whose objective metrics most notably outpaced its peer assessment.
“I think some portions of [the U.S. News ranking] are useful,” Leonard said. “I think the 60 percent that are based on truly objective criteria, I think that’s good hard data that if you look into it carefully it would be useful to know. I have to say that the 40 percent of the rankings that are subjective I have some skepticism about.”
Peer reputation rankings are published for every school, so they do at least offer a way to compare schools lumped together in the “Rank Not Published” category. By that metric, Charleston finished tied for 181st.
It’s all about value…
The objective criteria have detractors as well, who argued that those can be gamed by schools to boost their rankings. One criterion in particular, the expenditures per students has raised concerns at a time when students are increasingly worried about law school debt burdens. Expenditures count for more than 11 percent of a school’s rank. Since they’re largely driven by tuition rates, schools can boost their scores by charging a higher tuition, whereas schools that charge a lower bill are, in a way, penalized in the rankings.
That can work as a handicap for public schools. The University of North Carolina, for instance, finished tied for 19th in peer reputation but came in tied for 31st in the overall rankings. The school’s dean, Jack Boger, said that the school performed very well on other U.S. News lists that considered a school’s bang for the buck and that he was disappointed that such factors were still not included in the overall ranking.
Wilcox said that the expenditure criterion may have had a negative impact on South Carolina’s ranking as well.
“There is a lot of concern nationally about the fact that there is an incentive for schools to spend more money to try to get a higher and ranking and that that has had a negative effect for law school students as schools raise tuition to pay for all that spending,” Wilcox said. “We’ve tried to be very careful with our expenditures here.”
…and about jobs
Eighteen percent of a school’s rank is based on its employment rate for recent graduates. Kyle McEntee, executive director of Law School Transparency, is among the group of people who believe prospective students would be better served by data that focused more on career outcomes.
“I look at the metrics and the inputs they use, and they’re not really related to jobs so much, it’s not clear they’re related to anything. So there are all these arbitrary inputs that go into building an even more arbitrary ranking,” McEntee said.
McEntee said that because most law schools largely place graduates in local and regional markets, a national ranking was of limited use because graduates don’t typically compete for jobs with graduates of law schools from faraway states. He said that Law School Transparency is working on a rival metric to compete with U.S. News, but that such an effort was made more difficult by a lack of transparency surrounding employment outcomes.
“Every dean I talk to, it is the bane of their existence. They want the ranking to go away, but their hands are tied,” McEntee said. “But so long as there’s a blackout around their employment data, it makes it difficult to use for anyone trying to create an alternative to U.S. News.”
Students take a broad view
The reason schools put so much importance on the rankings is that students and employers are influenced them, “by probably more than they should be,” Wilcox said. There’s no question that prospective students pay attention to the U.S. News rankings, although perhaps not as much as law school admissions offices do.
One applicant from Apex, N.C. who is currently in the process of choosing a law school, Ashley Klein, said that while she paid attention to the rankings, they weren’t as important to her as other factors, such as a good career services office or a strong program in the field of law she wants to practice in.
“I think the US News & World Report law school rankings are a bit overrated,” Klein said. “The rankings don’t do a good job of reflecting the learning environment of a law school, the diversity of enrolled students, or the opportunity of networking with alumni and others in the legal profession.”
Follow David Donovan on Twitter @SCLWDonovan