So what's going on at your school over these things? Wailing and gnashing of teeth? Jubilation? Smug boredom? Sighs of relief? A small twinge of satisfaction followed by the cranking forward of the mental gears -- how can we squeeze out another point next year? Kicking yourself because the school you picked because of the rankings is now below the school you assumed it was better than? A quick stab of pain followed by immediate retreat to the usual painkiller thoughts about how the rankings don't really mean anything -- soft variables and intangibles!
UPDATE: The rankings at the link are not yet the new rankings. I'm responding to leaked rankings that I've seen, which I won't link to.
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These are the 06 rankings... Are the new ones the 07s??
When I went to Madison is was in the top 25. Now its No. 32. That's pretty sad.
Joel: You're right. The on-line ones are 2006, but that is last year. My school's rank stayed the same.
Sloan: You need to take into account that all the other schools are doing what they can to rise in the rankings. Taking students with the highest LSATs and GPAs is one of the more effective techniques. There's actually very little space between the schools, point-wise, and we could play the game harder than we do. If alumni think we should do that, they should let the administration know. I think the school is better than it was years ago. (I've been here since 1984.) The rankings have given up-and-coming schools a way to fight for recognition. Of course, they do it. More established schools might be complacent or scoffing about the rannkings. How much do you think law school policy should be designed to gain rank on the U.S. News list?
I'd be interesting to study what actual effect these ratings had on various groups. Alumni? Administrators? Faculty? Prospective Faculty? Students? Legislators?
Everyone says 'They aren't important,' and maybe that's true, but maybe they are to some groups. All we have now is anecdotal information.
Althouse, I agree that the rankings are somewhat fixed. After all most law school professors went to palces like Harvard, etc... so its no wonder these schools will always be tops. Unfortunately, the U.S. News Rankings has little competition and is cited with impunity by people across the country. Thus, we should play along.
Sometimes principles don't help you and sometimes fiction becomes reality in the minds of people who don't have the time or energy or ability to find out the truth (take the end of the Vietnam war for example).
Thus, we should try to get our rankings up even if it means playing the stupid game.
Everyone says 'They aren't important,' and maybe that's true, but maybe they are to some groups.
I suspect a prospective students might use the if there's a choice between School A and School B, and all other things being equal, the higher ranked school might get the nod. But all other things are never equal.
I suspect the only people who really use these lists are administrators who are trying to justify some new expense or highly paid hire in the name of moving up in the list. Or administrators who do something and then see their school rise and say "See? See? My policies are working!" To which the only possible response is "Correlation is not causation."
This lists have become consumer guides for students. I don't like the lists because they raise the cost of higher ed. Years ago, a student would just go to their local law school. Warren Burger went to Willie Mitchell and Holmes went to the University of Cincy. Today, if you can get into both George Washington U and the UW Madison, students will spend the $50k extra in tuition and living and travel etc.. to go to GW because it is slightly higher ranked. Thus, the higher ranked schools will attract the better students - even though you probably don't learn anything more at GWU as compared to UW Madison.
The same is true for professors.
These rankings won't last forever. Eventually top schools, like top businesses will collapse on their own elitism and mismanagement. Who knows when that will be....
madisonman, I think you are underestimating the effect of U.S. News rankings. Law students are fond of saying they don't pay attention and the ranking didn't affect their choice of school, but if you ask the typical law student about her law school's ranking, I would wager a hunk of cash that (a) she will know what the rank was when she applied (b) she will know the ranks of the schools she applied to but didn't get into, (c) she will know if those rankings have changed significantly since and (d) she will have gone to the school with the highest ranking unless she lives in a state with good, affordable public law schools. At least this is true of top-tier schools.
Why? Because the truth is law school cirriculum is very similar across most law schools and most law students don't have a serious commitment to study a certain kind of law. Thus, getting a job hinges a lot on the prestige of the school and the "prestige" of a school hinges a lot on the U.S. News ranking.
At least that's my take.
Art: "What if they added a rating category for combined hits on faculty blogsites?"
Then hundreds of lawprofs would set up blogs and lawprofs, students, and alumni would hit those sites as many times a day as the sitemeters would register. The lawprof sites would immediately jump the top of the traffic lists, bumping Kos! It would be quite amusing to have such tangible evidence of how hard the game that everyone loves to scorn is really played.
Glitch:
One thing you did not mention in your comment is where you might want to practice.
If you have any strong geographic preferences, you might want to check the opinions of lawyers at major firms in those locations. Sometimes local prejudices are as important as national reputation.
A small twinge of satisfaction
Yes. I am a UW grad who works with mostly WFU and UNC grads. Good to see we "beat" WFU.
Why do I remember UW being in the top 20 in the late 80s? Am I remembering that correctly?
Law school is very much like college. The right place for a student to be is "where they fit the best". Some students thrive in big metropolises, and others thrive in small rural settings. Some love the competition of large classes, and others do better with the nurturing of smaller groups. Just "going for the ranking numbers" causes many people to avoid doing what should be an important element of the law school admission process: analyzing themselves (what kind of persons they are, what they are really looking for) as well as analyzing the schools. It's the "fit" that makes or breaks the law school experience.
Just an observation - since the scores are partially based on undergrad and LSAT scores, schools heavily invested in affirmative action would tend to underperform those who are not. Wouldn't this leave law school administration in something of a quandary, sort of trying to serve two masters, ie the stated goal of diversity versus the objective goal of a high ranking?
The better question is do law schools get credit in their rankings for engaging in affirmative action. And if they do...should they get credit? does affirmative action at to the value of a law school?
Then hundreds of lawprofs would set up blogs and lawprofs, students, and alumni would hit those sites as many times a day as the sitemeters would register. The lawprof sites would immediately jump the top of the traffic lists, bumping Kos! It would be quite amusing to have such tangible evidence of how hard the game that everyone loves to scorn is really played.
From the law schools' and law professors' perspective, though, isn't that a pretty good outcome?
One of the criticisms made of law school academics and of academics in general is that in their ivory tower, they're out of touch with the sensibilities and concerns a) of ordinary people, and b) of ordinary lawyers. Having alumni click on their webpages all the time -- even if just to improve their alma mater's US News ranking, would also (if only incidentally) have the effect of giving professors a significant platform from which to express their ideas to a general public, and a significant means for the public to interact with and criticise those professors' ideas.
For students, the deal is, if anything, even better, since a law professor's blog (if it touches on legal issues) is likely to give them much more of an appreciation for their professor as a legal and personable (as opposed to didactic) intellect, and also give them a more immediate and accessible sense of their professors' professional interests as well, making it easier for them to seek out professors (and schools with professors) who teach what they are interested in, and improving the discourse between professors and students.
High traffic rankings will also probably drive high link rankings, and so have the effect of bumping qualified legal commentators' rankings in Google and other spider-driven search engines, meaning that when the public searches for commentary on legal issues, they will be that much more likely to encounter, say, Orin Kerr blogging about search and seizure, and that much less likely to encounter J. Random Journalist talking about something he knows nothing about.
That seems like a pretty good outcome to me, even if it is ratings driven.
The biggest problem I can see would be visitor-count fraud (like ad fraud) -- where you set up a bot to ping the site repeatedly so as to inflate your traffic numbers. But I think there are ways to get around that, for hit counts.
Balfegor: You assume that writing and reading would actually be going on. That's not a good assumption.
Goatwhacker: Absolutely! This is one of the reasons for scorning the rankings. A school that goes all out for the hard variables is rewarded. Would you want to go to a school that selected its students entirely based on LSAT and GPA?
You assume that writing and reading would actually be going on. That's not a good assumption.
But do alumni and students have so much free time that they're willing, in significant numbers, to sit there clicking blank pages, or pages full of lorem ipsum dolor sit amet? Even if you love your alma mater, that seems like it would carry an awfully high opportunity cost. Particularly for a lawyer.
My experience with graduates of elite law schools, at least at the appellate level, is they are predisposed towards policy arguments. Consequently, their arguments tend to be structured much like someone who is testifying before a senate committee about some piece of legislation. Although it is only a personal observation, it does seem to me that their arguments, more often than not, do not place much stress on logical form or analysis in the sense of showing that their opponents' arguments rest on a false premise or a logical fallacy.
Glitch, your degree in Philosophy should serve you well in law school. This background will give you a decided advantage in analyzing legal arguments. It's hard to come up with a better set of skills for the study of law than those honed by the study of philosophy
When I discussed this a friend today, he felt the group of people who would care most are employers. But I still stand by my wish for a more systematic study.
I think way too much emphasis is put on the rankings. I'm trying not to pay too much attention to them. Geographic location and cost are way more important.
One positive I've noticed is that some schools appear to be increasing the amount of scholarship money they offer in order to entice top students and improve their ranking.
I second deano in advising anyone considering law school who lives in a state with a decent public law school should very seriously consider going to that school. Looking over rankings and such from the perspective of a kid in his mid-20s, law school just seems expensive whereever you go. Its a bit hard to fathom how much the debt will saddle you for decades to come. The advantage of a state school is that they usually are well known, usually have at least decent reputations, and there's a certain amount of cred that comes with a degree from a mediocre state school that doesn't come with a mediocre private school (but I'm not saying Wisconsin or any other particular school is mediocre).
I have to dispute some other comments though that suggest its important to find the right "fit" of school for each applicant's personality. There are a few factors to consider, like area of the country, urban vs. rural, big factory school vs. more intimate setting, and a few schools that have unusual programs or specific ideological bents or joint degree programs, but other than that, as a law school applicant its hard to really choose based on things like the quality of faculty. Few applicants know anything about law faculty, let alone know what substantive area they'd be interested in, you can choose your profs to a pretty limited degree and most of the classes you take are required or strongly advised). So, US News can distort some things but the idea of their rankings is still a fair proxy for deciding on a good school to go to.
You can't eat a diploma, and tweleve years from now that $1,500 a month school debt will be old. But it'll be paid off at 45
Wow -- is the interest on student loans that bad? Cor. I don't think that's as much of a problem if you end up at a megafirm -- you should, if you don't insist on conspicuous consumption -- be able to pay off rather more than $1,500 each month. Twice that rate or more should be easily manageable. But for the people attending schools in the middle, where the pricetag is like a top school, but the megafirm prospects are not, that has to be a horrible squeeze.
Cato: "Is this bias self-reinforcing, then, as the private schools are rated higher, do they in turn glean an ever larger share of the best students, increasing their gap over the public institutions?"
Clearly, there is a spiral that can be upward or downward. The school needs the rank so that the students deciding based on the rank will pick us. Then, their coming to the school produces the statistics for the next year. If you lose rank, you will get different students the following year, and they will bring different statistics to feed into next year's rankings. That's why schools know they must guard their rank and try to move up. A fall one year forbodes a fall in the next year -- and the next! We are all locked into the game, really.
But public schools play the game too. Some of the public schools are among the highest ranked ones: Michigan and Virginia are in the top 10. There are many public schools in the "top tier" (top 100).
My studies have shown that a butterfly not flapping his wings in Indonesia raises the cost of higher education. In fact, no matter what the butterfly does, and no matter how hard he does it, he raises the cost of higher education.
The only answer will be the legalization of DDT.
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