My school stayed in exactly the same place, so... boring. Good boring, I guess. An interesting thing is that where we are is one slot below UC Irvine which appears in the ranking for the first time:
UC Irvine Law debuts at 30: University of California’s Irvine School of Law opened its doors in 2009, but this is the first time it was eligible to be ranked. The school was granted full accreditation by the American Bar Association in June. So how did it do? Not too shabby. It placed 30th, just behind William & Mary and a spot ahead of its sister public school, University of California-Davis.ADDED: From the Above the Law analysis:
There’s a three-way tie for #31, a six-way tie for #34, a four-way tie for #42, a three-way tie for #47, a tie for #50, a four-way tie for #52, a three-way tie for #56, a four-way tie for #59, a four-way tie for #63, a four-way tie for #67, a four-way tie for #71, a three-way tie for #75, a four-way tie for #78, a five-way tie for #82, a seven-way tie for #87, and an eight-way tie for #94. There are 22 rankings ties within the Top 100 alone. UGH!All those ties are going to play havoc with the minds of applicants who were planning to make their decisions based on ranking.
What the hell is with all of these ties?
Posts
18 comments:
Mine was RNP. I suppose US News didn't want to make Yale jealous.
More over-production of the least production group of Americans.
Enjoy it while you can because you are going to drop like a rock with Walker's draconian budget cuts. Just like what happened to K-12 with his last budget.
Wait, what?
Interesting how static the top 20 seem to be over the years. My main reaction though is the tuitions! Nearly $200K for three years of tuition alone for some schools. My school has more than doubled since I graduated fifteen years ago--way beyond the rate of inflation. Good thing I didn't decide to wait before enrolling!
Well...this is interesting. It's a couple of years old, but I think it is still relevant.
All that aside, I thought we had moved beyond the US News results. The results are self-reported, and easily manipulated.
So Harvard Law rakes in almost $100M each year in tuition. NYU brings in more than $80M.
Money well spent is not the phrase that comes to mind.
"tie" is a dog whistle. Law schools are racist.
There are lies, damned lies, and college rankings.
UW is a hell of a value, relatively speaking. Not sure the world needs value law schools, but any law student who ignores that is crazy.
Is anyone even using the rankings? From what I've read on Insty, the shenanigans involved have corrupted whatever values the rankings once had.
Harvard has more money than God. I did a presentation at the Harvard School of Public Health last week. They changed their name to the HSPH/T.H. Chan School.
T.H. Chan, some billionaire from Hong Kong, who went to HSPH donated over 800 million dollars just to the school of public health. Kennedy Schools get huge donations too-I am surprised it still is called the Kennedy School.
Harvard's endowment is sick.
I call bullshit.
That many ties suggests that either the underlying metric is too coarse to discriminate differences between schools (e.g; ranking 100 schools each scored on a ten point scale), or that there just isn't that much meaningful difference between the schools. Either way, publishing rank alone leaves an impression of precission and forces an equal interval difference from top to bottom almost certainly not supported by the underlying data.
Rank the schools if you must but publish the scores instead of the rank number.
Our snot-nosed 22 year-olds got higher LSATs than your snot-nosed 22 year-olds.
interesting how static the top 20 seem to be over the years.
Unfortunately not for the law school I went to. It was a top 20 school when I was admitted in '89 and now isn't even in the top 50.
ATL says that the USN&R rankings are all about prestige, of the sorry-you're-not good enough kind measured by the rejection rate. Sounds right. It's self-fulfilling, of course. So it's not surprising that the top ranks are four Ivies, and the usual Ivy-equivalents.
The most significant difference that a student might note is not in the content of the legal education but in the quality and ambition of the other students, and the networking potential from becoming an alum. Employers like the "sorry-you're-not good enough" sorting that the schools provide, since it's otherwise very difficult to tell one young law grad from another if you're making an employment decision.
None of that is likely to change any time soon.
I haven't paid much attention to LS rankings, but as I review these I don't see much that's very different from my own perceptions in 1965 when I was a college senior. I don't think that Duke was regarded as top rank nationally then, although certainly it was highly regarded in the South. Same for Texas.
In my 3+ decades in the Big Law Firm in Washington, I interviewed a lot of applicants, almost all of whom were from the top 20 on this list (and the large majority from the top 10). My comments on their records and interview performance were generally along the lines of "Better than mine".
Still, their success rates at the Big Law Firm were not proportional to the prestige of their law schools or their grade point averages.
BUT, please note, when we hired laterals -- either as senior associates or counsels, or as partners -- they were very often from less "prestigious" law schools. They had proved themselves in practice, and may even have been able to bring a book of business with them. Some (not all) had very successful careers.
Given the HUGE cost of most of the "top-ranked" law schools, a confident and aggressive young man or woman might try the path less traveled; it could make all the difference.
Somebody opened a new law school in 2009?! Talk about bad timing.
Post a Comment