<p>And the professor told me that USNews and World Report rankings are very important because.....students care about the rankings...</p>
<p>So....among other things....schools increase their cost of tuition...and open up more classes...and raise the grades....and offer more resources that have nothing really to do with education...And provide their graduates with jobs after graduation...even though these jobs are low paying and have nothing to do with law...So the percentage of graduates who find work looks better..</p>
<p>And I asked..are the students getting a better education with these changes?</p>
<p>And he said, "No."</p>
<p>Plus...the job market is terrible....</p>
<p>And a lot of the legal work is outsourced to cheaper labor....other countries....or to states where lawyers charge less..</p>
<p>Law schools are a BIG $$ maker for many colleges. It will be interesting to see if a “tipping point” has been reached, as fewer and fewer LS grads land the kind of big bucks jobs that made the high costs of LS easy to justify.</p>
<p>^ Identical to business schools. What that law professor wrote is what I’ve been saying for years (as a business school professor). Administrators care a lot about rankings and we jumped through sooo many wasteful hoops and spent money on all kinds of things, and playing all kinds of (most superficial) games and made changes to compete and it only took away from and did not add to the actual education.</p>
How is this possibly a bad thing? Especially since:</p>
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Not yet convinced that this is bad either. The subsidized tennis classes and free counseling sessions I get at my current school don’t really add to my academic education, but they certainly make me a lot happier.</p>
<p>The jobs are crap jobs…you don’t need a law degree…and they are offered to make the stats look better…</p>
<p>All these extra resources cost money…somebody is paying for these unnecessary resources…</p>
<p>Too many students are graduating from law schools…the jobs aren’t there right now…</p>
<p>As far as employers go…some are status conscious…</p>
<p>The firm I am with…when we need lawyers…we hire lawyers who we think are good…we don’t ask where they were educated…but that is only one data point…</p>
<p>We also like to use lawyers that are reasonable in their billing…but…sometimes we do get some bizarre bills…like having 15 lawyers work on something when it should take a few…
But I guess that is a little off topic…</p>
<p>You are saying that you would rather be unemployed than have a job offer only tangentially related to your law education? </p>
<p>The employment statistics for law school rankings may not measure what you would like them to measure; but if the rankings motivate law schools to help their students find jobs, any job at all, that’s arguably a good thing. If these “crap jobs” were worse than what students could find on their own, they would not be taking them.</p>
<p>The problem not only arises from a shrinking job market. It also arises because of a dramatic increase in the number of law school graduates that are being produced each year. Many new law schools were started over the last 20 years, and many schools increased their enrollments.</p>
<p>So if one asks the inverse question: So without the rankings, would the quality of teachers, quality of teaching, individual quality of students, and the cohort, be any different?</p>
<p>How would the prospective student or professor have any assurance of the quality of education for the same bucks?</p>
<p>I love these economic, philosophical problems.</p>
<p>I’d have rather saved my money than gone to undergrad and law school for a job that only needs a GED.</p>
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<p>That’s true. If you want to go to a top law firm, it seems to be much easier if you’re in the top 15-20% of your law school class (which better be a top 25 law school, too). Otherwise, job prospects seem bleek. Save your money and get work experience, instead.</p>
<p>The problem is the tyranny of a single ranking, US News. I have a keen interest in this because my D1, now a college sophomore, has entertained some thoughts about law school, so I’ve made inquiries. I’ve talked to some law professors and even some people in law school admissions, and they all hate it, but all the law schools are marching in lockstep with the US News law school rankings because they feel they have no choice. Those in the top 10 live in mortal fear of slipping to #11; those in the top 25 live in terror of falling to #26, and so on. If they slip even a notch, the alums are up in arms, the students are in near-revolt because they fear their degree is being debased and their career prospects diminished, and the prospective students—including those with the GPAs and LSAT scores the school needs to remain competitive–view the school as in decline, and one notch less desirable than whoever managed to pass them.</p>
<p>Among other things, this means they can’t be “holistic” in admissions anymore; it’s entirely a numbers-driven enterprise. A 3.6 GPA from Harvard is just a 3.6 to U.S. News, and it won’t help the applicant get into the University of Minnesota Law School (where the target median GPA this year is 3.8); but if that applicant balances the sub-median GPA with an LSAT score above the school’s median, it might be a different story. A 3.9 from Podunk State, on the other hand, looks just as good to U.S. News as a 3.9 from Harvard, so the 3.9 from Podunk State might be enough to get the applicant admitted even with a sub-median LSAT score, depending on who else is in the pool and how they affect both LSAT and GPA medians. Yale and Stanford, small law schools that get to choose from the creme de la creme, are partial exceptions to this; they have the luxury of being holistic in choosing “interesting” applicants out of an exceptionally strong pool, all of whom have tippy-top GPAs and LSAT scores. But even Harvard, whose law school class is roughly 3 times the size of Yale’s, is compelled to use a numbers-driven approach. </p>
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<p>Fair point. It’s not clear it’s always helpful, though. What I’ve heard is that some law schools are hiring their own graduates to do low-level legal research or administrative jobs around the law school, not as permanent employees but as temporary workers for the academic year following law school, so they’re recorded as “employed 6 months after graduation,” the employment figure that affects the school’s U.S. News ranking. After that, U.S. News doesn’t care, so the school doesn’t care, and the graduate is right back on the street. For most it’s probably better to be working at a low-level job for that year than not working at all, and it may be easier to be hired into a better job from a low-level job than from idleness. But for some the temp job is a stop-gap that turns into a dead end. And there might be a few for whom the time spent working at the temp job might have been better spent pounding the pavement in search of a job that might lead to a real career. On the whole, though, it’s true that the people who take these jobs are those who calculate (rightly or wrongly) that they don’t have better prospects elsewhere.</p>
<p>BC- your analysis is only partially correct. A 3.9 from podunk U is only helpful in admissions to a top law school when it is combined with the right LSAT score… If that student has a 175 on the LSAT then as you correctly note, he or she is not penalized by not having attended an elite undergrad. But since the LSAT and SAT are correlated (not perfectly… but it would be very difficult for a kid who got 600 on the verbal SAT to break into the top scores on the LSAT), the fact remains that a high percentage of the law school classes at the top law school come from colleges where the mean entering SAT score is high (i.e. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc.)</p>
<p>It is somewhat misleading to characterize the admissions committees as being indifferent to whether a kid is coming from Podunk or Harvard… given the number of Harvard college graduates populating the top law schools! Yes- on the margin- a high GPA and a high LSAT scorer does not get punished for NOT having gone to Harvard. But if you scroll down the lists of where law students come from, it won’t take long to see how many HYP (etc.) grads there are.</p>
<p>If your D is seriously interested in law school, there was an excellent article in the NYTimes a few months ago about law schools which “buy” high scoring students with merit awards… and what happens to the kids who lose those scholarships. (i.e. lake wobegon effect- everyone can’t be above average). Just to help round out her thinking.</p>
<p>Not what my informants tell me. It’s only a handful of very top law schools that can count on filling their classes with high LSAT and high GPAs. Even at the level of ## 6-7-8 in the US News law school rankings, they need to start “splitting”: they’ll take as many high LSAT/high GPA applicants as they can get, but after that they’ll go for above-median (for them) LSATs coupled with below-median GPAs (to keep their LSAT median up), and balance that with a similar number of below-median LSATs and above-median GPAs (to keep their median GPA up). Bottom line, at Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and maybe 2-3 more schools, you probably need BOTH high GPA and high LSAT. But anywhere below that level, some people who are above the law school’s median in one of those measures but not the other will be accepted.</p>
<p>Now it’s true that the average Harvard grad is far likelier to have a high LSAT than the average Podunk State grad. But some Podunk State grads score quite well on the LSAT; and there are some kids with high SATs (well over 600) at many, many colleges that aren’t particularly highly regarded.</p>
<p>Let’s put it this way: according to my informants, the median Harvard grad (GPA = 3.45 according to the most recent figures I’ve seen) is going to be well below the University of Minnesota’s (U.S. News #20 law school) target median GPA of 3.8, and therefore will need to have an LSAT score above the school’s median (167) to get any serious consideration for admission. I believe the average (mean) LSAT score for Harvard undergrads is 166, just a notch below Minnesota Law’s median; I don’t know what the median LSAT for Harvard undergrads is, but probably pretty close to the mean. If that’s the case, the median Harvard undergrad (3.45 GPA, 166 LSAT) is going to be below Minnesota’s GPA median and below its LSAT median, and won’t be admitted; whereas the applicant with a 3.9 GPA from Podunk State has a fighting chance even with a LSAT score a little below 167 (because she helps them with their GPA median, whereas our hypothetical median Harvard grad hurts them on both measures). </p>
<p>That’s not inconsistent with your point about how many Harvard, etc. grads there are at top law schools; but they represent probably the top quarter to top third of the class in both GPA and LSATs. They’re chosen not because their diploma says “Harvard” but because they’re terrific students, got great grades, and earned top LSAT scores. Send that kid to Podunk State and she’ll still end up with great grades and top LSAT scores, and still be admitted to the top law schools. There just aren’t as many students like that at Podunk State; and of the few who are, probably most are not encouraged to dream they could get into a Yale, Harvard, or Stanford law school.</p>
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<p>It’s premature to say she’s “seriously interested.” It’s just one of several possibilities she’s beginning to explore in parallel. We’re familiar with the NY Times article you refer to. In fact, through family connections we know this whole law school world quite well.</p>
<p>Question: If an applicant graduated from a respected (public flagship) UG program w/ a 3.2 GPA, works several years post graduation then starts taking UG and grad classes at another school (public non-flagship) obtaining a much higher GPA. Will the applicants 2nd schools GPA be used instead of the UG GPA?</p>
<p>Only the GPA from the first undergrad degree will be considered. Any classes taken after receiving their first undergrad degree will not be considered. Even if they attend another grad school, that GPA will not matter.</p>