This is probably covered elsewhere, but I’m not going to scour the forum. In the wake of Yale LS pulling out of US News, the WSJ did a good piece on the subject. I think it’s behind a paywall, but here’s the link: The Unraveling of the U.S. News College Rankings - WSJ
I thought this piece was particularly worth noting:
Critics question priorities in law-school rankings, where last year 11.25% of a score came from students’ LSAT and GRE scores. Only 3% was tied to the share of graduates who passed the bar exam, a prerequisite for practicing law.
I wonder if this will get US News to change its methodology, and if so, if that will change law school behavior as it relates to admitting largely on GPA/LSAT.
USN changes its methodology almost every year. I heard a podcast once that was discussing rankings. The bottom line is that colleges do not change that much annually, but USN has clicks to sell. If the rankings were static, people would not care.
The important thing to remember is that USNWR rankings are a marketing tool, not a scientific measurement.
When the rankings were first created in the early 80s, the directive to the team was to produce rankings that had some well known names at the top (so the list would look legitimate) and a few surprising names that would intrigue readers. This has been a very successful strategy and still drives how the ranking is created each year.
They periodically tweak the factors and weights as @1dadinNC said, but always in a way that keeps the private elites at the top.
If the law school rankings instead focused on bar pass rates, wouldn’t the law schools still try to admit the highest performing applicants on measures with the highest correlation to bar pass rate? If those measures happen to be GPA and LSAT, would that change rankings or law school behavior much?
For undergraduate, graduation rates are strongly correlated to entering student academic profile, so graduation rates and incoming student academic attributes are not much different in terms of ranking criteria.
It definitely is a marketing tool. I can’t tell you how many times international students brought up rankings - they are very important in decisions for international full pay families.
I know too much about how the rankings work to put stock in them. But schools who are on the list typically prefer to stay on.
The rankings will be tweaked only if the newer version drives more internet traffic, and especially if it increases the number of people who get aid subscriptions. Oh, and to match the image that their corporate entity wants to project.
Since they are a corporate entity, they want their rankings to reflect corporate ideals. So the wealthiest colleges will always be on top, as will those who have the most graduates who go to high paying jobs. Now that many corporate entities are playing with equality and such, USNews has started adding some minor tweaks in that direction.
What would happen is they would admit the same students but would do more to help their students pass the bar if they really cared about the impact on their rankings (ie teach towards bar or provide more resources for prep courses).
I doubt any of the top schools would change but schools below the T20 may.
If a ranking is based solely on opinions (for example, USNWR’s “Best Undergraduate Computer Science Programs Rankings”) then it’s a subjective ranking.
But USNWR’s “Best Colleges” ranking uses many factors - and some like faculty compensation and alumni giving rate seem questionable to me. In my opinion, these factors are an indicator of institutional wealth rather than educational quality.
And yes, USNWR gets picked on more than others because it’s the most widely cited ranking list.
It would certainly scramble the results to some extent since there are 50 different state bar exams and the ivies would suddenly have to defend their prepping for the two hardest ones to pass - New York and California. And I’d be very surprised if New York Law School wasn’t at least as proficient as NYU LS in getting their grads prepared for the NYS bar exam.
The question is whether the alumni become wealthy after having attended the institution, or whether they come in wealthy. Not all schools where the alumni come in wealthy have the same level of alumni donations after the fact. I also don’t think it is the dollar amount that matters, as opposed to what percentage of the alumni give anything at all.
The thing is the schools that are best for improving social mobility are generally not the highly rejectives (partially because they have such a high proportion of affluent students to start with).
Various methodologies to measure which schools are best at improving social mobility, here are a few:
Ironically, I’ve always thought of the USNWR ratings as one data point (although much of it’s methodology is not data driven, but rather survey based). I find it useful in that context. When we were looking at schools, we used it and several others (I prefer Poets and Quants for actual data) to start building a list. I essentially felt that if the same school appears on most of the top rated lists, there must be something strong and certainly worth a look. Doesn’t make them “better” (totally subjective based on ones wants / needs), but it certainly doesn’t make them worse. That’s another topic but I always am amused by those who totally discount the ranking systems to conclude their school is better. I agree that being highly ranked in and of itself doesn’t make school A better than B, but it certainly doesn’t make it worse.
We then used my distilled list and built a school list based on local, size, etc. Looking back, with the exception of our state flagship (safety - and now highly ranked which I disagree with based on it’s lack of funding / resources), all of the schools our kids applied to were on these lists.
We probably missed many great schools but not sure why list B would be better than list A.
In other threads there were accusations/suspicions that USN tweaked their algorithm to obtain a desired result. Here you go from the article:
“At a January presentation to law schools, Robert Morse, U.S. News’s chief data strategist, disclosed that he didn’t commit to a particular mathematical model until after receiving schools’ data, according to Ian Ayres, an economist and Yale Law School professor who attended the event. Once that information was in hand, Dr. Ayres said, the team ran simulations giving various factors different weights to see the potential outcomes before deciding on a final method.”
I figured this response would show up, and I certainly don’t disagree with it. But it was one passing comment the author threw in, and it’s not clear who made it. I would guess that it wasn’t the Dean of YLS, who as the feature of the piece would likely have received attribution for the point. We also know that law schools, and academia in general, hold other views concerning what they want to see in their student bodies.
If (and it’s a big assumption) that bowing out of a numbers race to the top will alleviate the law schools at Harvard, Yale and UofChicago from having to worry about conceding a few LSAT or GPA points to the others, could it affect who gets in? I really don’t know. LSAT, for example, has always been thrown about in my travels as a strong predictor of first year grades (which as we know sets one up for the second year summer job and in turn the first job). But I’ve seen more students than I can count who were admitted with low scores hit their stride in second semester first year and/or second and third years and leverage what they had into something and go on to a variety of what most would consider good outcomes. Will YLS take a chance on more of that kind of applicant profile? On the other hand, will the GPA be subject to greater scrutiny/taken into context more than it is today? Will the Swarthmore math/physics double major with a 3.7 become (again) more competitive than the Central Washington University business administration major with a 3.85 GPA, holding constant for LSAT? From first hand experience, law school admissions officers are keenly aware of the meaninglessness of the difference in those two GPAs, and if any anything a lot of them will make more favorable assumptions about the Swat kid.
Having been around law school admissions at two national law schools, I can say that it’s never been as cut and dry as it’s often described here on CC. And if you take out any concern about whether you will be leapfrogged by your rival in the Top 5 or the Top 25, might there be at least a slightly lower emphasis on absolute numbers? The bar passage rate tends to follow selectivity, so your point stands. But that’s not the only concern, and I don’t think it’s top of mind at YLS, who will admit a strong class regardless of whether they have new found flexibility on the admissions front.
Wouldn’t standardized tests be the best predictors of… standardized tests, particularly those with similar test characteristics? For example, PSAT and SAT predict each other quite well.
Perhaps a question would be, how similar is the bar exam to the LSAT in test characteristics (as opposed to content differences for testing pre-law versus law graduates)?
The bar exam is completely different than the LSAT. It has an essay component, first. Also, the multiple choice portion is content based, unlike the LSAT, which is more “skill” or “aptitude based.” In my law school experience, the LSAT was not a predictor of first year grades. Many of the top LSAT scorers (as evidenced by scholarships at my school) did not end up in the top of the class.
