New graduate school rankings are out

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Michigan
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Rankings are misleading/inaccurate in many ways but even if erroneous can themselves affect reputation. I was speaking to the head of hiring at a BigLaw firm today and she mentioned how articles being passed around among firms and listed on on blogs she frequents mentioned how Michigan Law had dropped. I hate to see that and just hope it does not drop further.

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Unfortunately 2135ar, Michigan Law has dropped, albeit very little. Not so long ago, Michigan law used to be a clear top 3 Law school, on par with Harvard and Yale and a tiny notch above the likes of Chicago and Columbia. Today, Michigan obviously remains a definite top 14 law school, but it is clearly not a top 3 Law school. At best, Michigan is Law is still regarded in the same league as Chicago and Columbia, at worst, more like Cornell, Duke and Northwestern. In reality, probably somehwere in the middle, with the likes of Cal, NYU, Penn and UVa.

That being said, in your son’s case, law firms do not distinguish between Michigan Law and Duke Law.

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@blue85 …I’m not saying you think Michigan knuckles under to usnews, but I just want to emphasize that they don’t.

  1. They really do accept students based on fit, and they give virtually no advantage to undergrads from universities with high usnews rankings. Years ago I was at the accepted new students recruiting weekend...it might have been in March. They had a list of schools where students came from. There must have been 60 or 70 different schools represented. There were students from top National Schools, top engineering schools, top liberal arts schools, service academies, and top international schools. No university was over represented.
  2. Michigan will go out of their way to compete with Berkeley, MIT, Cal Tech, and Stanford to get accepted students to choose Michigan engineering grad school. They will often win too.
  3. Michigan largely ignores rankings when hiring faculty. They may give a slight preference to Berkeley and MIT grads. Otherwise they hire faculty from Universities that are within the top ~25 of USnews based on publications and the quality of their research. They also hire numerous faculty who completed their PhDs at top universities outside of the US. This is different from other university's engineering programs where 70-80% of the faculty may have earned a PhD at one of 5 universities