<p>KMWJES, I caught that also and loved it. I put part of the transcript on my FB just to reinforce what I have been saying about Bama in general to my friends. Don’t forget also that, as has been covered elsewhere on this board, Honors College students with a requisite GPA get automatically accepted in UA Law School without the LSAT. M2, correct me if I am wrong, but that is what I thought was said.</p>
<p>Here is part of the transcript:</p>
<p>Malcolm Gladwell, writer for the New Yorker, was on CNN’s GPS this AM. This is part of the exchange.</p>
<p>ZAKARIA: So you went to a website. And you looked at Law School rankings? </p>
<p>GLADWELL: Yes.</p>
<p>ZAKARIA: And there’s a way you can reengineer them? </p>
<p>GLADWELL: Yes. So there’s this really, really fun website by a guy named – called The Ranking Game by a guy named Jeffrey Stake who is a Law Professor in Indiana. What he did is he loaded all of the information available about Law Schools onto a spreadsheet. And he allows you to construct your own rankings. </p>
<p>So, you know, there’s ten different variables, you know, academic reputation of the faculty, reputation of the school, tuition, number of publications of the faculty. So you can choose which criteria you care about and also how much to weight them. Of course, the dirty little secret of these rankings systems is which criteria you choose and more importantly, how much you choose to rate them makes all the difference in the world in the final ranking. </p>
<p>So if you put in a very simple thing about LSAT scores, reputation and faculty resources, how much money the school spends on a student, what you will get is something that looks like the U.S. news ranking. You’ll get Harvard, Yale, Stanford, right? Very familiar with those. The minute you monkey with that list even a little bit, it changes dramatically. </p>
<p>ZAKARIA: You mean, monkey with the weightings?</p>
<p>GLADWELL: Yes. Or add different criteria. If you add, for example, I think, in this day and age when the unemployment levels for graduating Law School students are really high, and when the costs of Law School in many cases has become prohibitive. And kids are graduating from Law School with $250,000 in debt, right? I think that tuition is a reasonable thing to add into the mix. The minute you add tuition into the mix, Brigham Young becomes a top ten Law School. And then that’s if you do it a little bit. If you add tuition a lot into the mix, all of a sudden Alabama becomes a top ten Law School. </p>
<p>Now, in discussions of elite law schools, do we ever bring up Brigham Young or Alabama? No. Why not? So if I can construct a rankings system which equally weights their cost effectiveness and the quality of the education I get these two schools that all of a sudden leap into the elite level, schools that never get into the discussion in our society.</p>
<p>Why would we want a rankings system which excludes cost effectiveness, which penalizes a school for providing a quality education at a reasonable price? Particularly at a time when the educational world is sinking under its own weight, right? The one thing we all agree is that higher education in this country is out of control because they can’t – the costs keep going up every year faster than the rate of inflation. People can’t afford to go to college. We’re in this crisis, cost crisis. And yet we have a rankings system which refuses to acknowledge the importance of cost effectiveness.</p>