You need to give them a week or two :-).
It’s up to at least 9 of the 14 “first tier” law schools now. Earlier this afternoon, Duke announced that they will no longer participate, as listed at Message from Dean Abrams regarding withdrawal from U.S. News rankings | Duke University School of Law .
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It’s up to at least 10 of 14 now. UCLA is not participating – https://law.ucla.edu/news/message-interim-dean-russell-korobkin .
I don’t believe UCLA is part of the traditional T14, but I’d love to be a fly on the wall at Chicago/NYU/UVa/Penn/Cornell right now.
Yes, UCLA was ranked 14th last year in 2021, but is 15th now. So of the current top 15 USNWR ranked law schools, at least 10 say they are not participating.
Ha, I hadn’t seen that blip in 2021. I bet everyone at Georgetown suddenly started saying “T15” there for awhile.
They may have, but unlikely. The so-called T14* is the 14 law schools that have been ranked in the top 10 at least once since USNews started. As a result, they are considered ‘national’ law schools, for whatever that is worth.
UCLA may have gotten up to 14, but would have had to jump 4 more spots to join the T15, at which time the T14 would have grown to T15 as 15 schools would have then been ranked in teh to 10 at least once.
Note, the label ‘T14’ is not used by USNews, just by us rankings junkies. (And didn’t Texas also get to #14 one year?)
Now back to your regular programming.
T-14 is used by law firms in determining their recruiting strategies… but schools number 13 and 14 are going to vary by geography!
UChicago says it won’t follow others and pull out of the rankings UChicago Law Says It Will Not Follow Others in Boycotting US News Rankings | Law.com
Contrary to the trend, Chicago announced that they are going to submit info to US News U. Chicago Law School sticks to US news rankings as peers stand up - California News , making Chicago the only top 5 ranked law school that will participate.
Chicago is in a unique position with their history of gaming US News ranking, bragging about USNWR rankings, and almost being called out in some of the announcements from other colleges (talking about activities that Chicago does, without mentioning school names).
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I think that their concern with rankings is kind of unnecessary, as those in the know have always considered UChicago to be top-notch – even when they were ranked like 16th in USNews’ National U ranking. They’re always in or around the top-10 in the Times and ARWU rankings – which cover the entire U, not just undergrad – as well.
They’ve garnered a slew of Nobels, are famous for their own school of economic thought, and are generally considered to be one of the most intellectual universities in the US. Their academic rep is massive.
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The USNWR ranking is not based on things like Nobel prizes, if the college considered to be one of the most intellectual universities, or even a group of knowledgeable persons debating about which college is “best”. It is instead based on a an arbitrary formula, and some colleges game that formula instead of doing what is best for the college, including Chicago.
Regarding Chicago specifically, prior to focusing on rankings, Chicago used to complain that they were a top notch college, yet still fell behind peers in public perception. For example, The 2010 NYT article at College Applications Continue to Increase. When Is Enough Enough? - The New York Times quotes then Dean Boyer as saying,
“I believe we are a better university than they {Columbia} are, so I think we should have more applications than they do”
…
“I don’t think Chicago should stand behind New York on this one. We deserve the same number of applications, if not more.”
The article makes it sound like Boyer and the admin were no longer satisfied with being thought of as a niche school with a reputation of “where fun goes to die.” President Zimmer (started in 2006) said he wanted more applications from NY and commissioned research about how to increase applications and was successful. There was a 40% increase in applications that year from Stuy alone – the HS for which Columbia matriculates the most students. They hired Nondorf who according to the article had a reputation as a “super marketer” He made a recruitment booklet and updated the website to made Chicago look more fun. Recruitment officers visited twice as many high schools. in 2010, Chicago hired the marketing firm Royal & Company who is credited for inventing college marking spam mailings (see The man who invented college spam ). This was also during the period in which Chicago stopped posting ACT/SAT score distributions and instead started posting lowest SAT/ACT score of all admitted students. Chicago became the first top 20 USNWR national type college to go test optional. Chicago made various other changes including things like adding the full spectrum of EA/ED/ED II and giving a strong boost over RD, targeting prep school kids, giving more merit scholarships than peers, etc.
The efforts were largely successful. Chicago had a huge explosion in applications – I expect a far higher increase in applications than any college Chicago would consider a peer. Chicago also had a large increase in USNWR ranking… reaching all the way to #3 (for undergrad) – only behind Princeton and Harvard for the pre-COVID admission cycle.
Is Chicago a better college now than when it was rated 15th in 2006 and had a 38% acceptance rate? It’s debatable, but more clear is the Boyer/Zimmer/Nondorf took steps targeted at changing their perception, including steps that seem focused on targeting specific USNWR formula criteria.
Chicago is far from the only college that makes changes or spends $ to improve/hold law school rankings that are not to the benefit of students/college outside of indirect effects of ranking, which is a problem.
Yeah, USNews focuses on undergrad. ARWU and Times appear to look more at (or at least heavily include) grad and PhD.
Anyone could devise a ranking formula. I think USNews’ undergrad formula is better than most, but my main point was – those who know understand the quality of UChicago. Increased applications won’t move the needle much, if at all, on the quality of teaching or the academic culture at the school. Much like Reed in culture, UChicago and Reed seem to hold opposing views on the importance of rankings.
Better than most at what? Identifying the best college for the students reading the magazine/website? Creating a formula that is meaningful way of measuring the true quality of the college? Ranking colleges high that readers expect to be ranked high (HYPSM)?
USNWR does well on the last metric because their formula emphasizes things that favor high endowment per student, and HYPSM are the 5 “national” colleges with the highest endowment per student. If the ranking was 100% based on endowment per student, then the top 6 “national” (undergrad) would be as follows.
- Princeton
- Yale
- Stanford
- Harvard
- MIT
- Caltech
I wouldn’t say Chicago and Reed have opposing views on the “importance” of rankings, but they have expressed very different views about USNWR, including about participation in USNWR. Much like the current law school movement, Reed withdrew from the rankings in 1995. Many colleges wrote letters expressing strong support for Reed’s decision, including Stanford, but few followed Reed.
Reed suffered numerous negative effects from the decision. Reed’s USNWR ranking immediately plummeted after they stopped participating in the survey, dropping ~100 spots in a single year to tier 4 (ranked 122 to 161). Reed’s ranking remained low for decades. According to the study described at https://www.causeweb.org/usproc/sites/default/files/usresp/2019-1/A%20True%20Lie%20about%20Reed%20College%20US%20News%20Ranking.pdf , if USNWR followed its formula, Reed would have been ranked #38, but instead Reed was ranked #90 in 2019 at time of study .
According to Reed’s website," In a presentation to the Annual Forum for the Association for Institutional Research in May 2014, Robert Morse, the director of data research for U.S. News , revealed that if a college doesn’t fill out the survey, then the guidebook arbitrarily assigns certain key statistics at one standard deviation below the mean.", which would explain why Reed’s USNWR rank was so much lower than calculated by the formula. I doubt that USNWR will do this for law schools because if all of the top 5 except Chicago plummeted in rankings next year, the ranking would look wrong to readers.
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While imperfect, I prefer USNews to Forbes because the former at least attempts to gauge teaching/academic quality, while Forbes seems to overvalue outcomes and undervalue academic/teaching quality. (Forbes includes no measure for academic/teaching quality)
It’s not easy to evaluate teaching quality, or to compare the teaching quality of two schools, because typically we don’t study the same things at multiple schools. But USNews at least tries, with the Academic Rep and Faculty Resources sections – those total 40% of the ranking.
And while anecdotes aren’t full sets of data, reading students’ observations on sites like this also help us to understand the academic culture and form our own opinions of the academic quality at a school.
The “academic rep” ranking is a survey in which admins rank hundreds of colleges (many that they are not familiar with) on a scale of 1 = “marginal” to 5 = “distinguished.” It’s not really a measure of “teaching quality”. It’s more of a popularity contest, that favors colleges with the most brand awareness and colleges that admins expect to be rated high get rated high, based on past US News rankings.
The “faculty resources” category is primarily a measure of class size and faculty salary, rather than “teaching quality”. There may be a loose correlation between salary and teaching quality, but I’d expect salary is more driven by things like tenure, past research, department, … than quality of undergraduate teaching. This fits with my earlier comment above emphasizing criteria that favors high endowment per student colleges, rather than things like “teaching quality”, which would not be as biased towards high endowment per student.
Forbes tries to present themselves as an alternative to US News that focuses on outputs rather than inputs, so they don’t attempt to measure any of the above and instead focus on outputs of graduates. For example, the highest weighted category is salary of graduates (this is also problematic). Outcomes is primarily driven by admitting students who are likely to do well in the measured outcome categories rather than anything the college does, so outcomes are well correlated with selectivity.
The end result is both lists are dominated by highly selective colleges. However, there are some differences, particularly in publics. For example, Berkeley is rated #2 on Forbes and was #1 last year, while Berkeley is rated #20 on US News. . Berkeley is not going to excel in the class size and faculty salary US News categories noted above to the same degree as peers, as well as others than emphasize high endowment per student, but it may excel in the Forbes student outcome categories.
In my opinion, both rankings methodologies are very poor ways to evaluate the “best college”. One could come up with a formula that was less bad than either US News or Forbes, but it’s still not going to have much correlation with the best college for a particular student reading the list. Rather than using such magazine/website lists of “best” college, a far better strategy is to review which colleges do well/poorly in the criteria that is important to individual students which may include things like cost after aid/scholarships, strength of planned field of study, location, availability of desired ECs/activities, etc. No general magazine/website list is going to be personalized to this degree.
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I suppose the argument could be made that smaller class sizes lead to a better learning environment for most, compared to survey lectures with 500 kids. That doesn’t represent teaching quality per se – maybe “quality of learning environment” would be a useful factor.
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Of course, the tradeoff with small class sizes for the common frosh-level introductory courses is that teaching resources used for such are less available to offer a larger selection of upper level courses, or offer those upper level courses at a greater frequency. Which is more valuable? It depends on the student.
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I don’t agree that smaller class sizes lead to better learning environments.
I took classes with hundreds of students- and scores of kids lined up along the aisles, crowded into the back, “standing room only” because they couldn’t get the class on their schedule but they wanted to audit. Why? Because the professors were “justifiably famous”. These were scholars at the top of their respective fields who were also phenomenal instructors. Justifiably famous.
I took a class on Shakespearean tragedy in college. I could quote you – 45 years later- from the lectures on Lear, Othello, etc. He was a showman for sure (which is why so many students audited his class- people on campus talked about his lectures for days afterwards) but he made archaic material come to life. I know dozens of people who took “Shakespearean Seminar” in college- 12 students sitting around a table in a conference room- and guess what- they think Shakespeare is overrated. They got their insights from other 19 year olds; I heard it from a master scholar and teacher.
I could describe the same phenomenon with two of my Classics professors (they switched off year after year for who won the undergrad teaching award), an Econ professor (he was shy and quiet and very introverted when you met him in his office but he came alive in front of a lecture hall), etc.
Why are these classes sell outs? Because hundreds of students keep their name on a waiting list in order to get that oversold class on their schedule. Nobody is taking Sophocles to get admitted to med school or to get their ticket punched on their way to a lucrative career in investment banking. They are taking it because the professor is reputed to be phenomenal, and it is a once in a lifetime opportunity to gain insights which you cannot get by reading on your own, or by listening to a classmate “Here’s how I interpret it”.
I’d pit these experiences against the tiny class size leading to “better learning environment” any day.
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I actually enjoyed some of my large lectures too, mainly for the anonymity of it – I could kind of do my thing, as long as I kept relatively quiet and was otherwise unobtrusive. In smaller classes, I felt more accountable and almost as if a spotlight was focused on me. So while some kids may learn better in smaller classes, not everyone does. Fair enough.
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