In a normal year, we’d use this week’s update to discuss some rather mundane matters like how it’s final exam season, how AdComms can be called in to help proctor for tests, isn’t it funny to proctor exams when you admitted these students three years ago, etc., etc., etc. Honestly, mid-May tends to be a fairly quiet time of year! But that was before U.S. News and World Report (USNWR) announced their latest release date (i.e., today) for this year’s law school rankings. As such, it’s “once more unto the breach” regarding this subject.
If you need a recap on the long and winding road that brought us to this point, we applaud your ability to block out all this noise and we also offer the following stripped-down timeline:
- Yale Law announced in November that they would no longer provide USNWR with the internal information the publication historically relied on for a substantial part of its formula. Many schools followed suit for a variety of reasons. The one that hit nearest to our hearts was from Dean Mark West of Michigan Law who wrote that, among other reasons, they would no longer send information to USNWR because “The staff time required to prepare our submission … comes at a cost—both financial and of opportunity—that no public institution should shoulder in the service of a revenue-generating third-party endeavor.” To which every law school admin who ever spent hours upon days compiling, checking, double-checking, and submitting data to USNWR said in firm and enraptured reply: “PREACH!”
- In the ensuing months, USNWR said that they would make changes to their formula to accommodate the reality that not all schools submitted their internal information this year. Rather, the publication would rely only on publicly available information via the American Bar Association as well as the evaluation surveys that USNWR sends every year to law school deans, judges, and lawyers.
- Everyone expected that we would see the published rankings at their normal release date of mid-March. But instead of releasing the rankings at that time, USNWR announced that they would publish them on April 18.
- On April 11, USNWR published a preview of the new T14 on their website. They also provided each law school with information about the new formula for this year as well as their embargoed rankings. And this is when things really took a turn….
- Law schools—en masse—replied to their copy of the rankings by pointing out apparent data errors. On April 21, USNWR took down their preliminary T14 and issued a statement that they were dealing with “an unprecedented number of inquiries” from schools about the embargoed data and would update us all when they had their house in order.
- This Monday (May 8), USNWR told law schools that they would release the rankings this Thursday (May 11). Apparently the house is cleaned up and ready to host everyone.
Since we are writing this on Tuesday for publication on Thursday, goodness knows what further plot twists we’ll have in the next 48 hours!
But let’s put the drama aside and focus on how this affects students. To put it mildly—it really shouldn’t. You should choose a school because it’s the right fit for your academic, financial, professional, and personal needs.
Academically, the law school has the classes, experiential opportunities, and instructional environment to suit your needs.
Financially, the law school has provided you with an aid package that matches both your short-term requirements (i.e., how you are going to pay your bills for the coming three years) and long-term plans (i.e., you can probably take on more loan debt in the short-term if you know that you’ll be pursuing a higher-paid profession in the long-term).
Professionally, the law school has the resources in career development and the kind of alumni network to help you find summer and post-grad employment in your preferred geographic market.
And personally, the law school community just feels right and it will be a comfortable place to study in the coming three years.
Wild fluctuations in the rankings won’t change any of those factors. Further—to go out on a limb—USNWR rankings never influenced any of those matters other than maybe financial aid. For example, students have never needed USNWR to get a sense of employment outcomes because every school’s employment data is readily available through the American Bar Association’s website for required disclosures. Rankings can’t tell you if a school can help you get a job in your preferred geographic market, but the ABA’s information sure can. The rankings can’t accurately capture a school’s academic offerings and how it will fit your needs, but visiting the school, attending information sessions from the admissions office, and networking with both current students and alums would address this concern. And regarding the brief aside about rankings possibly affecting financial aid, it is possible that a school that rises in the rankings will feel less need to provide merit scholarship (because they may be a more desirable school for admitted students) and the school that falls may be compelled to offer more merit scholarship (so as to recruit students who may be more likely to attend a higher-ranked school). But such changes would—at best—be marginal. So as we wrote back in March, our suggestion is “don’t be that student who chooses School A over School B just because the former passed the latter in the rankings—there’s no there there!”
And to put this into a real-life scenario, let’s say that you want to work in a market like New Orleans, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, or Phoenix. Hiring managers at firms in those markets likely attended schools like Tulane, Temple, Villanova, IU Bloomington, Arizona, and Arizona State. For the hiring managers, whether those schools rise or fall in the rankings only matters for bragging rights and conversation fodder during interviews. It won’t affect whether the firms will recruit at those schools—they always will.
So tune in on Thursday when—and maybe still if—USNWR finally publishes this year’s rankings. Pump your fist in celebration if the school where you’re deposited goes up, roll your eyes in annoyance if the school goes down. Give yourself a minute to feel your feelings. But after that minute passes, go back to the real work for the coming year like finding an apartment for August and writing your letters of continued interest.