What’s Going On in the Admissions Cycle Right Now?
As the snow melts and the grass turns a little greener, admissions offices are still reading applications, preparing for visit programs, and waiting for the ultimate late game-curveball to arrive in their email inboxes – the updated US News and World Report (USNWR) rankings.
Historically, USNWR rankings are published in mid-to-late March. USNWR typically gives each school their own rankings report a week or two prior to publication. Beyond being a professional courtesy, this allows schools to address any errors (which – yes – has happened in the past…) as well as prepare for when the rankings go live.
The rankings this year have the chance to be a bit unique. Although they make minor tweaks to their formula every year (and you can see their most recent one here), USNWR’s considerations have remained pretty static over time. However, since a number of schools did not provide USNWR with the usual internal information the publication requires to produce their rankings, USNWR has had to adjust their tactics. Right now, no school knows what changes have been made to the secret sauce. The changes could be minimal or “maximal” (which is a word that actually exists and yet seems like it shouldn’t).
So, why are the rankings such a potential curveball? Answer: because of how much they matter to students. For instance, LSAC provides schools with data each year regarding how much of their applicant pool and admitted group overlapped with another school. LSAC also gives schools the next step in that “information ladder” – how many of those overlapping admits enrolled at their school, how many enrolled at the other school, and how many chose to attend some other school. With this data in hand, schools can calculate their “win percentage” against every other law school. What they find quickly is that minor changes in the rankings have big effects.
Let’s say that you work at School A. You’re always in the same rankings neighborhood as School B – you annually go back-and-forth in the rankings. In the years when School A is ranked ahead of School B, your win percentage for overlapping admits will go up. In years when School B jumps ahead in USNWR, the win percentage goes down. In some cases, you may have dozens of overlapping admits with School B so a change in win percentage of even just 5-10% can have a noticeable difference. But usually a rankings drop versus School B is balanced out by a rankings gain against School C, so no one’s orbit is knocked too far off kilter.
(And as a quick note – these kind of minor rankings variations have no objective basis in reality! If a school goes from 34 to 26 in the rankings, that doesn’t mean that they’re a much better school this year than last year; if a school drops from 45 to 55, it’s not because of internal problems there. USNWR tweaks their formula each year and that leads to minor changes in the rankings – it just happens! But you can almost bet that the core data for the school as reflected in things like graduation rates, bar pass rates, employment rates, etc. remained about the same as the year before. So 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!)
Tying this back to the admissions process, there’s been speculation that some schools have been slow to issue decisions in order to suss out what will happen with the rankings formula. If true, this could be for two reasons:
1) Maybe schools want to see the new formula so that they can adjust their final waves of decisions in order to max out their rankings potential for next year. I think that this is a possible - but risky - strategy. While the benefit for schools would be maxing out rankings next year, the danger is that they’ve waited so long to make offers of admission that a large chunk of those last-minute admits may be turned off to the school. There’s a real balancing act there!
2) Maybe schools want to see the new rankings because they’re worried that a drastic change may lead to big skews in their win percentage. All of that stuff I wrote about above … what if School A not only passes School B … what if they are now 15 spots higher in the rankings than School B? What if School A also passes School C who is usually 20 spots higher? In a normal year, those kinds of ranking shifts are almost impossible short of bribery, black magic, or – more realistically – substantial human error. But in a year when so many schools aren’t participating in the rankings, perhaps things can best be summarized by the immortal Kevin Garnett:
Hopefully you can also reenact KG’s glory after you get those last minute-decisions from schools!