Some thoughts on rankings

Comments

• john1234-1 Alum Member

  May 2019 426 karma

  Very informative post. Thank you @"David.Busis"
• 1 Like

  FoolProofFun Alum Member

  May 2019 edited May 2019 122 karma

  I actually think USNWR rankings are intelligent. They are designed to measure academic prestige, and this I think they do relatively well. I understand questioning why job placement doesn't matter more, but then, there is probably a way to correlate job placement with the USNWR rankings such that they would line up. Yale, for example, might not employ as many folks in firms, but it absolutely has the best overall placement power for firms and opportunities generally. I don't think anyone would dispute that, even if many Yalies choose non-firm routes. The problem with "job-based" rankings like ATL is that they were created by (and for) loan averse people. ATL ranks some middling T-14 schools above some T-3 schools because those firms' best opportunities are with firms. UVA, Duke, and Penn send tons of students into big firms, but can't propel students into government and other super-elite opportunities like Yale, Harvard, and Stanford, so they are favored. But in reality, the T-3 are still far and away superior. If you're loan averse and just want a biglaw job, Harvard is still going to be better than UVA or Duke. It is just going to cost more, and trying to bend the employment stats to make lower T-14s better is just capitalizing on people's insecurity. ATL thinks it is doing people a service, but what about the kid who takes a scholly to a lower-ranked school and then doesn't get the job? There are plenty of those kids, they just don't get talked about, and by and large they are a quiet group because although they have no job, they also have no debt, but is that honestly something anyone wants?

  The big caveat to USNWR, of course, is regional firm placement. As soon as you stop thinking in terms of "national market" opportunities (basically large metro areas), then the placement power of highly ranked schools fades away. And even in large cities, top students from lower ranked schools, and other students from regional schools will still place into those cities, albeit potentially into different firms, although no one goes to those schools gunning for those positions necessarily.

  At the end of the day, I think the concept of "going to law school to become a lawyer" is a weird post-recession idea that actually makes no sense. You go to law school to go to law school, and then there are different routes to employment as a lawyer after school. Law school has never, ever been a strictly pre-professional school like Dental school, medical school, engineering school, etc where the degree itself guarantees something. The jobs-based rankings are obsessed with trying to make it that way, but they're not going to succeed because at the end of the day, it costs a lot of money to run a law school, and not everyone is going to be able to attend an expensive school and get an expensive job—and there are always going to be enough people with enough money to pay for school without the guarantee of a job. It all goes back to people going to law school because they think it will make them money. Law school will not make you wealthy as a lawyer, even if you go to Yale or Harvard, period. Even if you go to a T-14 with a sizable scholarship and then get biglaw, you're not going to become wealthy long-term by being an associate in an expensive city. It just isn't happening. Where you go isn't enough.