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Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Law - US News Law School ranking system may be changed [Updated]

The WSJ reports today, in a front-page story by Amir Efrati headlined "Law School Rankings Reviewed to Deter 'Gaming,'" that:

The most widely watched ranking of U.S. law schools may move to stop an increasingly popular practice: schools gaming the system by channeling lower-scoring applicants into part-time programs that don't count in the rankings.

U.S. News & World Report is "seriously" considering reworking its ranking system to crack down on the practice, says Robert Morse, director of data research at the magazine, who is in charge of its influential list.

Such a move could affect the status of dozens of law schools. It would likely reverse gains recently made by a number of schools that have helped their revenue by increasing their rosters of part-time students with lower entrance-exam scores and grade-point averages, without having to pay a price in the rankings.

In some cases the part-timers' course load is barely less than that of full-timers, and they are able to transfer into the schools' full-time programs in their second year. Statistics about second-year students' pre-law school scores also aren't counted in the rankings.

Counting part-timers would roil the law-school rankings, which have a big impact on where students apply and from where law firms hire. A number of law-school administrators interviewed about the potential change contend it could have another effect: narrowing a traditional pathway to law school for minorities and working professionals. Those groups often perform worse on the important Law School Admission Test, or LSAT, and schools could feel pressure to raise their admission thresholds.

A change in criteria would "catch the outliers but punish part-time programs that have existed forever and aren't doing it to game the system," says Ellen Rutt, an associate law-school dean at the University of Connecticut. If U.S. News makes the move, many schools with part-time programs would have a tough choice: Leave their admission standards for part-timers unchanged, which could hurt their rank, or raise the standards, likely shrinking the programs and cutting revenue.

The story includes a graphic on how some schools' rankings could be affected, but no Indiana law schools are included in the illustration.

[Updated at 11:15 am] A reader writes to point out this paragraph in the story, explaining how these rankings can have a significant impact:

Initially, "the effect of a drop in the rankings is psychological, but it can have real institutional consequences," says Bill Henderson, a law professor at Indiana University-Bloomington who tracks the legal job market. For some schools that fail to effectively manage their U.S. News ranking, the drop could cause a snowball effect over several years in which there is a "falloff in good applicants and eventually a tapering off of employers," he says.
See also this just-posted entry from the WSJ Law Blog. A quote:
These kinds of drops can put the jobs of law school deans in jeopardy. Nancy Rapoport, the former dean of the University of Houston Law Center, resigned in 2006 after the school had fallen from 50th to 70th in the span of a few years. (The school is now ranked 55th; Rapoport has moved on to teach at University of Nevada-Las Vegas.) In the 2009 rankings, Buffalo law school experienced the most precipitous drop in the rankings, from 77 to 100.
A front-page Indianapolis Star story in 2005 (quoted in this April 11, 2005 ILB entry) began:
[T]he latest ranking of the Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis -- the state's largest of four law schools -- has plummeted from 63rd to a tie for 95th in the U.S. News & World Report graduate school listings.
This entry just posted on the Volokh Conspirary is also worth reading - he discusses "long established part-time evening programs."

More: See Brian Leiter's Law School Reports, here. A quote:

But including part-time students is also going to have pernicious consequences as well, given the way the US News tail wags the legal education dog. For many, probably most, part-time programs serve older, working students, who might not have time for fancy LSAT prep courses, but who bring levels of dedication, seriousness, and pertinent experience that enrich legal education and the legal profession. What a loss it will be if, out of fear of US News, schools start cutting back their part-time programs or rejecting these students whose numerical credentials might impede their crusade for a "higher ranking."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on August 26, 2008 09:03 AM
Posted to General Law Related