“At one time, U.S. News & World Report law school rankings were extremely important to law schools,” Brian Fry of the University of Kentucky and Christopher “CJ” Ryan of Indiana University write in a new study. “Law schools literally lived or died based on their U.S. News rankings,” Fry and Ryan say.
But now, these law professors argue, U.S. News school ratings have become significantly less important, and possibly irrelevant, to prospective law students.
Frye and Ryan analyzed a decade of US News rankings and what they call “revealed preference rankings,” which rank schools based on the admissions decisions of students with the best grades (GPA and LSAT scores). They sought to see whether a law school's rise (or fall) in the US News ranking made that law school's entering class stronger (or weaker) the following year. If prospective law students pay attention to rankings, they would expect to see a strong correlation between changes in rank and the quality of the class.
However, the authors found no actual correlation between the two measures, which led them to conclude that “although U.S. News produces rankings of law schools, prospective law students do not care about rankings and instead decide which law school to attend based on other factors.”
Their claim that rankings are “totally irrelevant” may be an exaggeration: In an interview with Frye and Ryan earlier this week, I suggested that while the U.S. News rankings may still matter to students, it may take a year or more for changes in rankings to show up in freshman grades.
The authors acknowledge this possibility both in their paper and in their conversations, stating that prestigious school rankings are “static,” meaning they are slow to change. For example, many of us reflexively think of the Top 14, or “T14,” schools, which have remained fairly stable since the rankings began in 1987 (although in some years, the traditional T14 schools may fall out of that elite group).
I also wondered whether law schools might respond to changes in rankings by simply adjusting tuition discounts: About 80% of law school students receive some kind of tuition discount, and these carefully calculated discounts often reflect a school's ranking, with lower-ranked schools offering larger discounts to compete with higher-ranked schools.
Frye and Ryan don't dispute that cost plays a key role in students' decisions about where to enroll, but they add that the factor is difficult to track because schools are not transparent about their pricing practices.
Despite these nitpicks, my experience is that Frye and Ryan are fundamentally right: The US News rankings are not as powerful as they once were, which is why Yale and Harvard Law School felt comfortable declaring in November 2022 that they would no longer provide certain data that US News needed to produce rankings that Yale Dean Heather Gerken called “deeply flawed.”
After dozens of other schools followed suit, U.S. News announced a major methodological change to how it ranks universities, which could be seen as an admission that the rankings are at risk of becoming outdated.
I asked Frye and Ryan what U.S. News could do to restore relevance to its rankings, or even whether it could do anything at all in an era when the very idea of buying a print magazine is laughable to many aspiring law students.
“We need to think about who the rankings are aimed at,” Ryan says. “They are aimed at future law students and current law students. I think U.S. News has forgotten this fact. If they surveyed law students and law faculty and asked them what is important to them, then maybe the results could be the starting point for a new ranking.”
But the challenge, and the inherent problem with a “one size fits all” ranking system like U.S. News, is that different students have different priorities when choosing a school.
“For example, if you want to work for a large law firm, you should prioritize prestige,” Frye says, “but if you want to enter the public service, you may want to focus more on cost and choose a lower-ranked school to keep tuition costs down.”
“Choosing a law school is a combination of many factors, including prestige, cost, and educational opportunities,” Ryan explains. “You have to choose the one that's right for you.”
So here are my suggestions for U.S. News to restore relevance to their rankings: Eliminate the universal rankings of the “best” law schools and replace them with a powerful interactive tool that allows prospective law school students to state what is most important to them in a law school.
Factors include overall prestige, bar exam success, post-graduation debt, geographic location, and job success in a variety of fields, including large law firms and clerkships. The tool provides students with customized rankings of schools based on their individual criteria.
The tool is likely based on a heavily improved version of the “MyLaw Rankings” feature already on the US News website. I tried it, and it was a joke. For example, it asked me about the size of the law school I wanted to attend. Not a single question asked me what I wanted to do professionally after law school, something that in my experience most students don't care about at all.
In the past, creating an advanced interactive rankings tool would have been a difficult task. But in the age of artificial intelligence, it is not difficult to make MyLaw Rankings actually useful to future law students.
Of course, customized rankings produced by online interactive tools may not generate as much buzz (or revenue) as traditional, seemingly prestigious, numerical rankings of around 200 law schools. If US News insisted on publishing numerical rankings, it should simply rank the most prestigious law schools in America (comparable to its Vault 100 ranking of the most prestigious law firms).
After all, the reputation data, which U.S. News obtains through the costly and laborious process of sending out, collecting and analyzing reputation surveys, is the only element of the magazine's rankings that is unique to it: After an overhaul of its methodology in 2023, everything else in the rankings is based on publicly available information that isn't specific to U.S. News, such as employment and bar exam passing data.
“The prestige rankings, while maybe a little vulgar, are one of the really valuable things that U.S. News still does,” Frye told me, “and any prospective law student should know about the prestige of the school, because that prestige will have a lasting impact on their career.”
Lawyer-turned-author David Latt is the publisher of Original Jurisdiction. He founded Above the Law and Underneath Their Robes, and is the author of the novel Supreme Ambitions.
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