My law school’s Librarian and Associate Dean, Billie Jo Kaufman, sent around this latest newsletter from the Law School Admissions Council re a new study on how law schools move resources around in order to maximize USNWR rankings (thanks Billie Jo!). Here is part of the LSAC executive summary:
Fear of Failing: the Effects of U.S. News & World Report Rankings on U.S. Law Schools, by Michael Sauder, and Wendy Espeland. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the rankings are a fact of life for law schools. This report looks at the effect of the USN rankings on legal education, and it’s not peripheral.
From the Executive Summary:
One general effect of the USN rankings on law schools is that it has created pressure on law school administrators to redistribute resources in ways that maximize their scores on the criteria used by USN to create the rankings, even if they are skeptical that this is a productive use of these resources. This redistribution is illustrated by two examples mentioned consistently by the administrators interviewed: (a) increases in marketing expenditures aimed toward raising reputation scores in the USN survey and (b) increases in merit scholarships intended to improve the statistical profile of incoming classes. A more subtle form of resource redistribution is also described in this section: the adoption of strategies by some schools to “game” the rankings.
Some forms of this redistribution comes in the forms of brochures and other publications designed to enhance a school’s reputation, which is a full 40% of the ranking. Many administrators acknowledge that many these enhancing publications are probably not read before being recycled (go green!), but peer pressure makes them spend upwards of $100,000 to produce and distribute these publications anyway. Library volume count, by the way, represents 0.75% of the weight of an over all score. That explains much more as to why academic law libraries are hardly ever enhanced with an eye to the rankings.
Schools game the system by giving out financial aid to students with high LSAT scores as a way of bringing in a higher quality metric to the entering class and student body as a whole. Some schools create part-time or probationary programs to keep the academically weaker students off the books. Student quality (LSAT, GPA) is 12.5% of the full ranking. Things such as need-based scholarships, enhancements to programs, improved quality to areas of the school not affecting the rankings all tend to take a back seat at the most rankings-obsessed schools. The pressure on admissions and career services offices is tremendous. Schools put up with it because potential students do take rankings seriously. Rankings even affects faculty recruitment and the ability of faculty to publish in quality journals. While none of this is a surprise, the report is a nice compilation of how schools have adapted their budgets and practices to account for their survey information. There is also a nice table that breaks down the ranking standards and weights.
The report is available on the LSAC site. Because of the way the site is constructed, there is no direct URL. However, anyone interested in finding it should start at the main LSAC page, click on Research Data from the menu bar running across the top of the screen, roll over the graphic for Research and select Grant Reports. The report should be available from the page that comes up. It’s numbered GR-07-02. [MG]
One question I have long had about LSAT scores is whether they tend to favor the youngest applicants. My brother the neuro-psychiatrist points out to me that IQ scores on average tend to go down starting quite early in adulthood, and suggests that particularly the logical games section of the LSAT functions like an IQ test. If that were true, and younger takers of the LSAT had higher scores, other things equal, and if USNWR put enough pressure at the margin for higher LSAT scores (even for small increments, and I suspect the rankings do indeed create such marginal pressures), then the result might favor younger law classes.
And yet, if age is the thing that matters, the students being taken younger today will turn into those same “less smart” people tomorrow, so apart from the LSAT scores themselves, what is the advantage in this? Do we as law schools think that in those younger years, those higher scores mean we can teach more advanced stuff in school? Do we think that this compensates for having students who already know something of the world that lawyers regulate and intermediate? I, for one, think that professional school is more professional, not less, if students are not coming direct from undergraduate studies – and I do not favor in the least a “trade school” model of legal education. Rather, a thoroughly intellectual law study that takes advantage of the fact that students are not entirely operating in their imaginations about the world of work.
Why do I think think this matters? Because, if true, it tends to squeeze out students who have spent significant years doing work in the real world – as (again, if true) merely an artifact of age. I think offhand of one person – Harvard undergraduate, did very well there in economics, near perfect SATs – who has spent the last eight years first learning Arabic, and then reporting for various wire services from the Middle East. Well, he can see the writing on the wall in journalism, and wants to go to law school. From the standpoint of the tests, however, he was smarter and a better bet as a law student when he first got out of Harvard undergrad. He’s in Cairo but does not think, probably correctly, that coming back to do Kaplan would make that much difference and, frankly, it’s an idiotic idea. (My sense of this is anecdotal, of course, but I can think of various people like him – I don’t mean folks who might be considered “interesting” even if not “smart” in the usual terms – I mean people who have all their lives been “smart” in the sense of top schools, top test scores, but find that after significant time doing something real, test performance is not what it used to be.)
In the past, someone like him would be considered an interesting possibility for Harvard or Yale law, and the LSAT score would be a consideration, but taking him would not damage the school’s USNWR scores. Now, the USNWR rankings mean that if the school decides that someone like him means smart + worldly experience + willingness to do something (in those years) other than practice for the LSAT while being an analyst on Wall St, well, it will cost the school. Its LSAT composite goes down. If I’m right about the underlying assumption of age and LSAT score, on the margin, taking these older, experienced people, even the ones who, earlier in life, have hit the standard “smart” benchmarks, is a real hit to the school’s rankings.
Anecdotally, I think this is happening. No data to really know, but I suspect it has affected the composition of law classes, in terms of age and experience outside of school. Anyone know of data that would tend to confirm or disconfirm this?
yankee says:
Apparently my IQ tripled while I was studying for the LSAT. Who knew?
December 3, 2009, 11:52 amMike S. says:
If law school administrators think US News rankings are distorting their behavior in undesirable ways, the obvious answer is to create their own system to compete with US News. I’d love to see an exit exam parallel to the entrance on (perhaps replacing bar exams?) and see schools graded by how well students do leaving compared with LSATs coming in. I.e., what did they get from law school besides a credential.
December 3, 2009, 12:05 pmalkali says:
As a one-time beneficiary of the overemphasis on LSAT scores, I agree with all of this, with the possible exception that I wonder how much pressure Harvard, Yale and Stanford are actually under with respect to LSAT scores. Of course they are not going to start ignoring LSAT scores altogether but the base they start with is so high it doesn’t strike me that they would really care too much about a few points in individual cases.
December 3, 2009, 12:15 pmMark Field says:
LSATs are radically overused, but I don’t think the age concern is a big one. IQ scores peak around the age of 20 (pretty young for a law student) and the decline thereafter is fairly slow. There could easily be an effect if the older test taker were 40, but there probably wouldn’t be a significant difference for someone who’s 25 or 30 unless they were borderline to begin with.
I definitely agree that law schools, like colleges, should value life experience and accomplishments far more than test scores.
December 3, 2009, 12:24 pmAdam Kamp says:
I’m fascinated by this assertion, because personally, I have very little doubt that I would have scored worse on the LSAT if I had taken it ten years beforehand, when I got out of undergraduate school.. I’ve got pretty good processing power, but to me a lot of the logical tricks were as much a learned skill as an absolute value in my head–like Yankee suggested, I apparently got a whole lot smarter doing study guides for the LSAT! This is anecdotal, of course, and percentile-wise there wasn’t all that much difference between my 10-year-old GRE scores and my LSAT score. (Then again, the GRE is a little easier than the LSAT, which means there’s more distortion and noise at the top end of the scale.)
December 3, 2009, 12:26 pmyankee says:
It matters a lot. Harvard and Stanford each care a great deal about being #2 rather than #3. If either were ever to drop below Columbia the school’s administration would be under enormous pressure to get back into the top 3 the next year; if they didn’t it would be considered devastating. Same with Yale and its #1 slot.
December 3, 2009, 12:26 pmPLR says:
I had a high LSAT score, and a lot of financial aid. I thought at the time that I was getting the aid because the University had massive resources, and I had hardly any.
But if I was a PR tool, I guess I can live with that.
December 3, 2009, 12:39 pmCurt Fischer says:
Law profs in general seem to love to tooth-gnash about the pernicious effects of over-reliance on the USN&WR rankings. But if even the top schools cannot ignore their ranking, mustn’t there be some secret set of faculty who love the rankings?
What’s wrong with the John Roberts approach to USN&WR rankings? The way to stop over-reliance on USN&WR rankings is to stop over-relying on USN&WR rankings.
December 3, 2009, 12:42 pmDJR says:
I can say one place where it has affected the composition of classes: Georgetown’s evening division. They used to have a policy that you applied to either the day or the evening division. The evening division attracted the older students with life experiences (and jobs and mortgages) and their LSATs didn’t count for USNews purposes. Georgetown started the gaming by encouraging more people to apply to both day and evening (thereby permitting the school to put the highest GPAs in the day division), but USNews compounded the error by including “part-time”* programs in its calculations. Now GULC has less flexibility to admit smart older students if they have marginally lower LSATs than their fresh out of school would-be classmates.
December 3, 2009, 12:46 pmDJR says:
* Try telling a person with a full-time job taking 11 law school credits that they are a part-time anything.
December 3, 2009, 12:47 pmAdam Kamp says:
Oh, I’m pretty sure I was a total PR tool. For family reasons and subspecialty (ADR) ranking, I ended up going into a part-time weekend program at a Tier 4 school, despite getting into significantly more prestigious schools. (Having money thrown at me didn’t hurt either.)
If, however, there is truth to the idea that LSAT scores are dragging down one’s tier, then it seems to me that there’s a major counterincentive to part-time, weekend programs. People in my program are quite a bit older, generally–people who went into the workforce and then decided to go back to school but want to maintain their prior life (and perhaps move elsewhere in the organization after graduation). However, since they’re older, it seems likely that the part-time program is absolutely hurting their ranking–which, for a Tier 4 school, is an ENORMOUS deal.
So part-time programs may be hurting schools’ ranking… which would be a serious shame.
December 3, 2009, 12:47 pmAdam Kamp says:
(Darnit, DJR beat me to my point.)
December 3, 2009, 12:48 pmtheobromophile says:
I can see the value to the LSAT; without it, there’s little way to compare, say, a nuclear engineer from MIT with a B+ average and a communications major from some no-name school with an A average. Yet, the law schools ought to be making the determination as to the importance of the test, not USNews.
There’s a whole host of problems related to putting heavy reliance upon LSATs and GPAs, such as penalising bad test-takers (those who scored relatively poorly on the SATs but still did well at very respectable schools), penalising older students who went to school before the era of grade inflation, and penalising those who took difficult courses at rigourous universities.
USNews could offset these problems; it could add a category for percentage of students with at least two or three years of work experience, which has the dual benefit of offsetting the lower GPAs or LSATs of older students and encouraging students to treat law school as professional school. Alternatively, it could not exclude the GPAs and LSATs of certain students (e.g. extremely low household income, more than 10 years out of school, or traditionally grade-deflated majors) from its calculation of median scores.
Either way, it would at least be proactively addressing the problem, rather than changing legal education in ways that do not necessarily benefit students nor the profession.
December 3, 2009, 1:06 pmDavid Bernstein says:
December 3, 2009, 1:17 pmZedward says:
I question much of the premise of this post. For starters, I think that the decrease of IQ from 20 to 30 is probably negligible. I’d be happy to see studies saying otherwise, but I’d be surprised if it was more than a percentage point or so. Furthermore, I think that the LSAT doesn’t correlate particularly highly with IQ. Logic games are only 26.6% of the LSAT, on average, and even they probably don’t correlate that strongly with IQ; after all, they are considered the most “learnable” portion of the test, and if you take a symbolic logic class, you’ll see a much bigger increase in this section than you could ever generate in IQ. The LSAT is such a “learnable” test, something which an IQ test isn’t to nearly the same degree, that there’s probably not much more than a correlation coefficient of 0.5 or 0.6 between it and IQ. Is that enough to discriminate between people with 150 IQs and 115 IQs? Sure. But it hardly seems like it would make much of a difference between a 20-year-old with a 140 IQ and a 28-year-old with a 139 IQ. I think that a lot of law schools would prefer the 28-year-old if he had 8 years of useful job experience and an LSAT of 169 over the 20-year-old who was just out of college and had an LSAT of 171.
December 3, 2009, 1:29 pmalkali says:
@yankee: I agree that Yale really wants to keep its #1 ranking and Harvard and Stanford are really anxious about their own rankings. My question is how much much weight the impact of LSATs on school rankings is actually going to be given in particular cases — the high-life-experience-value candidates Prof. Anderson has in mind aren’t going to completely bomb the LSAT, and a difference of a few points in a particular case isn’t going to matter very much. The high-life-experience candidates also contribute in their own way to the school’s reputation — the alumni magazine profiles of current students generally don’t focus on fresh-out-of-undergrad brilliant test takers.
@David Bernstein: I understand your point re: grade inflation but my understanding had always been that the big inflation took place in the late 1960s and in the 1970s. Is grade inflation really going to be an issue in assessing two people who graduated from college in (say) 1998 and 2008?
December 3, 2009, 1:43 pmSandy MacHoots says:
LSAC studies show that students with life experience don’t do better in law school than students without it, and the age at which the LSAT is taken is irrelevant. Nor does the caliber of the undergrad school attended makes no difference in the predictive value of the GPA. (Strange, but true.) Thus, A 40-year-old Goldman Sachs partner who scores a 165 on the LSAT and had a 3.75 GPA at Harvard can expect to do as well in law school as a 22-year old with a 165 who had a 3.75 at Northern South Dakota State College and spent the summer working at Burger King.
If LSAT scores decline with age, then so do the skills necessary to succeed in law school. Diversity of experience may make for a better class, but older students aren’t being discriminated against if they lose out to younger students with better scores.
December 3, 2009, 1:51 pmPubliusFL says:
Well, he can see the writing on the wall in journalism, and wants to go to law school.
Sounds like he forgot to read the fine print in that there writing on the wall. ;)
December 3, 2009, 1:55 pmBama 1L says:
Based on the headline, I thought this post would be about how USNWR will not start considering law school resources devoted to gaming.
December 3, 2009, 2:07 pmTK75 says:
I resemble the hypo in your post. I had near-perfect SATs, was an Ivy graduate with honors, and scored a 173 on the LSAT my senior year of college – and that was the low end of my practice range. I did not finish law school the first time and went back 10 years later. I had to take the LSAT again and scored a 168.
Was that 5 point drop due to any decrease in IQ? I tend to think it was more likely a result of the fact that my brain was 10 years removed from the academic world. I also had a mediocre 1st year of law school and then excelled after that as my brain was reconditioned to school-mode.
Maybe an IQ drop due to age is a bigger factor for those who are far removed from college when they enter the process, in their 40s or 50s. But I tend to think distance from the academic environment is a bigger impediment to those in their late 20s or 30s than any natural loss of IQ. The skillset used to excel in school is quite different from the real world, and skills unused tend to atrophy as we all know.
December 3, 2009, 2:17 pmCato The Elder says:
Anecdotes, even yours yankee, are not data. How many chalartan tutors of the SAT say the same things when the College Board’s own analyses show that most test-takers don’t budge more than 20 points between trials?
I generally suspect the veracity of such stories anyway; in my mind, they’re the liberal geek’s equivalent of the “I have a hot girlfriend back home” shtick.
December 3, 2009, 2:28 pmCato The Elder says:
These threads often turn into LSAT bragging contests that are inapposite to the vital thrust of the post. I’m not trying to be churlish or anything, hopefully just heading off such disgressions at their pass. We all understand that the Conspiracy has a fairly intelligent readership.
December 3, 2009, 2:31 pmDownfall says:
Law schools are acting like a business (there’s no academic benefit to glossy brochures), so the obvious question is: What’s the business benefit of a high ranking? Many tier 4 schools charge just as much for tuition as Harvard does, so it has no impact on ‘profit’ (which, in this case, is used by the parent institution to subsidize other programs). Why bother?
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December 3, 2009, 3:08 pmyankee says:
You can believe me or not as you wish. And my overall LSAT score didn’t go up 20 points, because practice didn’t help me much with the reading comprehension or logical reasoning sections. It did, however, help me enormously with the logic games section. I started test prep scoring near chance and by the time I finished I was getting nearly all the questions in that section right.
Obviously most cases aren’t that remotely that extreme, but my point is just that the logic games are by far the most “learnable” section of the test. It’s bizarre to call that section an IQ test when scores vary so much depending on the amount students have prepped for it. Virtually all prospective law students have extensive experience reading and reasoning logically, but almost nobody has much practice doing logic puzzles at high speed. Accordingly, the marginal returns to studying for that section are much higher.
December 3, 2009, 3:09 pmtvk says:
Need more information to be sure, but it seems to me that there are two separate factors here. One is a natural decline of IQ with age, which seems to me to be fairly minor. The second is that, once you leave school, you stop having to take standardized tests all the time, and it takes some time to readjust.
In this way, I think your Cairo friend made a serious mistake passing on Kaplan. Is there any reason he wouldn’t be able to do well on the LSAT if he had as much practice as his younger competitors were able to have? If the argument then becomes that the LSAT is unfairly biased toward people who have the time and money to practice for it (whereas others such as full-time workers in the real world lack the opportunity to do so), then this will just collapse into the debate about affirmative action for all “disadvantaged” classes.
December 3, 2009, 3:36 pmMike McDougal says:
What? No one uses Cooley’s rankings instead?
December 3, 2009, 4:04 pmASlyJD says:
Relevant Courtoon
As a former Kaplan junkie (I’m not just a student; I’m also a teacher!*), it’s valuable. But I have to agree with tvk; it’s valuable only because the test, the logic section especially, is highly trainable. While the test could have logic games so advanced only those with an IQ over 150 (or any other arbitrary line) could solve them, the section simply isn’t set up to do that. It requires solving puzzles of a high school difficulty level in a time constrained environment. Frankly, it’s a matter of learning to do something difficult quickly, not of learning to do something which is nearly impossible. With that in mind, anyone who lacks the time to practice doing it quickly is going to have lower scores than his personal maximum, regardless of how many years separate him from his undergraduate days.
*Hair Club for Men reference enthusiasm ONLY.
As for the whole ratings game, I couldn’t care less. There are a number of people, including myself, who pick their law school on pedestrian criteria like proximity to their house, proximity to family, ability of their spouse’s work, and price. And since I, being in the bottom quarter of the class of a third tier law school, actually have a job lined up at graduation, unlike so many of my academic “betters,” I think I made the right choice.
December 3, 2009, 4:52 pmbob says:
The only volumes I ever pulled from the law school library were out of state decisions that weren’t available on Westlaw.
I’d suggest that the only reason why there are __any__ volumes in libraries now is to keep the rankings up.
December 3, 2009, 5:13 pmalkali says:
I’d suggest that the only reason why there are __any__ volumes in libraries now is to keep the rankings up.
I think the ABA actually requires them as part of accreditation. An unaccredited school in Mass. a couple years ago unsuccessfully (although perhaps reasonably) contended that Westlaw/Lexis made the volumes unnecessary.
December 3, 2009, 5:21 pmyankee says:
Unfairly or not, it’s definitely biased in favor of people with the time and money to practice.
December 3, 2009, 6:11 pmricky says:
Just wanted to clarify that statement a bit. It takes very little time and money to adequately prepare for the test, especially considering that the result may well determine where you spend the next three years of your life. I don’t think that spending enormous amounts of time and money preparing gives anything but the slightest edge – it might even be harmful.
December 3, 2009, 6:32 pmAnon21 says:
Yale’s #1 slot is secured almost entirely by its massive per-student spending advantage, and it couldn’t be overtaken by Harvard even if Harvard raised its LSAT median by 6 points. It has literally nothing to fear in terms of its ranking from varying its LSAT standards in individual cases unless it decides to completely stop looking at scores.
December 3, 2009, 6:50 pmShane says:
As another anecdote, I scored significantly higher on the LSAT at the age of 26 than 19. I’m not sure where raw intelligence comes into play, but my much higher maturity level allowed me to actually practice/study better and prepare for a better score. With my 5 years of work experience and an improved GPA (took some correspondence courses for the hell of it), I’m glad I waited a few years before applying.
December 3, 2009, 6:52 pmWilliamP says:
I hate to be the fly in the ointment, but this is my area of expertise and I think a lot of the discussion about IQ trending downwards as people age is a product of people not understanding how IQ tests work and what, exactly, they test. First, IQ tests aren’t really the general intelligence measures many imagine them to be but rather a specific set of subtests which are primarily used (and designed) to assess deficits. Second, IQ tests don’t really test intelligence (unless you define “intelligence” as whatever it is IQ tests are assessing) but aggregated performance on a variety of tasks (some of which aren’t well understood). Third, a difference of less than about 10 points on an IQ test is statistically irrelevant. If Person A has an FSIQ of 120 and Person B has an FSIQ of 129 they are statistically indistinguishable and would both be tagged “Superior” on a testing report. Finally, ff we’re talking about the WAIS-III/IV (the standard adult measure for IQ) we’re talking about a test which is weighted heavily towards speed rather than processing power. A consistent difference of less than 10 seconds on a few subtests is enough to drop someone’s Full Scale IQ score more than a few points and drop their Performance IQ score and several Index scores by a standard deviation or more.
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December 3, 2009, 9:21 pmyankee says:
Color me unconvinced. LSAT prep classes start at $1000—and that’s for the el cheapo Princeton Review online version. If you want a real teacher, it goes up from there. If you want someone less low-end than Princeton Review (where they only require instructors in the 90th percentile and therefore the teacher may have scored as low as 163) it goes up from there. If you want a private tutor, it goes up rapidly from there.
To someone in college or just out of college, $1000 (which is the minimum you’re paying for an online LSAT prep course) is already quite a lot of money. It’s more if you have student loans to pay back, and more than that if you have a family. Maybe you think those people paying for real teachers or private tutors are all wasting their money, but color me dubious.
December 3, 2009, 10:09 pmLSO says:
A quick thought popped into my head: If it is true that a the current admissions systems causes an over-reliance on LSAT, which (the argument goes) causes some “better” (higher ranked) school to pass up a “better” (for whatever reason one might consider him/her better) applicant, is this not actually a good thing for legal education?
December 4, 2009, 7:41 amIf we assume that there was a perfect way to identify the best candidates, and also assume that “best” students would go to the “best” schools, then the rich would only get richer, leaving the lower-ranked law schools with fewer “better” students than before.
PubliusFL says:
I really wonder how much utility the high-priced reviews had. As others have noted, the logic game section is the most trainable part of the LSAT, and the logic games are pretty much the same thing you can find in pulp magazines next to the sudoku ones at your local newsstand. I think I spent less than $100 on LSAT prep — bought a few books with old tests and sample questions, and did a bunch more sample questions from books in the library. Perhaps having previously taken the GRE (which had an analytical ability section similar to the LSAT’s logic games) gave me a bit of an advantage, but I used the same approach for GRE prep.
December 4, 2009, 9:06 am0L says:
You can go and see the entering class profiles on most law schools’ websites, but here is one from Northwestern, a school notorious among law school aspirants for valuing work experience:
http://www.law.northwestern.edu/admissions/profile/
This is useful because it shows over time, an increase in LSAT scores and an increase in average age (currently at 26, which is about four years out of undergrad). Additionally, 87% of the student body from the 2009 cycle had 2+ years of work experience.
While this is only one school’s data, it is my experience that this is the case at many of the best law schools. Most of the ones that I have looked at, Columbia, NYU, Michigan etc have only roughly a third of their student body coming in directly from undergrad, with the average ages are pretty steadily around the 24-26 range currently.
It is important also to note that something like work experience and taking the LSAT when you are older do not necessarily go hand in hand. I recently graduated and I am working for 2-3 years for the government before I go to law school, but I took my LSAT in the Fall of my senior year because I wanted to get this out of the way. The scores last for 5 years, so if the concern amongst those wanting to get life experience is that doing so will disadvantage them, it is not necessarily warranted. If you think you’re at your intellectual peak, then take it before you “lose” it.
Yes, law schools do prioritize test scores over GPAs and other “soft” factors, but in my opinion, they don’t block everything else out for the sake of the ratings game, and at the top schools, it’s probable that they get enough applicants with both strong hard and soft factors, that they are unlikely to be losing on any front of the “worthiness” metrics.
December 4, 2009, 1:08 pmSuzy says:
I don’t know of any evidence that older students (i.e. those a few years out past a typical college graduation date) perform worse on the LSAT; indeed, I think there’s no difference, or if anything, they tend to do better. In addition, even if IQ declines, there’s no clear reason to think that would correspond with an LSAT decline, since those tests are rather different.
However, I do think that “gaming the rankings” is having a direct effect on the practices of admissions offices and law school administrators. My evidence is anecdotal, unfortunately, and I’d like to see better studies of the subject. When it starts to affect decision making at the schools, I think it’s really out of hand. The rankings are self-reinforcing and are only helpful to a certain sub-group of students. Most prospective students don’t benefit that much from the rankings, because geography, finances, or less glamorous employment goals are dominant in their decision-making.
I was saying in another earlier thread, what most prospectives really would want is a clear analysis of how many graduates of the school are employed at different years out of the gate, what the average salaries are like, and what the bar exam passage rates are like. Sure, they’d care about student selectivity and faculty quality and other such factors, but the most important would be those employment-related figures. The fact that 25% of the us news ranking is based on academic insider perceptions of reputation is just sad. The result is a ranking that’s only important if your career goal rests on academic insider perceptions of reputation. For most lawyers, it doesn’t.
December 5, 2009, 12:23 am