Proposed Changes for the U.S. News Rankings,
from Prof. Jay Brown at The Race to the Bottom. The first post is here, but all five are still on the blog's main page.
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I'd eliminate most "hard" parts of the criteria, like library size (who cares?) and increase the weight of the school's reputation in the overall score. I'd also try to improve the quality of the reputational surveys, which are currently too short.
The factor you seem to think is most important -- the GPA/LSAT of the student body -- is just a proxy for what prior students thought of the prestige of the school. That's not a bad measure, although it's largely dependent on past rankings. It's also less important to most students than what future employers think of the schools they're considering applying to.
-m
So if anything, the US News change will actually improve education in that regard, by getting rid of this silly charade.
Consider schools like Minnesota and Iowa as examples. I'm guessing many of their students stay in the midwest and earn lower salaries than they would on the coasts, but the cost of living is lower so a comparison of salaries is no reflection of their achievement. Fewer of their students probably end up working for the firms or clerking for the judges whose opinions will count in the rankings, but that may have more to do with geography and past rankings than any accurate measure of the quality of the students. When employers or faculty who have less experience with anyone from Minnesota or Iowa are then asked to rank them, are the results a good reflection of the quality?
The opinion of faculty also seems less important than other factors. They themselves tend to come from a relatively small pool of schools, and they know, value, and keep up with that same small pool. I don't see why their opinions are likely to avoid reflecting the biases they came into the profession with.
The rankings do serve the purpose of identifying prestige, if you want to eventually snare that clerkship or work for that big law firm. For the smaller proportion of students who will end up there, I suppose the rankings are useful. The damage of perpetuating this system, though, is that high quality students who attend schools like Iowa and Minnesota suffer when the quality of their education and achievement is not properly recognized by the rankings system. The cycle continues, then, as the same faculty and employers whose opinions matter will continue to believe that those schools aren't quite as good as the others.
Minnesota is tied for #22 overall, and is #23 by LSAT. Iowa is #27 overall, and not in the top 40 by LSAT. Doesn't that seem to contradict your thesis?
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