Dean Randall Quoted in Article on Changes to U.S. News Law School Rankings
In Wake of Law School Boycotts, U.S. News Announces Changes
Law.com
by Christine Charnosky
January 3, 2023
After more than 10% of law schools announced they will no longer participate in the U.S. News & World Report education rankings, the news agency sent a letter to law deans Monday informing them of methodology changes, but at least one dean is calling the move “too little, too late.”
U.S. News reported that following conversations with more than 100 deans, that it will be “making a series of modifications in this year’s rankings that reflect those inputs and allow us to publish the best available data,” Robert Morse, chief data strategist, and Stephanie Salmon, senior vice president of Data & Information Strategy, said in the letter.
Megan Carpenter, dean of the University of New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce School of Law, told Law.com Tuesday, “The announcement from U.S. News about its intended modifications is too little, too late, and too vague.”
But Ken Randall, dean of the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, said in a statement emailed to Law.com Monday that he appreciates U.S. News’ solicitation of input from the country’s law school deans over the past several weeks.
“We will rank law schools in the upcoming rankings using publicly available data that law schools annually make available as required by the American Bar Association whether or not schools respond to our annual survey,” the letter states, which U.S. News first reported in November after Yale paved the way for other schools to join its boycott of the rankings.
Yale Law School stands by its decision to withdraw from the rankings, Dean Heather Gerken, told Law.com on Tuesday. “Having a window into the operations and decision‐making process at U.S. News in recent weeks has only cemented our decision to stop participating in the rankings.”
“For schools that do respond, we will publish more detailed profiles, enabling students to create a more comprehensive picture of their various choices,” the letter continues, adding that, for the rankings portion, there will be some changes in how certain data points are weighted, including a reduced emphasis on the peer assessment surveys of academics, lawyers and judges and an increased weight on outcome measures.
For years, law school deans have raised concerns about U.S. News’ “monolithic ranking system and its outsized negative influence on law school education with little substantial change,” UNH Law Dean Carpenter said.
“We realize that legal education is neither monolithic nor static and that the rankings, by becoming so widely accepted, may not capture the individual nuances of each school in the larger goal of using a common set of data,” Morse and Salmon said in their letter, adding that in their discussions with the law schools they received both positive and negative feedback that highlighted a few areas of concern including “per student expenditures, the weight of the peer assessment surveys and indicators of student debt” and how more weight should be placed on outcomes such as bar passage and employment.
“These changes go a long way toward helping students make better‐informed decisions,” Antonin Scalia Law Dean Randall said. “Reducing the emphasis on reputational rankings makes a lot of sense because it cuts back on the survey’s most unscientific and unreliable metrics” and that U.S. News’ renewed focus on outcomes such as bar pass rates and employment better reflects what most students are interested in when comparing schools.
“For the next year, we will be giving full weight to, school funded full‐time long‐term fellowships where bar passage is required or where the JD degree is an advantage, and we will treat all fellowships equally” and give “full weight to those enrolled in graduate studies in the ABA employment outcomes grid,” the letter states.
However, U.S. News states that other concerns, “such as loan forgiveness/loan assistance repayment programs, need‐based aid and diversity and socio‐economic considerations,” will require additional time and collaboration to address.
Lastly, Morse and Salmon are requesting that all law schools make public “all of the voluminous data they currently report to the ABA but decline to publish.”
“While U.S. News generally incorporates incremental changes in each rankings cycle in consultation with legal professionals and academics, the recent discussions with the larger group of law schools provided the opportunity for additional focus, allowing for changes that promote U.S. News’ ongoing mission of helping prospective students find the school that is right for them,” U.S. News said in a press release Tuesday morning.
“While we know it is challenging for diverse institutions to be ranked across a common data set, we all have the same goal—to provide the best information to prospective students so they can make one of the most important decisions of their careers,” Eric Gertler, executive chairman and CEO of U.S. News, said in a statement.
In a separate letter to “future law students,” Gertler and Kim Castro, editor & chief content officer, said that the law schools that will no longer participate in the rankings “have articulated a number of reasons for that decision, and some have even suggested that U.S. News should discontinue its rankings. We have no plans to do so.”
“In the coming weeks and months, our trusted editorial team will make changes to the methodology,” Gertler and Castro said in their letter. “We also plan to make more of the data we have collected available to you so that you can run deeper comparisons among law schools.”
UNH Law Dean Carpenter said that she is concerned because Monday’s letter does not state how U.S. News will modify its formula, adding that “we should be very concerned that the conversation about the diminished credibility and legitimacy” of the U.S. News rankings “simply devolves into an exercise about tweaking their monolithic formula.”
The methodology will be released alongside the next edition of the rankings this spring, Madeline Smanik, senior communications & public relations manager for U.S. News, told Law.com Wednesday, adding, “We do not have any comment on staff size or allocations.”
Dave Killoran, chief executive officer of PowerScore Test Preparation, said that, without specific information about methodology changes, which likely won’t be released until the next edition, there’s no way to know the exact consequences of the proposed changes.
While relying on publicly available information—where approximately 85% of the data for current rankings is derived—U.S. News “can and will still rank every law school because they make plenty of money from doing so, and they don’t want to stop that money train!” Killoran said.
U.S. News “can’t drastically change the rankings because they need to preserve the historical integrity of what they’ve been doing for years,” Killoran continued. “If the rankings changed dramatically in response to these withdrawals, wouldn’t that call into question how accurate the rankings were in the past? I say it definitely would.”
Of the 21 schools that have pulled out of the rankings, Yale Law School was the first to announce on November 16, with its law dean, Heather Gerken, calling them “profoundly flawed.”
Harvard Law School followed with its own announcement hours later, followed by the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law on November 17.
The schools that followed include Georgetown Law Center, Columbia Law School and Stanford Law School, all announcing on November 18.
Then the University of Michigan Law, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, Duke Law School, The University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law and the University of California, Irvine, School of Law all announced their withdrawal before Thanksgiving.
During the last week of November, the University of California, Davis, School of Law became the fifth California law school to drop out of the rankings.
The University of Washington School of Law announced December 1 and the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School announced its decision December 2.
New York University School of Law announced on December 5 with the University of Virginia School of Law, the last of the T14s to announce, declaring on December 9.
Campbell University’s Norman Adrian Wiggins School of Law announced on December 12, the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law announced and Southwestern Law School announced on December 15 and California Western School of Law made an announcement on December 20.
Additionally, the University of Idaho College of Law announced in late December.