More law schools are reacting to Yale Law School’s decision to boycott the rankings by U.S. News & World Report—some by joining with Yale Law and others by declaring an intention to continue their participation.
On Nov. 22, the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law announced that it is withdrawing from the rankings, Law.com reports. The school was ranked No. 15 in March, putting it just outside the top 14, or the T14, as it is called.
Just days before, Russell Korobkin, the interim dean at the UCLA law school, told the New York Times that there is a downside to boycotting the rankings and refusing to provide information to U.S. News & World Report. That’s because of the way that the publication could use publicly available data to rank the school, he said in the Nov. 18 story in the New York Times.
Besides Yale Law and UCLA, other law schools boycotting the rankings are Harvard Law School, the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, Stanford Law School, the Georgetown University Law Center, Columbia Law School, the University of Michigan Law School, the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, the Duke University School of Law and the University of California at Irvine School of Law (the only school besides UCLA on the list that is not in the top 14).
Some schools, on the other hand, are announcing decisions to continue to provide data to U.S. News & World Report for rankings. They include the University of Chicago Law School (most recently ranked at No. 3) and Cornell Law School (ranked at No. 12), according to Law.com here and here.
When Yale Law withdrew from the rankings, it cited several concerns. They include U.S. News & World Report’s reliance on grades and test scores that gives law schools an incentive to use financial aid to recruit high-scoring students, rather than those in need. And schools are incentivized to admit students who don’t need loans because of U.S. News & World Report’s calculations of student-debt loads.
Korobkin echoed many of Yale Law’s comments in his message to students.
He also criticized U.S. News & World Report for using unadjusted grade-point averages, which penalizes students who pursued undergraduate programs that tend to award lower grades. He also said he dislikes U.S. News & World Report’s reliance on reputation rankings, which are “provided by a small number of lawyers, judges and professors who cannot hope to have detailed knowledge of the nearly 200 schools they are asked to evaluate.”
“And the rankings perversely reward schools for spending more and passing on the costs to their students, without regard for the value of the expenditures—a feature that also structurally disadvantages public law schools, which tend to spend less and charge less than private schools,” Korobkin said.
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