U.S. News and World Reports claims to perform a service for students when they rank schools. In fact, the rankings are harmful to students in significant ways. It is not just that the academic rankings are marred by those who game the system and by the fact that everyone who ranks the schools has only fragmentary knowledge of the schools they rank. Much more serious is the impact of the weight the magazine gives to the grade point averages and test scores of the admitted students. In order to compete on these measures, first undergraduate schools and in the last decade law schools are spending millions of dollars throwing money at students who will help their average GPA or test scores in order to hold their U.S. News ranking or to move up in the rankings. The result, of course, is that students who do not get merit scholarships are paying inflated tuition to support the merit scholarship programs.
It would take a lot of faith in GPA’s and test scores to suppose that the marginal increases in the average numbers of the school actually mean that the student body is better. This means that law schools individually are literally wasting millions of dollars. This waste is all the more infuriating in that the millions could be spent on programs for students or scholarships for low income students or both. Wouldn’t it be a better world if law schools spent their millions on what they thought was best for their school rather than what would make them look better to a magazine?
In fairness, I should mention that one aspect of the rankings actually encourages law schools in one context to do the right thing. The magazine considers employment of students after law school to be an indication of a school’s quality. It would be nice to report that schools feel a responsibility in a tight job market to assist graduates tied down with loans they shouldered to pay for their legal education. But few do. U.S. News to the rescue. In order to create higher employment rates to look better for the magazine, many law schools subsidize graduates in paying for their salary in an internship during the year after graduation. This is surely good for those graduates. They gain experience, and a not inconsiderable percentage are hired after the internship.
But U.S. News is not in business to help students. They recently decided to weight those jobs less, thus reducing the incentive to subsidize the jobs. From the perspective of rankings, this makes some sense. Better a job with more security than a one year subsidy.
But we should recognize the obvious. The rankings of U.S. News are an unreliable guide to quality, and their existence harms law schools and law students.
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