Legal school rankings not a reliable source
Long regarded as one of the most stable, prestigious and financially rewarding designations, a Juris Doctorate seems to be as popular as ever in the minds of prospective undergraduate students.
If nothing else, earning a law degree is seen as a safe and secure route. If three years of grueling postgraduate work and $200,000 or so of debt can’t guarantee a stable and rewarding career, what can? Even this superficial outlook seems convincing.
The problem to anyone paying any attention is that reality is just the opposite.
For years, studies and casual observations have highlighted a market over-saturated with lawyers, one in which basic laws of economics fall to the wayside, where supply grows even as demand shrinks. One study out of Northwestern Law showed 15,000 attorney and legal jobs have been cut from large firms around the country since 2008.
Add this indisputably clear trend to the fast-rising cost of attending law school, which, for the vast majority of students, is financed by student loans that can easily leave graduates with up to $200,000 in debt, and you can see the potential for disaster.
This begs the question: Given the current climate, why are students still lining up to go to law school, even at mediocre institutions?
As anyone seriously considering law school can tell you, the U.S. News & World Report annual rankings is the Holy Grail of law school stratification and the primary guide for potential applicants and legal employers alike.
Of course, applicants often consider a range of factors, such as cost and location, when looking into schools, but in terms of perceived quality and prestige, these rankings are most trusted.
The problem with these rankings is that they are derived from data that is collected and analyzed by the law schools individually, in a process which is neither perfectly standardized nor audited.
This has led to some very questionable data reporting, which can be described as creative accounting.
In one category, graduates known to be employed nine months after graduation, the criteria is so broad that a graduate waiting tables, selling shoes or doing any other job unrelated to the legal field would be counted as an employed person to boost the statistics.
Few would argue that choosing to attend a top-10 school over a lower-tiered school is a bad decision, but the distinction is seldom that clear.
For example, should the rankings be a fool-proof guide in choosing a school ranked in the 30s over one ranked in the 50s? What about when there is a significant difference in the cost of attendance?
We can only hope the American Bar Association and the Association for Legal Career Professionals, the organizations in charge of setting the guidelines for the surveys, will impose stricter standards and audit results in the future, or that U.S. News will unilaterally demand similar action.
Even better in terms of the larger issue of an over-abundance of lawyers would be strong restrictions on the number of law schools accredited by the profession itself, a tactic already perfected within the medical profession.
Until there is clear reform of some sort, it is up to students to understand the extent to which they can rely on the rankings, and at what point it fails to be a useful tool.
Justin Davidoff is a sophomore majoring in Judaic studies.
I have heard about this before but never quite understood what the problem was. now I understand, thank you very much.
USC Law – Top Tier #1!
Very informative article. I have heard about the rankings and their problems before in passing but now I understand what all the fuss is really about. Thank you!
I wouldn’t be so presumptuous about your “$150,000 average starting pay” assertion there, Marie. Law is really a hit-or-miss deal. You can come out of a prestigious law school such as an Ivy or anything “commensurate,” and it doesn’t mean you’ll make rockstar money off the bat.
I interned for a big shot law firm a couple summers ago, in an affluent part of Los Angeles, which I won’t name. But coincidently, all the lawyers were either from Ivies, Georgetown, Duke or East Coast top-tiered schools. The parking lot was filled with current model Ferraris, Porsches, or anything European that costed at least $100,000. These lawyers had more than 1 home in affluent communities. It was like MTV Cribs, no hyperbole. But you know what? these guys were some of the biggest alcoholic, coke (not cola) addicted, DUI-getting, divorcing, affair having, losing their homes to banks, miserable, getting sued themselves, mental health impaired group of people I’ve come across. These guys would come to work either hung over or coked out. (sorry if my post wasn’t PG-13 enough)
I’m not in law school nor pre-law. If law is your passion, and you’re sincere about practicing law ethically, then good for you; and if you become wealthy from it, that’s the icing on the cake. But narrowing your focus on law school rankings, the wealth that can be attained from it, etc. shouldn’t be your reason to pursue law. I mentioned earlier that it was hit or miss…and when you miss, you can be relegated to being a low paid public defender or some other “crusader lawyer” who makes peanuts.
Hey I think you’re right about the hit or miss, although I think at least a part of it is how hard you work. That’s the way I’ll approach it if I go into law. Like those alcoholic coworkers you talk about didn’t get anywhere eventually because they weren’t focussed on their job.
Anyways, while its true that you can hit or miss no matter what school you go to, the idea is that the better the school, the better your chances of hitting if you put in the same effort than if you went to a lesser school. The problem I have with the rankings is that they aren’t being honest in saying which schools are better than others, which messes up people’s judgement. So when I talked about the 150,000 average STARTING salary that a lowly school bragged about, I was just showing how when there’s obviously wrong stuff like that going on it definitely messes up the rankings overall. Like there’s no way in the world thats the right number, its probably less than half of that.
No its actually really spot on…my friend is just starting law school and she was telling me about when she was applying to law school it was so hard to decide how to really value the schools. They brag about a lot more than just employment data, like for one she told me that they give the average income of new grads and some pretty horrible schools were reporting $150,000 on average! The school she goes to (which I won’t name) apparently doesn’t count its part time students towards the data and pulls tricks like that. Its all pretty messed up when you think about it.
I’m thinking about law school and the way I see it, the tiers seem accurate but within the tiers there’s no telling what you’re getting.
Law school rankings are a reliable source for something, but the question is what. They are highly indicative of future job prospects, especially as you go down the tiers. No one has ever said, and US News has never claimed, that they should be the only source, but they are a source that should be relied on. Nearly a quarter of the rank is derived from academic prestige – something everyone should care about because employers certainly do. Calling job numbers “creative accounting” is somewhat disingenuous since US News does not require only legal jobs to be reported. What you should have focused on is that when schools do not report their employed at graduation numbers, US News simply reduces their employed at 9 months numbers to create a fictional number for employed at graduation. This is the true creative accounting because it incentivizes not reporting certain data. It has nothing to do with creatively reporting it and more to do with a system that rewards you for not reporting at all.
Before criticizing something as unreliable, you need to do some research on what goes into it as well has how it is used.
No its actually really spot on…my friend is just starting law school and she was telling me about when she was applying to law school it was so hard to decide how to really value the schools. They brag about a lot more than just employment data, like for one she told me that they give the average income of new grads and some pretty horrible schools were reporting $150,000 on average! The school she goes to (which I won’t name) apparently doesn’t count its part time students towards the data and pulls tricks like that. Its all pretty messed up when you think about it.
I’m thinking about law school and the way I see it, the tiers seem accurate but within the tiers there’s no telling what you’re getting