Law school rankings are a sham, simply put. The idea is sound enough, and there’s a good chance that, at one point, the intent was, as well. Why not give prospective law students a jumping off point from which to begin their school research? One answer: The lists of criteria that are used to compile these rankings dangle in front of law schools like carrots. Think about it. Would the masters of the legal loophole offer up information indicative of their schools’ comprehensive ability (or lack thereof) to educate students, without tampering with it in some unethical, yet entirely legal manner, for their own benefit? It seems the opposite has proven more likely.
Even if affected parties are able to operate under the naïve presumption that the publishers of the rankings have successfully eliminated any and all manipulation that is likely to occur, making the rankings more accurate, prospective and current law students still suffer a disservice, as they are displaced from the center of the law school’s attention focus, to the outskirts.
With a comprehensive ranking system establishing a published hierarchy among law schools—one that is distributed at little or no cost to consumers—law schools’ primary focus will be on keeping abreast of their competition. But a law school can’t maintain an excellent reputation if it neglects its student body. Can it? This is where the law students are vulnerable to a swift kick in the rear.
Historically, there have been three factors that determine whether or not an employer hires a recent law school graduate: the graduate’s performance in law school, the academic reputation of the law school, and the company’s track record for graduates of the law school. Incorporate a ranking system, and a new dimension is added to the interview process. Now, the U.S. News and World Report rankings supplant word of mouth in questions of a school’s reputation. An “increased awareness” of the quality of law school graduates from other areas creates a more diverse arrangement of alma maters in the workplace, diluting the firsthand information pertaining to the local schools in the area. And employers are, more commonly, faced with a dilemma: Which is more valuable, the law review editor from the local state school, or the University of Virginia graduate who brought up the rear of the class for three years? In short, graduates are finding it harder to earn jobs, and more and more of them are being designated jobs that the rankings permit.
Prior to the introduction of a ranking system, the bulk of the job competition in local markets affecting graduates of the local law school stemmed from the Ivies and Stanford, the who’s who among universities. Now, employers are aware of other outstanding programs: Duke, U. of Chicago, Texas, etc. The post-grad job interview at the law firm that local students have had their eyes on is now less a quality and character assessment, and more a show and tell of university names on degrees.
The outcome: Law students who came down with the flu during the week of their LSAT, and only get into LSU, instead of Tulane, are out of luck when it comes to the job interview. Law students who endured a personal tragedy during their undergraduate careers, and have missed out on two-tenths of a GPA point (and Northwestern Law) as a result, get the axe. Performance in law school matters less. The name of the school that issued the degree is getting all the attention. Law schools are bettering their numbers by being more selective (and manipulative) on paper, paying more attention to ranking criteria than law potential. NYU might snub the unrecognized humanitarian of the year and cause the student to miss out on his or her first choice employer, because his or her grades were not ideal, but, as a result of its selectivity, NYU has a decent shot at leapfrogging Columbia in the latest U.S. News law school rankings issue. To some, this is the game, survival of the fittest. For every applicant that didn’t get the grades, there’s an applicant who did. To others, these rankings are mechanizing and dehumanizing a process that admits students to a curriculum and a profession that cries out for good human beings. It’s a shame to think that these rankings may hurt prospective and current law students a great deal more than they help.
