Archive : Law School Rankings

Ready for more rankings obsession? Today we dig into the latest law school rankings, which U.S. News & World Report released last week. We have a rule here at Veritas Prep headquarters to caution applicants against reading too much into rankings when making decisions on where to apply and attend, but there is no denying the fact that the material is interesting. Our society loves rankings. Put anything on a list — grad schools, rock albums, baseball players — and people will sit up and take note.

And, in research graduate schools, the rankings certainly are useful in terms of helping you get a feel for the lay of the land. Have a 170+ LSAT score and a sterling GPA? maybe you have a shot at a T14 law school after all. Having a hard time getting above 155 on the LSAT? Then maybe you need to look a little lower in the rankings. In this regard, it certainly makes sense to at least eyeball the rankings before going too far into the admissions process.

Last week Inside Higher Ed reported that the American Bar Association is considering ending a rule that law schools require the LSAT in order to receive ABA accreditation. Right now this is just an idea being kicked around by an ABA panel charged with reviewing the associations accreditation rules, but if the panel recommends the change (which many believe it will), ABA approval may not be far behind.

Why the proposed change? Many schools claim that the LSAT requirement takes away flexibility in the admissions process, because they have no choice but to report those scores to the magazines that that publish annual rankings (ahh, the rankings again). Since each school needs to keep up with the Joneses and keep their mean LSAT scores high (lest they risk dropping in those hated rankings), they end up turning away some students they really do want.

Everyone who operates in the graduate school admissions space knows that rankings are both important and also to be taken with a grain of salt. Any summation of programs presented in list form purports to be an objective analysis, but is always filled with subjective factors, opinion, and incomplete data.

Ready to geek out on the newest U.S. News law school rankings? Good, because we are going to break down the 2011 edition, which has been officially posted on the website and available for public consumption (and obsession). While we make it a policy here at Veritas Prep to caution applicants against reading too much into rankings when making decisions on where to apply and attend, there is no denying the fact that the material is interesting.

By at least one measure, Northwestern University’s School of Law is the best law school in America. But what is that measure? And what does it mean? Should would-be Harvard, Columbia, and Chicago students suddenly reverse course?

You may have already heard the “Northwestern ranked as best law school” sound bite in the last week and scratched your head. “Really?” Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that the National Law Journal is a highly respected publication that put out a legitimate ranking that had Northwestern had the top of the heap. No, in the sense that this ranking measures one thing — and one thing only — and has nothing to do with academic excellence, peer reputation, class profile, or any other metric that we’re used to analyzing. And no in the sense that the one thing it does measure might be a pretty misleading statistic.