<p>While this is not entirely new news, the following are some exerpts from an article in today’s Wall Street Journal:</p>
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The most widely watched ranking of U.S. law schools may move to stop an increasingly popular practice: schools gaming the system by channeling lower-scoring applicants into part-time programs that don’t count in the rankings.</p>
<p>U.S. News & World Report is “seriously” considering reworking its ranking system to crack down on the practice, says Robert Morse, director of data research at the magazine, who is in charge of its influential list.</p>
<p>Such a move could affect the status of dozens of law schools. It would likely reverse gains recently made by a number of schools that have helped their revenue by increasing their rosters of part-time students with lower entrance-exam scores and grade-point averages, without having to pay a price in the rankings.</p>
<p>In some cases the part-timers’ course load is barely less than that of full-timers, and they are able to transfer into the schools’ full-time programs in their second year. Statistics about second-year students’ pre-law school scores also aren’t counted in the rankings.</p>
<p>Counting part-timers would roil the law-school rankings, which have a big impact on where students apply and from where law firms hire. A number of law-school administrators interviewed about the potential change contend it could have another effect: narrowing a traditional pathway to law school for minorities and working professionals. Those groups often perform worse on the important Law School Admission Test, or LSAT, and schools could feel pressure to raise their admission thresholds.
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Tom W. Bell, a law professor at Chapman University, Orange, Calif., who developed a rankings model that mimics the one used by U.S. News., says that if the change had already taken place this year, some schools could have fallen from the magazine’s “first tier” of the top 50 schools to the second tier, and some from the second to the third. For example, Southern Methodist University and the University of Connecticut, tied at 46th, might have fallen out of the top 50, and Hofstra and Stetson universities might have sunk below 100. Representatives for the schools didn’t dispute his analysis, done at the request of The Wall Street Journal.
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It’s become an open secret that many law-school deans strategize specifically to improve their rank in the magazine’s annual publication, to try to reap more interest by employers in their students and energize alumni donors. Even movements of one point in median LSAT scores, or a few hundredths of a point in median undergraduate grade-point averages, can change a school’s position on the list.</p>
<p>One of the top beneficiaries of the current U.S. News criteria is Phillip Closius, former dean of the University of Toledo’s law school. He led the school’s rise from the list’s fourth tier to its second tier within a few years. After he took the helm of the University of Baltimore law school last year, that school also quickly climbed the rankings, to 125 this year from 170 last year, he says. (Schools in the third and fourth tiers aren’t publicly ranked – instead they are grouped together – but deans can find out where they placed.)</p>
<p>Mr. Closius’s winning strategy in both places: Cut the number of full-time students accepted into the program to boost the median LSAT scores and GPAs, which together account for more than 20% of a school’s ranking. In their place, the schools add more part-time students, who can transfer to full-time the second year.
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At Toledo, more large law firms began interviewing students after the school’s ranking climbed, and at Baltimore, he recently got multimillion-dollar grants and donations for a new building.
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Prospective students are voracious readers of the annual U.S. News rankings, as are some prospective employers and alumni donors. Generally, the lower a school’s ranking, the smaller the percentage of its graduating class will land high-paying jobs at bigger firms or prestigious judicial clerkships – though a recent study by the National Law Journal of the 2005 graduating classes across the country shows that a higher rank doesn’t always translate into better job prospects at the biggest U.S. law firms.</p>
<p>Even a slight drop in the rankings can put a law-school dean’s job in jeopardy, especially during a tough job market for graduating lawyers.
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Initially, “the effect of a drop in the rankings is psychological, but it can have real institutional consequences,” says Bill Henderson, a law professor at Indiana University-Bloomington who tracks the legal job market. For some schools that fail to effectively manage their U.S. News ranking, the drop could cause a snowball effect over several years in which there is a “falloff in good applicants and eventually a tapering off of employers,” he says.
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<p>I’ll stick to Leiter’s. :)</p>
<p>Well, at least Columbia will still be able to take boatloads of transfers to boost revenue without hurting their ranking. Maybe some more schools will start trying that.</p>
<p>I would think Georgetown might drop quite a bit if this comes to pass. They could drop out of the top 20, since they have about the biggest night law school program on the east coast.</p>