Continuing in the tradition of years past (going way back to 2007), I have prepared some quick takes on the most recent US News law school rankings. This year I'm focusing on the correlations between a series of variables (peer assessment, lawyer/judge assessment, 75th and 25th percentile LSAT and GPA of entering class). And because I'm struggling -- again -- with typepad over the format of the tables, here they are in pdf form. Couple of quick observations here. There is a very high (.96) correlation between peer assessment and lawyer/judge assessment for all 190 schools and also for the top 53 (the "top fifty" includes a three-way tie at fifty) (.95). The correlation between peer and lawyer/judge assessment for the forty-five unranked schools (what is now called tier two) is substantially lower, though still high (.78). I might hazard a guess here that tier two schools have stronger regional reputations among judges and lawyers than among academics.
I might add something else here, about the rankings phenomenon in general. There seems to have been much less talk of rankings this year than I remember in past years; perhaps this just reflects the fact that I've been quite busy of late, so I haven't been reading the blogs (or talking to my colleagues for that matter). But maybe something else is going on; "rankings" is a game we play when we're affluent. We want to know how we rank in all sorts of things when things are going well. However, when we're all concerned with getting jobs, or helping our students get jobs, or worried about how we're going to do more with less, the old talk of rankings just isn't so important. If there's something positive about the new austerity, it may be that we're all returning to the basics of trying to provide a solid grounding for our students. Let me hazard two other hypotheses that may account for some of the decline in "rankings talk." First, the significant problems with employment numbers have caused a number of people to lose confidence in rankings. In fact, as Brian Leiter has pointed out, there are all sorts of other problems with the manipulable data that go into the rankings. Second -- and I think this is really subsidary to my previous hypotheses -- to the extent that academics study rankings (like the relationship between US News rankings and law review citations), perhaps we have fished out, at least for the time being, the rankings area.
Update as of March 21: Just to follow up on this post a little, here is another table, which breaks out the peer and lawyer/judge assessments by rank (all schoosl, top 53, and unranked). As in past years, the peer assessment scores are lower at each level than are the lawyer/judge scores. And as I hypothesized in the first paragraph, there is greater difference in the lawyer/judge scores among the unranked schools than in the top 53.
I haven't noticed any decrease in talk about the rankings.
What *has* changed is that the U.S. News decided for the first time to release the rankings on the web first, before the paper magazine was shipped out to stores. This effectively eliminated the usual hunt for leaked paper copies of the rankings that used to characterize the week before the rankings were formally announced. The hunt for leaked copies of the rankings led to a lot of coverage, which effectively ended when the first available appearance of the rankings was on the U.S. News website (timed a bit before it was expected).
Posted by: Orin Kerr | March 19, 2011 at 05:44 PM
Hi Orin,
Perhaps it's just me and that I have been me more distracted than usual and thus haven't been reading the blogs as much I have in past years. Entirely possible.
Still, this warrants a little investigation. Am I correct in my thinking that neither co-op nor prawfs have had any posts on the 2012 US News rankings since their release? I don't see any. By contrast last year, co-op had one on the rankings and a couple of others about rankings the week of the US News release and prawfs has a response the one of co-op's posts on how to fill out the US News survey. Moreover, at Leiter Reports there was only one post on US News this week (it was a re-post of Leiter's long-standing criticisms of US News). In a similar period last year, there were three posts, I think, all quite substantive -- ranking schools based on peer assessment and responding to some astronomical employment numbers and whatnot. That's drawing an inference from very small Ns, obviously, though given how little time I had for reading blogs this week, I think that's what may have shaped my opinion.
Maybe the real arbiter of this stuff is abovethelaw.com, though? They've had five, I think, posts from the eve of the release of the 2012 rankings up to now -- and they had three, I think, in a similar period last year. So there's been more this year than last, judging by abovethelaw.com!
Anyway, if rankings talk is chugging along at the same or increased pace as last year, you can ignore my second paragraph!
Posted by: Alfred Brophy | March 19, 2011 at 07:01 PM
Al,
I'm not sure what the right metric is, but my overall sense of the amount of U.S. News reaction among law profs and law students is that it's not different this year as compared to past years.
Posted by: Orin Kerr | March 19, 2011 at 07:36 PM
I've been hearing a lot more about rankings than in previous years, largely because of the change in how employment is reported and weighed, and the letter sent from US News to all law school deans saying it's a joke that schools claim they don't have better employment stats (pointing out that business schools have no problem with the issue).
Posted by: BL1Y | March 21, 2011 at 08:03 AM
Hi BL1Y,
Interesting that what I saw as a cause for decline in discussion -- the problems with employment data (as I noted in my post "the significant problems with employment numbers have caused a number of people to lose confidence in rankings") -- may have caused an increase in discussion.
I suppose in some ways both might be true -- because of problems with the data, people take the rankings less seriously and thus talk less about the rankings themselves, but the problems also lead people to talk more about the rankings process.
Posted by: Alfred Brophy | March 21, 2011 at 10:55 AM
This is an interesting discussion. I just went through the process of applying to law school, and it's an unfortunate reality that people think so much about rankings. I made the choice of not thinking about US News while picking the schools to which I decided to apply. But I can't help but wonder how much prospective employers consider rankings while looking at a resume.
Posted by: Ben Buchwalter | March 21, 2011 at 01:23 PM