Legal Commentary

U.S. News and World Report has announced that it's thinking about changing its law ranking methodology in two ways.  To quote their blog: "The first idea is that U.S. News should count both full-time and part-time entering student admission data for median LSAT scores and median undergraduate grade-point averages in calculating the school's ranking. . . . Another idea . . .  calls for U.S. News to compute our bar passage rate component (school's bar pass rate/jurisdiction's bar passage rate) using only the data of first-time takers who are graduates of American Bar Association-accredited schools."  According to the posting, this second idea was proposed in a report on U.S. News rankings commissioned by the AALS.  This posting addresses the first proposed change.

My first-blush take on the first idea is it is potentially quite pernicious, as it will put pressure on law schools to curtail part-time (especially evening) programs' focus on older students whose life and work experience may offset any deficits on the more standard admissions credentials (i.e., LSAT scores and GPA).  This is especially true with regard to LSAT scores.  I freely admit that I don't have empirical evidence to back this up, but I've got to believe that, all other things being equal, someone who's been out of school for 10, 20 or 30 years is simply not going to do as well on a racehorse multiple choice test as someone fresh out of college.  If those students are going to start counting for U.S. News ranking purposes admissions committees are going to start giving those students less of a break on that criterion, even if their post-college accomplishments give all kinds of reasons to expect the applicant to succeed in law school.  The same goes for GPA.  If a 40 year-old applicant had only mediocre performance in college but has since excelled in whatever she's done I would think that logically a 20 year-old GPA shouldn't count for much.  The proposed change in U.S. News's methodology will put pressure on that common-sense policy as well.

This change could also cause some other perverse effects.  Presumably many law schools' business models assume the continued existence of a part-time program -- for example, if their facilities simply can't handle siginficant increases in full-time enrollment.  If those part-time programs start to be filled by students with higher conventional credentials it will probably be the case that those students will be more likely to be recent college grads without major career or life commitments.  Thus, a school's part-time and full-time programs will start to be filled by the same demographic.  This may well cause tension.  Full-time 24 year-old students who don't work will complain about part time 24 year-old students who don't work since those part time students will have a lot more time to study.  (I confronted that complaint more than once in my stint as associate dean.)  If they end up in the same classes (and there will be more pressure for this, too, since, by hypothesis, the part-time students will not have any particular place to be during the day), does that suggest that they should be graded on different curves even in the same class?  This problem already exists to some degree.  But usually it's full-time day students who take evening classes (specialty classes often taught by adjuncts), rather than part-time evening students taking day classes.  So in some sense under the current scheme any unfairness to day students is the product of their own decision to take an evening class.  (And again, currently those evening students often have lots of commitments, a fact that mitigates any complaint about an uneven playing field.)  But an evening division filled with 24 year-olds will lead to a lot of day classes being filled with evening students who have significantly lighter loads than their day-division peers.

These evening students may suffer harms of their own.  Currently it's easy for most evening students to explain to employers why they're part-time students.  If U.S. News changes its methodology and law schools change their admissions criteria in response then part-time students will have more explaining to do as to why they're not finishing in three years.  In general, the change may lead employers to start seeing part-time programs not as programs designed to accommodate older students' scheduling needs but as second-class programs catering the same demographic as full-time programs, but enrolling less-desirable members of that demographic.

These latter effects are speculative, of course.  But it does seem clear that older, non-traditional students will take an admissions hit if this change goes into effect.  And that would really be too bad.  Part-time programs face a lot of challenges, about which I have blogged before.  But they play an important, and maybe underappreciated, role in making a legal education more accessible to those who otherwise wouldn't be able to obtain one.  It would be a shame if yet another hurdle would be placed in their path by a change in how U.S. News does its already highly questionable rankings.