Legal News

Yet Another Way the U.S. News Rankings Have Changed Law Schools

By Ashby Jones

The U.S. News & World Report law-school rankings has, throughout the years, caused law schools to do all kinds of things to improve their standings, including funneling lower-ranking admitted students into part-time programs to avoid dragging averages down. (Click here for a 2008 WSJ story on that phenomenon, by Amir Efrati.)

According to this piece in the National Jurist, another little gymnastic performed by the schools isn’t, well, all that small: Schools have increased their faculty size by 40 percent over the past 10 years, partly in order to bring their student-faculty ratios down and thereby gain a hike up the U.S. News rankings. The NJ’s full survey will be released later in the month. (Hat Tip: ABA Journal)

According to the piece, this move — big surprise! — has led to a huge tuition hike as well: a 74 percent increase at private schools and a 102 percent at public institutions.

"Law schools tend to believe that their faculty reputation is driven by scholarship and they are very interested in U.S. News," said William Henderson, a law professor at Indiana University Mauer School of Law, to the National Jurist. "Lowering your faculty-to-student ratio improves your [U.S. News] ranking and increases time for scholarship."

According to the article, the hiring spree has lowered the average student-to-faculty ratio from 18.5-to-1 in 1998 to 14.9-to-1 in 2008. It was an estimated 25.5-to-1 in 1988 and 29-to-1 in 1978.

The piece doesn’t get into it, but we wonder whether this is a good thing, whether students are getting more for their (more) money. After all, with twice the number of professors around, it stands to reason that office hours are more accessible, that class size is lower, that the quality of education is, simply better.

On the other hand, it’s not like faculty scholarship necessarily translates into a better experience for students — so removed from real life practice the scholarship so often is. LBers, thoughts?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 10, 2010 (boomark / email).