Law Students

Stop It With the Rankings

By Casebook Sherpa

Rankings are important. I don’t deny that. But they’re only important so far as they go – they are a rough gauge of the prestige of your school. They can be, and are, manipulated. They can become a self-fulfilling prophecy – if you focus on how low your rank is, you will start to assume you’re not any better.

Since our school seems intent on obsessing about its ranking, I’ll add two more cents on the rankings question. By way of background, this week our law school’s dean is meeting with students to discuss the latest U.S. News Rankings:

The Student Bar Association has asked Dean Miles to meet with students to discuss the U.S. News and World Report rankings and answer any other questions students may have for her. We?ve scheduled this Conversation with the Dean on Thursday, April 22, at 5:30 pm. All students are invited to attend and should feel free to come in late or leave early as class schedules permit.

Our school is ranked #98 in the latest rankings. Last year it was #94. The year before it was #88. We’re going down. If we read into the dean’s letter of last week, we’re to believe that we’re staying roughly the same on key indicators while a handful of other schools are moving up. That’s shaky ground to stake when you’re graded on a curve. Perhaps this shaky defense of the school’s record is why the SBA is nervous about the decline. I give them credit for pushing the Dean on it and appreciate their work.

I’m not bitter about this. The bottom line is I have a fairly unsophisticated (shortsighted? juvenile?) view of rankings. I care about the rankings to the extent that I understand it’s a key factor in assessing job candidates, at least in the early stages of a lawyer’s career. I care about them to the extent that they, if at all, make schools focus on the actual quality of education and educational environment.

Frankly, I don’t think our school hires or keeps enough top-notch, Ivy-educated legal scholars who would power a move up in the rankings. We get strong faculty reputation marks. We have some genuinely excellent professors. And more than a few so-so ones. I think if we want to move up in rankings and quality of education, a good first step will be figuring out how to attract and, more importantly, keep professors who can cultivate a more rigorous academic environment.* There have been several good hires in this regard in recent years. We’ll see if it continues.

But here’s my take… So what?

So your school’s ranked 242nd. So? You can’t control that. The question is what are you going to do about it?

You’re in law school. Now work your ass off and prove to whoever will listen that the rankings are nearly meaningless when you have someone who’s talented, smart, aggressive, diligent, thorough, and conscientious. The qualities that make a good lawyer graduating from Yale are the same as those for one graduating from Catholic University. Likewise, a lazy, entitled person graduating from Yale will get exposed just like the same person graduating from Catholic, it just might happen on a different timeline (and, frankly, different payscale).

Prestige is important. And rankings provide a nice way of measuring your school against others. But at some point you need to prove that you can do the job. And many lower ranked schools are damn good at preparing people to be damn good lawyers. It may be more work to get a shot at proving it at a big firm (particularly in today’s economic climate), but you can only control so much.

If you don’t like that, get good grades and transfer. You knew where your school measured up when you started. If you ignored that or didn’t come to terms with it, it’s not worth whining about now.

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* A great example of this is a few (maybe more than a few) years back, Justice Scalia was at school for a panel discussion. An illustrious panel. Not a single faculty member showed up. Not one. In discussing the event with organizers in our law school’s atrium and how excellent the quality of its dialogue and focus, Justice Scalia is said to have thundered, “This law school’s faculty stands indicted.” Or something like that. The point isn’t that Scalia is a blow-hard, but that it suggests a lack of interest among our faculty in this sort of academic exchange and dialogue.

Related posts:

1. US News Rankings – Letter from the Dean

Full post as published by Fight The Hypo on April 20, 2010 (boomark / email).