“Once upon a time, the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings were critically important to law schools,” University of Kentucky’s Brian Frye and Indiana University’s Christopher “CJ” Ryan write in a new study. “Law schools literally lived or died” based on their US News rankings,” which Frye and Ryan say were “existential.”
But now, these law professors argue, U.S. News’ scoring of schools is dramatically less important to prospective law students—maybe even to the point of becoming irrelevant.
Frye and Ryan analyzed a decade of U.S. News rankings and what they call “revealed preferences rankings,” which rank schools based on enrollment decisions of students with the strongest credentials (GPA and LSAT scores). They sought to determine whether a rise (or fall) in a law school’s U.S. News rank resulted in that law school matriculating a stronger (or weaker) class in the immediately following year. If prospective law students were paying attention to the rankings, one would expect to see strong correlation between rank changes and class quality.
But the authors instead found no real correlation between the two measures. This led them to conclude U.S. News “is ranking law schools, but prospective law students don’t care about its rankings, and are making decisions about which law school to attend based on other factors.”
Their claim that the rankings are “entirely irrelevant” might be overstated. In my interview with Frye and Ryan earlier this week, I suggested that perhaps U.S. News rankings remain relevant to students, but rank changes take longer than a year to manifest in the credentials of incoming classes.
The authors acknowledge this possibility both in their paper and our conversation, in which they referred to prestige rankings as “sticky”—i.e., slow to change. For example, many of us think reflexively of the top-14 or “T14” schools, which have been fairly consistent since the start of the rankings in 1987 (even if, in a given year, a traditional T14 school might drop out of that elite group).
I also wondered whether law schools responded to changes in their rank by simply adjusting tuition discounts. Almost 80% of law students receive some kind of tuition discount, and these carefully calculated discounts often reflect a school’s rank, with lower-ranked schools offering larger discounts to compete with their higher-ranked peers.
Frye and Ryan didn’t disagree that cost plays an important role in students’ decisions about where to enroll, but added that this factor is difficult to track, since schools are opaque about their pricing practices.
Despite such quibbles, my anecdotal sense is that Frye and Ryan are basically right: the U.S. News rankings aren’t as powerful as they once were. This is why Yale and Harvard Law felt comfortable declaring, in November 2022, that they would no longer provide U.S. News with certain data the publication needed to prepare what Yale dean Heather Gerken called its “profoundly flawed” ranking.
After dozens of other schools followed suit, U.S. News announced major methodological changes to how it ranks schools—which could be viewed as an admission that its rankings were in danger of becoming obsolete.
I asked Frye and Ryan: What can U.S. News do to return its rankings to relevance? Or is that even possible, in an age where the idea of buying a hard-copy magazine would be laughable to many pre-law students?
“You have to think about who the rankings are for,” Ryan said. “They are for prospective and current law students—and I think US News has lost touch with this fact. If you could survey pre-law and law students and ask them what matters to them, the results of that survey could be the genesis of a new ranking.”
The challenge, however—and the inherent problem with a “one size fits all” ranking system like that of US News—is different students have different priorities when selecting schools.
“If you’re looking to go into Big Law, for example, then you should prioritize prestige,” Frye said. “But if you’re interested in public service, you might want to focus more on cost—and pick a lower-ranked school in exchange for lower tuition.”
“Picking a law school involves a combination of many factors, including prestige, cost, and educational opportunity,” Ryan explained. “You need to choose the nexus that’s right for you.”
So here’s my suggestion to U.S. News for how to reclaim the relevance of its rankings: Get rid of its universal ranking of the “best” law schools and replace it with a robust interactive tool that would let prospective law students state what matters most to them in a law school.
Factors could include overall prestige, bar passage, debt upon graduation, geographical location, and placement success in different sectors, including Big Law and clerkships. The tool would then provide students with a customized ranking of schools based on their individual criteria.
The basis for this tool could be the “MyLaw Rankings” feature that’s already on the U.S. News website—but greatly improved. I took the tool for a spin, and to be blunt, it’s a joke. It asked, for example, about the size of the law school I wanted to attend—a factor that, in my experience, most students don’t care about at all—and it didn’t ask a single question about what I might want to do professionally after law school.
In years past, producing an interactive ranking tool of any sophistication would have been a daunting task. But in this age of artificial intelligence, turning MyLaw Rankings into something that’s actually useful to prospective law students wouldn’t be difficult.
Of course, customized rankings produced by an online, interactive tool might not generate the same buzz (or revenue) as a traditional, seemingly authoritative, numerical ranking of almost 200 law schools. If U.S. News insists on putting out a numerical ranking, it should simply rank America’s most prestigious law schools (comparable to Vault 100, a ranking of the most prestigious law firms).
After all, the prestige data—obtained by U.S. News through an expensive, labor-intensive process of sending out, collecting, and analyzing reputational surveys—is the only component of the rankings that’s proprietary to the publication. After the 2023 methodology overhaul, everything else in the rankings is based on publicly available information that’s not unique to U.S. News, such as employment and bar-passage data.
“The prestige ranking, while maybe a bit gross, is the one really valuable thing that U.S. News still does,” Frye told me. “As a prospective law student, you need to know about a school’s prestige because that prestige will have long-lasting career effects.”
David Lat, a lawyer turned writer, publishes Original Jurisdiction. He founded Above the Law and Underneath Their Robes, and is author of the novel “Supreme Ambitions.”
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