Last week, U.S. News and World Report released its new law school rankings, and Iowa slid from 24 to 27. Despite the notorious invalidity of these rankings, prospective students, faculty and employers still eye them closely. When the rankings came out, some Iowa students went crazy, blaming women, minorities, affirmative action, the phases of the moon, or whatever for Iowa’s slip in the rankings. The most visceral comments surfaced on a post at AboveTheLaw.com, but a group called “Stop the Bleeding” also briefly showed up on Facebook.
The irony here is that, by complaining so loudly in public forums, these students do more harm than good. The largest single portion of the USNWR Rankings are made up by the opinions of others:
Peer assessment score 25% Lawyer/judge assessment score 15% Employment rate at nine months 14% Median LSAT percentile equivalents 2.5% Median undergraduate GPAs 10% “Educational” expenditures per student 9.75% Employment rate at graduation 4% Student/teacher ratio (inverted) 3% Acceptance rate (inverted) 2.5% Bar passage ratio indicator 2% Other expenditures per student 1.5% Library volumes and titles 0.75%
So, 40% of the score comes from peers, judges and lawyers’ assessments. The next largest groups are employment at graduation and per-student expenditures. Median LSAT score? Only counts for 2.5% of the ranking.
Of course, there may be legitimate gripes about the administration’s priorities, its communication with students, and its willingness to support public interest jobs. However, these things have little to do with our rankings. The only two long-term professors that Iowa lost in the past year were Profs. Cain and Love, both women, both lesbians, and both renowned scholars in their fields. If we want to get our rankings back up, we need to support our school publicly, push for higher faculty salaries and expanded faculty office space so that we can attract the prestigious acedemics that boost our rankings. In other words: whatever your LSAT score is, you’re not helping by undermining the administration on the internet. Chill out.
EDIT: The journal I quoted had a typo: the median LSAT score makes up 12.5% of the ranking score.
Steve Wieland
fsford
timhilton
smahieu
Morgan N. Engling
maryiowa
jaimiesuzi
jarens
kevinjames
brieanne
lcm
Andrew
enwinfield
Steve,
Unless I am misreading the methodology, as I am not a statistician, Median LSAT amounts for 12.5%, not 2.5%. See, e.g., http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/best-graduate-schools/2008/03/26/law-methodology.html.
As a general reply, yes the rankings are flawed, but the system is in place and we have to compete in it. There’s no way to objectively determine what the best legal education is. As an example, there’s no way to objectively determine what the best baseball team in a given year is, which is why we have the subjective definition of, “The team that wins the championship is subjectively considered the best” in place. It would be irrational for the KC Royals to argue that the World Series is a flawed system for picking the champion, rather than to try to improve themselves in order to compete in the system that is in place. As it relates to law school, the objective factors, such as median LSAT and GPA, are the only thing we can control which will in turn increase the subjective factors.
Of course, you’re right that immature, uninformed responses hurt the law school’s reputation, which is bad, and I think the law school community has done a good job of curbing that after a brief reactionary period.
Tim
Tim,
Yes, I think you’re right in one sense: this is how USNWR computes the score. The article I read might have re-weighted the score using “a forced mean and standard deviation,” the same method that USNWR uses, but might have done it a different way. In sum, I don’t know if it’s just a mistake or just a different way of looking at how the rankings are weighted. Either way, we both agree that the rankings are subjective and based chiefly on others’ perceptions; we also agree that people can really hurt the law school with public outcry.
From what I read of that article, it looks like his table may have simply omitted the digit “1″ from the LSAT weighting figure. If you add up that table, it only adds up to 90%, indicating that the missing 10% came from this typo in the LSAT scores.
Regardless, my overall point is that while 40% of the ranking comes from the subjective opinions of others, the other 60% comes from objective factors over which the University has varying, but always significant, levels of control, such as the faculty, the acceptance rate, and the median LSAT and GPAs. Solving the problems that we have on the objective side will almost certainly influence the subjective side as well, because the opinions of lawyers, judges and our academic peers have to be based on something.
Well, in a sense it is true that those are “objective” factors, but they are weighted in a completely arbitrary and subjective way. Of course, I support spending more per-student on things, having lots of volumes in the library, etc.
My point was that our greatest losses have been in our faculty. We haven’t been recruiting talented professors as hard as we should be and the school lets some professors get by without significant publishing. One of the main reasons is not spending per student, but low faculty salaries. Our salaries here are lower than our peer institutions, including Minnesota.
I agree. The law school administration/University should be focusing on improving the things that they have control over that make up 60% of the rankings.
Just want to point out that our peer assessment actually went UP… at the same time we dropped in the rankings. So, by your own logic, it looks like we should not be chilling out.
If our peer assessment is going up, and yet our ranking is going down… well, then it would appear that our slip in the rankings is directly attributable to that remaining 60%.
Sam, see my new post on the blog in response to your comment.