Ep 70: Harvard, Yale, & Others Pulling Out US News Rankings – Whats Next?
You have likely seen the news this week that Yale, Harvard, Berkeley, and now Georgetown have pulled out of the US News and World Report Best Law Schools Rankings. What does this mean for current and future applicants? What changes and what stays the same? How does this impact you? Let's talk about it.
Episode Highlights
A lot of the things that go into the rankings may or may not be what actually makes a good law school. It's important to understand that the rankings have power because the stakeholders involved, employers, applicants, and law schools themselves, have given US News and World Report some power. It’s all about the perceived prestige that comes from the ranking.
This does not mean those schools will not be ranked or taken off the list. Schools pulling out of the rankings are just refusing to give US News information on the survey that US News asks law schools to participate in, which might affect some of their scores. It's an algorithm.
Majority of the data points US News for their rankings are publicly available information
Absolutely nothing has changed about the metrics that law schools are using to evaluate you as an applicant. Schools will use the same exact standards that they used to evaluate applicants last year whether or not they submitted the survey to us News and World Report. It has no bearing on how they are viewing your application.
In terms of what this could mean for future applicants, this may allow for increased access for under-resourced students and incentivize schools to diversify. Schools, especially of those lower ranked, are no longer beholden to making decisions to go higher up on the rankings.
Tweetable Quotes
“We absolutely should all be on the playing field of, how do we increase access to higher education, to legal education for our most marginalized students, for lower income students for BIPOC students, for non-traditional students...How can we all increase access and if there is a tool and a structure in place that is disincentivizing institutions from making policies to increase access. Well, that is a great reason to pull out of the rankings.”
“While perception and prestige aren’t really everything, and I really don’t want you to associate your worth or your intellect or capabilities with where you went to school, if you have the opportunity to go to a higher ranked school and it’s a good financial decision for you, and you’re not going to set yourself up in a cycle of debt, then I think you should do everything to maximize your chances. Because we live in a shitty, racist, homophobic world, so we have to work with what we’ve got. Rise to places of powers so that we can dismantle them. That is always my thing. We must rise to dismantle.”