The UCLA School of Law announced Tuesday that it will join a growing boycott of US News & World Report rankings, saying the methodology the publication uses penalizes institutions that promote public law careers and seek to enroll students from diverse and marginalized communities.
UCLA’s decision amplifies what is turning out to be the biggest challenge yet for the university rankings industry, following similar decisions in the past week by other major law schools to prevent publication. At least half of US News’ top 20 law schools have announced they will not participate in the rankings due to long-standing problems with the methodology. In addition to UCLA, they include Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, UC Berkeley, Georgetown, Michigan, Duke, and Northwestern.
USC Law, which is currently ranked 20th in US News, has not joined the boycott or made any statement about it. Among California law schools, Stanford is ranked #2, UC Berkeley #9, and UCLA #15.
“The rankings discourage schools from supporting careers in public service for their graduates, creating a diverse student population, and awarding financial aid based on need,” UCLA Law School Acting Dean Russell Korobkin said in a statement. message to the law school community. “UCLA Law does all of these things, but honoring our core values comes at a cost in ranking points.”
US News officials have said their organization would continue to rank the nearly 200 fully accredited law schools regardless of whether the institutions agree to submit their data. Much of the information used for the rankings is publicly available.
“US News’ Best Law School Rankings are for students seeking the best decision for their law education. We will continue to fulfill our journalistic mission of ensuring that students can rely on the best and most accurate information to make that decision,” said Eric Gertler, US News CEO and CEO, in a statement. “As part of our mission, we must continue to ensure that law schools are held accountable for the education they provide these students, and that mission does not change with these recent announcements.”
Korobkin took issue with several aspects of the US News review method. He said the rankings are based on unadjusted undergraduate grade point averages to measure student quality, penalizing those who take classes that tend to give lower grades, such as math, technology, engineering and science. The dean of the law school said that discourages students from pushing themselves through more challenging classes and does not measure their academic ability or leadership potential. Other critics have said that the focus on GPA and test scores encourages law schools to award merit-based financial aid to attract top-scoring applicants instead of providing need-based aid designed to offer greater access to low-income students.
Korobkin also criticized the use of subjective “reputational” ratings of law school faculty and programs provided by a small number of lawyers, judges, and professors. She said such evaluators “cannot expect to have detailed knowledge of the nearly 200 schools they are asked to evaluate, instead using more quantifiable measures.”
Like UC Berkeley and other institutions, UCLA Law is also dismayed that the rankings discourage students from entering public law.
UC Berkeley, for example, offers students a scholarship for a year after graduation to work for a public interest organization. Students receive a salary comparable to an entry-level position in public service or public interest and a study stipend for bar exams. Nine out of 10 students who receive a scholarship remain in the public service law, she said.
But US News does not count these interns as full-time employees, creating a “perverse incentive for schools to eliminate these positions, despite their success and despite the training they provide to future public service lawyers.” UC Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky said last week. by announcing that the school would join the boycott.
Additionally, Korobkin said US News rewards schools for spending more on their students. But that puts public law schools at a disadvantage, she said, which tend to spend less and charge less than private schools.
To make matters worse, Chemerinsky said, a law school’s per-student spending is adjusted according to the cost of living in the surrounding area. This means that high-cost regions, such as the San Francisco Bay Area, are penalized despite a lack of evidence that such metrics are related to academic quality. Statistical analysis from UC Berkeley showed that cost-of-living adjustments alone lowered Berkeley’s US News ranking to #9. He helped elevate Yale in New Haven, Conn., to No. 1, over No. 2 Stanford, in Palo Alto.
Some other major law schools that have not joined the boycott said they are evaluating the issue, but have echoed the criticism.
In a statement last week, the University of Pennsylvania law school applauded its peer institutions “for their leadership in raising key questions.”
“Among the problems with the current system, the US News algorithm severely undercounts money spent on student financial aid, while fully rewarding schools for every dollar spent on teacher and administrator salaries and other operating expenses,” he said. Law school. “The rankings do not provide a holistic view of how legal education meets the needs of today’s society.”
In an interview, Korobkin said that the time taken to discuss the issue with faculty and alumni did not focus on whether the ranking methodology was flawed; “there was no doubt” that it was, he said. Rather, the school debated whether taking a position would make a difference, since 80% of the information used by US News is publicly available.
In the end, he said, the law school believed that it should take a public position.
“It is important for us to use this moment to reinforce our values and do what we can to encourage positive change by retaining our cooperation,” he said. “We look forward to working with US News, or any other organization wishing to rank law schools, to help determine a methodology that can provide useful comparative information for potential students without creating perverse incentives for schools that don’t encourage improvement. of the laws. education.”
