Download the Guide to the U.S. News Survey here.
Dear U.S. News Survey Respondent:
The U.S. News & World Report survey has an enormous impact on how law schools are perceived throughout the profession, and on how law schools structure their own missions and priorities. Yet the dominant consideration in filling out these surveys has historically been the existing prestige of the school. We believe that there is an important factor missing from the dialogue: the quality of the education those schools deliver to their students, and we provide the attached information in order to begin to address this problem.
The “quality assessment” survey from U.S. News, which you may have recently received, overwhelmingly determines the overall rankings. The response from law professors (25%), and the responses from lawyers and judges (15%) comprise a combined 40% of each school’s overall score, dwarfing any other factor. By comparison, a school’s median LSAT score amounts to 12.5%, and bar passage rates are worth a mere 2% of the school’s overall rankings score.
Survey respondents like you are thus not merely expressing a preference, but influencing how law schools will structure their priorities. And yet many survey respondents have mistakenly believed that the U.S. News survey asks about the “reputation” of different schools. Unsurprisingly, research has shown that the survey responses tend simply to replicate the previous year’s rankings. As a result, there is no real competition on the quality of the service provided (a legal education) in the law school market, and—worse—in the absence of such competition, many schools attempt to “game” the rankings in order to move up.
In fact, the survey asks you as an expert on legal education (law professors) or the skills need for lawyering (lawyers and judges) about the quality of the J.D. program. But comparative information about this is sorely lacking.
As Stanford’s Deborah Rhode, a former president of the AALS, has put it: “Prospective students need more comparative data, and schools need more incentives to compete across a broader range of characteristics than current ratings address. So, for example, applicants might benefit from approaches adapted from undergraduate education that evaluate schools by reference to ’good practices’ on teaching. Such approaches can provide comparative information on students’ experiences on matters such as faculty contact, effective feedback, skills instruction, and collaborative projects.”
This is a gap we begin to help fill here. Attached is some information on schools that have (1) high bar passage rates relative to entering credentials; (2) curricula that use “best practices” in legal education; and (3) strength in programs that are highly relevant to developing skills for practice, such as legal writing, clinical programs, trial advocacy, and dispute resolution. In future years, we hope to produce a shorter list of top “value added” schools that get high marks in all or most of these categories.
Ultimately, how to use this information is of course up to you. Our view is that a school’s presence on one or more of these lists means that it warrants a “bump up” from the ranking that one might otherwise give a school. So a “3″ school that delivers particularly strong legal education would become a “4,” etc. And to the extent that many of the schools identified may not be familiar to you, their presence may provide reason to give them a stronger ranking than their current reputation- based score in last year’s U.S. News survey might suggest.
In addition, this kind of information can help make distinctions among institutions that are otherwise difficult to distinguish. For example, take Penn and Northwestern, two national schools that compete for students and are close in the overall rankings. Both have very high student satisfaction and bar passage rates. But consider the curricular differences in areas particularly important in preparing students for practice: Northwestern has top-10 (or close) legal writing, clinical, dispute resolution and trial advocacy programs in last year’s U.S. News surveys of faculty in these fields. Penn is not ranked in any of these areas, and is one of the few remaining law schools that uses third-year law students to teach 1Ls legal research and writing. Northwestern is also moving towards an increasingly innovative, practice-oriented curriculum, all of which suggests that Northwestern has a higher-quality J.D. program than Penn.
We hope you find this information helpful in filling out your U.S. News survey, and we would welcome your help in urging an institution like the AALS or ABA to take the lead in developing this kind of comparative data. If you have questions or comments on the project, we’d love to hear from you. Feel free to get in touch with us at jason@racetothetoplaw.com or david@racetothetoplaw.com.
Sincerely,
Jason Solomon and David Fagundes