Race to the Top

Why should anyone care about the stupid U.S. News survey anyway? According to a commonly held view, the rankings are silly, and the thing to do is ignore them. But I think this view is quite misguided.

It turns out — and this is the basic premise of the Race to the Top project that I helped start recently — that a major obstacle to the improvement of legal education generally is the lack of competition on quality among peer institutions, and that this lack of competition also leads to other bad consequences for law schools like spending lots of money on buying LSAT scores and shifting full-time students into “part-time” programs. And the easiest way to address both sets of problems is by taking the U.S. News rankings more seriously, not less, and focusing on this survey. » Read the rest of this entry «

Over at TaxProf Blog this week, Paul Caron is doing a great series of posts unpacking the data from the new The Princeton Review’s Best 174 Law Schools. One post is on the “academic experience” rating, which Princeton Review describes this way:

Academic Experience Rating: The quality of the learning environment, on a scale of 60 to 99. The rating incorporates the Admissions Selectivity Rating and the average responses of law students at the school to several questions on our law student survey. In addition to the Admissions Selectivity Rating, factors considered include how students rate the quality of teaching and the accessibility of their professors, the school’s research resources, the range of available courses, the balance of legal theory and practical lawyering skills stressed in the curriculum, the tolerance for diverse opinions in the classroom, and how intellectually challenging the course work is.

Because it incorporates admissions selectivity, the elite schools should all do quite well here, and indeed 17 out of 20 score above 90. The three that fell below 90: Southern Cal (88); Yale (87); Cornell (63).

Judging from the narrative sections in the book, USC’s relatively low score (95 for UCLA) may be due in part to too much theory/not enough practical from some professors. Yale: indifference to teaching among some faculty seems to be the culprit. Yikes on Cornell. Sure, discount it a bit for weather/location and not being first-choice school of many, but still, that’s awfully low. Students seem to complain about range of courses offered, small size of faculty. May also be they’re working harder (5.5 hrs a day outside class) than peers at other places. » Read the rest of this entry «

It’s the final days of the election for many law professors: that is, the U.S. News survey asking voters to assess the quality of each school’s JD program is due on Thursday. The Race to the Top project, which Dave Fagundes and I started a few months ago, just put out our first guide in time for the final voting from the academy, and in advance of the lawyers/judges survey next month. We emailed it yesterday to all the law professor voters, but if you didn’t get it by chance, you can download it at our website.

For another indicator of the quality of the JD program, look at the student satisfaction data extracted from The Princeton Review by Paul Caron over at TaxProf Blog — the key is to compare peer institutions in order to give different ratings to competitors, and thereby promote competition on quality. If everyone in the top 20 gets the same score — a “5,” for example — then they just end up competing on who can throw the most money at students with high LSAT scores. This is essentially the status quo.

Over the next few days, I’ll say more on why people who care about things like justice and meritocracy should care about this U.S. News survey — yes, there’s a presidential election, a global economic crisis, a quite-possibly innocent man about to be executed here in Georgia, and a few other things — but this isn’t just navel-gazing. It matters.

As U.S. News voters figure out what rating to give each school, and start focusing more on educational quality, Penn Law seems to be quite well-positioned — sky-high student satisfaction (”academic experience” rating of 96 in Princeton Review), great bar passage rates, on curriculum, we’ll have to see what they submit for their “Best Practices” survey today (thanks to all who have submitted so far!).

But Penn faces a real ceiling on these “quality assessment” surveys: its legal writing program. Like Yale, it’s taught by 3Ls. This ceiling prevents Penn from having an “outstanding” JD program (”5″), instead, I’m inclined to think they should get a “4″ (”strong”). Particularly where one of its chief competitors, Northwestern, has top-10 legal writing, clinical, dispute-resolution and trial advocacy programs (Penn’s nowhere on any of these lists, from last year’s U.S. News surveys) and an increasingly innovative, practice-oriented curriculum, all of which point to a “5″ in the survey, Penn needs to fix this soon. » Read the rest of this entry «

For those filling out the U.S. News survey rating the academic quality of J.D. programs across the country, one logical question is what kind of information one ought to look at to make such determinations. Here’s one key piece of data: bar passage rates relative to entering credentials.

So if we look at schools that have students with not-great entering credentials, but high bar passage rates in recent years — that’s a good signal that the quality of the JD program is relatively strong.

Two possible objections (and others welcome) on this as a metric: first, this encourages and rewards “teaching to the bar.” My response is: well, the school that has pulled off one of the biggest bar-passage miracles of recent times, New York Law School, raised bar passage rates — 57% to 90% — primarily by teaching struggling students analytic skills. See Dean Matasar’s description of how they did it here (p. 3 of pdf). Intensive training in analytic skills for struggling students? Sounds good to me.

Second objection is: bar passage is already included in the U.S. News formula — why double count it? The response is: bar passage counts for next to nothing (2%) in the US news formula, and it’s considered on an absolute, not relative, basis. So Yale gets essentially the same credit for achieving a 90% bar passage rate in New York as New York Law School does, working with students with far lower entering credentials. » Read the rest of this entry «