For a long time, the top dozen or so law schools in US News & World Report’s annual rankings stayed remarkably consistent, with Yale for example holding the top spot every year since the rankings debuted in 1990. But not this year.
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Yale is now no longer at the very top of the highly influential rankings, which were unveiled earlier this week, having slid down to number two. While this may seem insignificant, Bloomberg Law columnist David Lat said even dropping one spot can tangibly affect a law school’s brand.
Lat spoke about this with Bloomberg Law editor Jessie Kokrda Kamens for our podcast, On The Merits. He said recent changes in the methodology for compiling these rankings means we should expect more movement in and out of the top spots in years to come. Lat also talks about why the rankings matter for Big Law talent recruitment and beyond.
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This transcript was produced by Bloomberg Law Automation.
Jessie Kamens:
Hello and welcome back to On the Merits, the news podcast from Bloomberg Law. I’m your host, Jessie.
U.S. News and World Report’s law school rankings cause a lot of chatter in the legal world. And that’s kind of surprising since they actually don’t change very much from year to year. But that’s not the case this year. For the first time since the rankings debuted in 1990, Yale was knocked out of the top spot by Stanford.
Bloomberg Law columnist David Lat, who’s also behind the Substack newsletter Original Jurisdiction, wrote about the latest school rankings unveiled this week. And he joins us on the podcast today to talk about who’s up, who’s down, and why it actually matters.
David Lat:
So I think that over the long term, they do. Harvard was number six this year. They actually had been number six last year, but this is their all-time historic low. For the vast majority of the history of the rankings, Harvard has been a top three school. And I think in people’s minds, it still is a top three school. But if Harvard is number six year after year after year, I think that will start to erode perceptions of Harvard.
I would think it’s fair to say that Yale, being thought of by many people as the number one law school, is largely a creation of U.S. News. I think before U.S. News existed, most people would probably say Harvard was the number one law school in America. It certainly was in terms of popular culture, whether it’s 1L or The Paper Chase or Legally Blonde. It’s certainly the most famous law school in America worldwide. So I think to the extent that people think of Yale as now the number one school, I think Yale owes that a lot to U.S. News. So I think these changes can make a difference.
One other example I’ll mention, Texas A&M. They have had a meteoric rise through the rankings. A decade or so ago, I believe they were unranked. And now, in the latest rankings, they’re number 22. That is definitely going to change people’s perceptions.
Jessie Kamens:
And do you think that translates to applications for these schools?
David Lat:
Oh, absolutely. It is funny. Law school deans will often poo-poo the rankings, but they also have to care about them because other people care about them. So it drives applications. It is so influential. Here’s even another thing I hadn’t thought about. The former dean of BYU Law, which has also had a big jump in the rankings over the years, said that it even affects the quality of what the flagship law review at a school ends up publishing. Because when authors are choosing from multiple offers from law reviews or law journals about where to publish, they look at the school’s U.S. News rank. This has so many implications that are beyond just the number of applicants. But absolutely, it affects the number of applicants.
Jessie Kamens:
Are there other notable moves from the last list that come to mind for you that you’d like to talk about?
David Lat:
Well, one thing that I thought was interesting was, for whatever reason, state or public law schools did not do well. And I talked about this a little bit in my Substack newsletter. For whatever reason, a lot of very prominent state schools took tumbles. And if you look at just the top 50, for example, you had 16 public law schools that collectively lost 64 spots in the rankings. And in terms of state schools that gained from the top 50, you had only around nine that actually notched gains. So that was striking to me. I don’t know why. I don’t know if that has to do with funding or political controversies or what have you. But I was struck by that.
Jessie Kamens:
Well, I went to a public law school, the University of Virginia. And was it among one that rose in the rankings?
David Lat:
No, UVA stayed steady, but at a very high rank. It is now number four, which I believe is an all-time high for it. And here’s a funny thing about people who graduated from these schools in the past. It’s kind of like, I don’t know what its rank was when you were there, but to the extent that it’s higher today than it was when you were there, if that’s the case, it’s kind of like the value of your degree appreciated. People don’t necessarily realize when, you know, if you go back really far, NYU Law School, which is now number seven, was not regarded as a top law school, and now it’s ranked ahead of Columbia. So again, I don’t think the year-to-year moves may matter much, but over time, they do make a difference.
Jessie Kamens:
What about in terms of big law hiring or clerkships? Do you think that those employers make any sorts of decisions? Not obviously directly based on the rankings every year, but do you think it also has that trickle-down effect?
David Lat:
Oh, absolutely. Because look, employers look at these rankings as well. It’s funny. You would think, oh, is a story about rankings going to be of interest only to law students or law applicants? But I have people who graduated from law school decades ago who are interested in the current rank of their alma mater. So these hiring partners definitely look at these ranks. And it’s especially important if your school is not a top school. Look, if you have Harvard Law School or UVA Law School or Duke or Michigan or any number of law schools on your resume, fine. Everybody knows those are great law schools. They always have been. They always will be, most likely. But if you have a law school that is not necessarily a household name, the person who’s looking at that resume or that transcript may whip out a copy of US News, or maybe I should say, go to the website. So they definitely make a difference in terms of law firms and also with judges. There is sort of this effect where they may kind of have a combined matrix of what’s the rank of the school and what’s the rank of the student in their class. So you could be middle of your class at UVA and maybe do better than somebody at the top of their class at a lower-ranked law school. So I would say it’s a combination of factors. But the rank of the school is definitely a factor.
Jessie Kamens:
What about the groups that people used to use as shorthand on Above the Law that you founded and in Reddit groups? They used to call the top 14 law schools the T14 or refer to the T20. Do those categorizations still hold weight?
David Lat:
So I was chatting about this with Professor Derek Muller of Notre Dame, whom I interviewed for my Bloomberg Law column. And he believes, and I agree, that the label T14 has outlived its usefulness. So 14 is a somewhat random number. It’s not 10. It’s not 20. It’s not 50. Why 14? For many, many decades, the same 14 schools were the top 14 schools in the US News rankings. And they would just change spots amongst themselves. But it was very rare that one of them would drop out of the 14. And it was also very rare that an interloper would enter the 14. So that’s why these 14 schools became known as the T14. But this marks the fifth straight year that we haven’t seen the T14 in the top 14 spots all by themselves. And because of some methodological changes to the rankings that have been made a few years ago, Professor Muller was maintaining that we are not going to see that kind of consistency that we saw before with the T14. And so you’re going to have different schools in the top 14 every year now going forward. And so I think it may be time to retire that. If we want to talk about the top 10, or the top 20, or the top 50, or some other round number, I think that makes sense. But I think the T14 needs to be retired.
Jessie Kamens:
I want to dive into a little bit more about US News changing their methodology. Can you tell us more about that? I know there was a little controversy last year and that a few dozen of the law schools decided to stop providing proprietary information for these rankings. Can you give us that background?
David Lat:
Yes. So for many years, US News had a formula for the rankings that require proprietary or private information from the law schools. For example, one of the factors they needed was expenditures per student. And they don’t have access to schools’ budgets. They needed the schools to provide that information. And schools willingly did for many years. But then a few years ago, then-Dean Heather Gerken of Yale Law School cited various shortcomings of the rankings, problems in their methodology that, in her view, encourage unhealthy behavior by law schools and law deans. And so Yale stopped providing US News with the data that US News needed. And then this turned into a whole movement, or a boycott, if you will, and dozens of schools joined it. And after dozens of schools basically told US News we’re not going to play ball, US News changed its methodology so it no longer needs cooperation from schools. So now the US News factors are based all on factors that either, one, are publicly available, such as data that the schools themselves provide to the American Bar Association as part of the accreditation process, or two, information that US News generates itself, such as these reputational surveys it sends out to members of the legal profession who say how highly they regard a particular law school.
Jessie Kamens:
Has that changed the weight, to your knowledge? I don’t know if they give out their secret sauce recipe. But to your knowledge, does it change the weight of certain factors?
David Lat:
Yes. So, for example, they got rid of expenditures per student. They de-emphasized certain factors. In general, if I could sort of sum up the changes big picture, they made the factors focused much more on outcomes, such as employment outcomes and bar passage, as opposed to inputs, such as the LSAT or GPA of the incoming class. Because look, if you’re going to law school, you don’t care about, say, how many volumes they have in the library, which actually to this day is a very small percentage of the US News algorithm or formula. You care about whether you’re going to get a job. So of course you should weight things like do people pass the bar and do people get full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar passage. You should weight those factors more heavily.
Jessie Kamens:
So we’ve been focusing a lot on the top schools. What about the mid-tier and bottom of the rankings? What do these rankings mean for those law schools? And do students at those schools, are they still able to get jobs at the firms and places that they want to?
David Lat:
So you’re right to point out that for the mid-tier or lower schools, the rankings are actually very, very important. Because if people haven’t heard of your law school, people around the country, people are going to look at US News. They’ll say, well, I’ve never heard of Law School X. Let me see what its US News rank is. And that will cause them to give a certain weight to your transcript or your resume. People from lower-ranked law schools can definitely get jobs, but often their credentials need to be that much better. And a thing I wrote about in another Bloomberg column of mine relating to extremely early recruiting, that does hurt people at lower-ranked schools. Because now some firms are recruiting so early that people might not have a full year or even a full semester of grades. So if you’re at a lower-ranked school that doesn’t have nationwide name recognition and you can’t walk in there with a 4.0 or something close to it, that’s going to make it harder for you to get a big law job. So in answer to your question, Jessie, yes, you can get one of these coveted jobs coming out of a lower-ranked law school, but it’s harder. When I’m talking about big law, I’m talking about federal clerkships. We also have to remember, look, a lot of law schools that maybe you and I have not heard of are very strong regionally. And so you can definitely get a very good job at a local or regional employer, even if you’re not necessarily going off to Cravath or Wachtell.
Jessie Kamens:
That was Bloomberg Law columnist David Lat. And that will do it for today’s episode of On the Merits. For more updates, visit our website at news.bloomberglaw.com. Once again, that’s news.bloomberglaw.com.
The podcast today was produced by myself, Jessie, and David Schultz. Our editors were Chris Opfer and Alessandra Rafferty, and our executive producer is Josh Block.
Thanks, everyone, for listening. We’ll see you next time.
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