Published by Inside Higher Ed
The question in the admissions world right now is fairly simple: Will the moves by leading law schools against the rankings of U.S. News & World Report spread to undergraduate institutions?
Eleven law schools, most recently at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Washington, have announced that they will stay out of the rankings. The first law school to announce that it was dropping out was Yale University, which has been the top-ranked law school by U.S. News since it started the rankings more than 30 years ago. But in the last week, two law schools, at Cornell University and the University of Chicago, announced that they would continue to participate with the rankings.
Many have been waiting for a similar push by undergraduate colleges. But thus far, they have been disappointed.
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David Strauss, a principal of the Art and Science Group, said he hoped some undergraduate colleges would follow law schools, but he said he wasn’t holding his breath for immediate action. Law school rankings, he said, are just “as big” as undergraduate ones, so the move by law schools is significant.
Strauss said he believes that rankings in general (not just U.S. News) are not reliable. A given ranking may find the right college for one student but not another, he said.
”There is a core question here: What is our driver?” he said, adding that he always asks colleges to focus on what they most need to improve the student experience and not on rankings.
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And what of law schools? What impact will it have on the rankings for so many of the law schools that U.S. News ranks highly to not participate? Will readers tolerate many entries marked “not applicable” when they look at the rankings of Harvard, Yale, Stanford and others that they expect to have high rankings?
U.S. News insists that it will not matter, but it isn’t saying how its rankings will change.
A spokeswoman said, “U.S. News will continue to rank all fully accredited law schools, regardless of whether schools agree to submit their data.”
Asked about the methodology, she said, “Details about the methodologies for the next editions of U.S. News’ rankings will be available closer to the publication of those editions. For Best Law Schools, that will be in the spring of 2023.”