© The Indian Express (P) Ltd
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Journalism of Courage
This week, Yale Law School, Harvard Law School and UC Berkeley School of Law announced that they will no longer participate in the US News and World Report’s law school rankings. These rankings are used by prospective students, their parents and employers to assess the quality of law schools. The three prestigious law schools have, however, cited flaws in the methodology for analysing the rankings as the reason for pulling out.
Why won’t these major law schools participate in the rankings?
The primary reason all three schools have mentioned is that the methodology and framing of parameters are in conflict with their commitment to provide need-based aid to students and to support their students in pursuing public interest careers.
“…in recent years, we have invested significant energy and capital in important initiatives that make our law school a better place but perversely work to lower our scores. That’s because the US News rankings are profoundly flawed — they disincentivize programs that support public interest careers, champion need-based aid, and welcome working-class students into the profession. We have reached a point where the rankings process is undermining the core commitments of the legal profession,” read a statement by Yale Law School Dean Heather K Gerken on their decision.
What specific methodologies have these schools criticised?
All three schools have cited US News looking at lower student debt as a major factor influencing their decision. They have stated that without appropriate context, it acts as an incentive for schools to admit more well-off students.
Harvard Law School Dean John Manning has written that “… a school may lower debt at graduation through generous financial aid, but it may also achieve the same effect by admitting more students who have the resources to avoid borrowing. The debt metric gives prospective students no way to tell which is which. And to the extent the debt metric creates an incentive for schools to admit better resourced students who don’t need to borrow, it risks harming those it is trying to help.”
Another reason they have cited is that 20% of a law school’s ranking is based on median LSAT/GRE scores and GPAs, which they have argued results in incentivizing large amounts of scholarship money being diverted from students with the highest need to those with the highest scores, making it difficult for law schools to remove financial barriers for working-class students to joining them.
All three have also alleged that the rankings penalize law schools for encouraging careers in public service law.
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“Berkeley Law has a program where we provide students a fellowship for a year after graduation to work in a public interest organization… We have done this for many years and 94 per cent of those who receive such fellowships remain doing public interest law after the fellowship ends. But US News does not count these students as fully employed. This creates a perverse incentive for schools to eliminate these positions, despite their success and despite the training they provide for future public service attorneys,” wrote Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky on the university’s website.
“We have recently revised loan repayment assistance programme to make it even more helpful to our graduates pursuing public interest and public service careers. US News pays no attention to this, measuring student debt but ignoring how schools are helping students who need assistance to repay it,” Chemerinsky added.
Have there been previous controversies over the rankings?
In July this year, the rankings removed Columbia University from the No. 2 spot among national universities to “unranked” after questions were raised about the accuracy of the data submitted by the university for the rankings. One of the university’s professors, Michael Thaddeus, had published an analysis claiming that the university had submitted “inaccurate, dubious and highly misleading” statistics for the rankings. In September, the university admitted to “outdated and/or incorrect methodologies”.
“…the ranking is a failure because the supposed facts on which it is based cannot be trusted. Eighty percent of the US News ranking of a university is based on information reported by the university itself. This information is detailed and subtle, and the vetting conducted by US News is cursory enough to allow many inaccuracies to slip through. Institutions are under intense pressure to present themselves in the most favorable light. This creates a profound conflict of interest, which it would be naive to overlook,” wrote Thaddeus in his analysis.
Will the decision of the three law schools affect Indians looking to study in the US?
According to education consultant Viral Doshi, there are multiple reasons why this will not affect Indian students. He said the rankings in question are for LLB-equivalent degrees in these schools, which very few Indians opt for in the first place because of the expenses and because the degrees are not recognised by the Bar Council of India. Far more students go to the US for LLM-equivalent degrees, he pointed out.
“In any case, people know Harvard is Harvard and Yale is Yale. Students already know what these universities are. Them not being part of these rankings won’t affect either the students or the universities. In any case, information of different kinds on these courses will still be available to students on different platforms… Featuring in these rankings matter much more for lower-end colleges,” Doshi explained.
