Less than one week after the dean of Yale Law School announced she would no longer cooperate with U.S. News & World Report on its annual rankings, several of her peers have followed suit. As of Tuesday, deans at 10 of the 15 top-ranked law schools had said they would stop sending their data to U.S. News.
The collective revolt came quickly — and with barbs. In their announcements, the deans criticized the algorithm that U.S. News analysts use to produce the rankings. “The rankings rely on flawed survey techniques and opaque and arbitrary formulas, lacking the transparency needed to help applicants make truly informed decisions,” wrote Kerry Abrams, dean of Duke Law. The methodology creates “perverse incentives,” wrote Jenny Martinez, Stanford Law School’s dean.
More fundamentally, the deans argued that the rankings hurt vulnerable students. “U.S. News stands in the way of progress for legal education and the profession,” Heather K. Gerken, dean of Yale Law School, told The Chronicle in an interview last week. “It’s made it harder for law schools to admit and support low-income students, and it’s undermining efforts to launch a generation to serve.”
Eric J. Gertler, chief executive of U.S. News, defended the rankings as a tool serving students. “What we do is provide a common set of metrics so that students can evaluate their choices to go law school,” he said. “Aspiring legal students, they’re spending tens of thousands of dollars and spending three years of their lives getting a legal degree. I think it’s important that they have the right information.”
If the law deans’ criticism sounds familiar, it’s because it echoes the complaints that have been leveled for decades against an even bigger project: the magazine’s ranking of undergraduate colleges and universities. There, too, critics have said the magazine’s metrics are flawed, opaque, and harm equity efforts.
But seldom have institutions acted on their concerns, as Yale and its peers have recently. And if elite colleges are willing to withdraw their support from one U.S. News ranking in the name of equity, why not another? In other words, is the undergraduate ranking the next venue for this kind of protest?
Not yet. The Chronicle called and emailed the main press offices of all 10 universities whose law deans have quit U.S. News, to ask whether they had considered withdrawing from the main ranking. Four answered. Columbia and Yale Universities’ responses emphasized that their law schools made their decisions independently from the main administration. Michigan had no comment. And Janet Gilmore, a spokeswoman for the University of California at Berkeley, wrote: “We support the decision of the law school and do not, at this time, have plans for the campus to withdraw from the college rankings.” None answered a question asking whether criticisms of the law-school list could apply to the undergraduate rankings as well.
It’s a great first step to get people to start to question what ‘U.S. News’ does and how they view educational quality.
Though they are similar, the metrics that underlie the two rankings have important differences. Reputation plays a key role in both. Forty percent of a law school’s ranking depends on reputation surveys the publication sends to law academics and professionals, while 20 percent of a university’s undergraduate ranking — the largest single variable — is based on the result of reputation surveys sent to other campuses. The law-school formula more heavily weighs incoming students’ test scores and grades (20 percent) than does the undergraduate formula (7 percent). Finally, the undergraduate algorithm has measures that take into account the rates at which Pell Grant recipients graduate. The law-school one has no equivalent.
Nevertheless, to critics, the rankings’ effects are similar enough that to cooperate with one but not the other is hypocritical. “It’s fascinating they go, ‘That graduate school methodology is trash. Oh, let’s not talk about the undergraduate,’” said Akil Bello, director of advocacy for the National Center for Fair and Open Testing and a longtime rankings critic.
The undergraduate ranking exerts a strong pull on the campuses that seek to climb it. Some institutions advertise their standing on billboards, while others incorporate the ranking into their strategic plans. Yet the U.S. News list has been the subject of persistent public controversy in recent years. Accusations of incorrect data submissions, such as those involving Columbia University and the University of Southern California’s school of education, have undermined trust in the ranking’s accuracy.
Add to those headlines the recent law-school withdrawals. But researchers who study rankings say that, while a protest from some of the most visible universities in the country is not nothing, rankings have endured for decades despite periods of pointed criticism. “I’m skeptical this is the end of U.S. News,” said Michael Sauder, a professor of sociology and coauthor of the book Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability. “It’s a great first step to get people to start to question what U.S. News does and how they view educational quality.”
Bello thinks that to make a difference in students’ and families’ perceptions of rankings, the protesting law deans would have to undertake a sustained messaging campaign. They would need to stand up for perhaps several years in a row, whenever new rankings come out, and remind the public that they don’t believe in the rankings formula and don’t participate.
Sauder said the schools to watch are not at the top of the list, but in the middle. If mid-ranked law schools began ditching the list, he said, then a more fundamental shift may be afoot. “They’re the schools that feel the most pressure from maximizing their numbers,” he said. Schools among the top 14 — considered by the law academy to be the elite — don’t depend on U.S. News for their reputations, but a lower-ranked school has more to lose by refusing to submit data, and therefore risking a lower ranking. (Historically, colleges that stop submitting data to U.S. News for the undergrad list fall in rank.) So far, the only non-top-14 law school to join the protest is the University of California at Los Angeles, which is No. 15 this year.
In the meantime, the protesting schools will still appear on the U.S. News list — and those colleges might one day decide to re-engage. In interviews with The Chronicle, Gerken and Erwin Chemerinsky, Berkeley Law’s dean, both said they haven’t shut their doors to the magazine forever. “If they were to change the formula in a way that doesn’t conflict with our mission,” Chemerinsky said, “I would have no trouble providing U.S. News with data in the future.”
