Magazine rankings both seduce and coerce law schools into manipulating data and even changing their missions, and law schools that don’t play the game are often punished, according to an article published in the February issue of the American Sociological Review, the main journal of the American Sociological Association.
Rankings produced by magazines are popular with consumers, including potential students, but draw mainly scorn from academics. Yet for all of their complaints about such rankings, legal educators become complicit in the practices they disdain when they game the system to bump their schools up a notch, the authors argue.
The article, “The Discipline of Rankings: Tight Coupling and Organizational Change,” was written by Michael E. Sauder, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Iowa, and Wendy Nelson Espeland, an associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University.
The article takes aim in particular at U.S. News & World Report, whose latest law-school rankings are due out in April.
“Rankings change perceptions of legal education through incentives that are simultaneously seductive and coercive,” the article states. Despite having been widely denounced by law schools, “rankings have prompted broad changes in legal education, affecting how resources are distributed, decisions are made, and status is defined.”
The authors examine the way law schools conform to pressure—both external and internal—through comparisons with the way prisoners react to discipline and punishment, as described in the 1975 text Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, by Michel Foucault.
The authors argue that the rankings punish law schools that emphasize public service or that serve large numbers of disadvantaged students. Those schools often feel pressure to compromise their missions to avoid being left out of the top tiers of law schools, they argue.
The study is based on interviews with administrators and faculty members at 75 accredited law schools, as well as with 92 prospective law students. The authors visited seven law schools, analyzed 15 years’ worth of admissions statistics, and attended professional conferences.
Robert J. Morse, director of data research for U.S. News, acknowledges that the rankings have had an impact on legal education, but he says that isn’t necessarily all bad.
“It depends on what they’re doing,” he said in an interview on Monday. “If they’re beefing up their career-services office to help students get jobs, that’s a good thing. If they’re lowering their student-faculty ratio by hiring more faculty, or taking steps to help students pass the bar exam, that’s a good thing.”
But if they’re trying to game the system by steering students with lower standardized-test scores into part-time programs because part-time students aren’t counted in the rankings, that might not be so good, he said. Mr. Morse acknowledged that possibility in an entry on the magazine’s blog last June (The Chronicle, June 27, 2008).
“Where you go to law school matters,” Mr. Morse said on Monday. “It can affect where you get your first job, and it can shape your career. We’re publishing the rankings for prospective law students who want to know the relative merits of different schools—not for the deans.” On his blog Monday, he invited legal editors to weigh in to help improve the rankings.
