Higher education is facing a pivotal moment as leaders reckon with U.S. News & World Report’s rankings and the outsize role they play in setting the agenda.
As many have rightly explained, the rankings create perverse incentives with pernicious effects: Many institutions have adopted regrettable strategies to move up the magazine’s vaunted rankings — at the expense of good policy.
One of the most problematic aspects of U.S. News’s rankings is the effect its methodology has on low-income students, who need financial aid to take the opportunities they’ve earned. For decades, educational leaders have used precious aid dollars to pursue students with scores that can deliver a rankings boost. In our field, a top LSAT score has become a golden ticket to financial aid, even as many institutions allow lower-income students to struggle with higher tuition bills. Such practices keep law school financially out of reach for many highly qualified, indisputably meritorious applicants.
In our view, admissions decisions should be merit-based, and standardized-test scores and grade-point averages should continue to be important factors in those decisions. But once an applicant has earned a seat, financial aid should be based on need, and need alone.
Because of the current rankings formula, deans are under terrible pressure to focus on scores rather than need in awarding financial aid. As a result, need-based financial aid is eroding, while scholarship awards without regard to need are exploding. From 2005 to 2010 — before many of the merit scholarships that exist now were even created — data from the American Bar Association showed that the number of law students receiving need-based aid went from 20,781 to 17,610 (a drop of more than 3,000), while the number of students receiving merit scholarships went from 31,265 to 39,845 (an increase of more than 8,000). As a result, $230 million was pumped into merit scholarships during that time while only $23 million was allocated for need-based aid — one-tenth the amount.
In 2010 alone, law schools spent $522 million on merit scholarships and just $143 million for need-based aid. In 2016, Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research asked 17,000 law students about their scholarships and found that 60 percent of them received merit-based awards while just 19 percent got need-based awards. Similarly, law schools without large endowments have strong incentives to offer tuition discounts to high-scoring students in order to raise their ranking, while low-income students pay full freight.
Once an applicant has earned a seat, financial aid should be based on need, and need alone.
Meanwhile, those needy students — who have overcome remarkable hurdles to be admitted — have debt piled on them or discover they cannot afford to take the seat that they have plainly earned. At a moment when economic inequality is at the center of public debate, U.S. News’s rankings methods have thus discouraged colleges from ensuring low-income students take advantage of the life-changing opportunities that higher education provides.
The statistics make clear why so many law deans have walked away from U.S. News. Fortunately, while a poorly conceived, nontransparent ranking system helped create this mess, transparent data and healthy competition are the solution. The ABA has played an important leadership role in publishing a common set of data to hold law schools accountable and inform students — all at no cost. We believe that the ABA now has a chance to do more to deal with this crucial problem in legal education.
First, the ABA should collect data and release the breakdown of need-based aid vs. merit-based aid for every law school in its annual reports. Transparency is the first step toward encouraging schools to switch to a need-based-aid model and provide life-changing scholarships to the students who need them most. The amount of need-based aid a school provides should be a point of enormous pride and value for students, alumni, and faculty members alike. If the goal of rankings is to use data to create a race to the top, this is the place to start.
Second, the ABA can start gathering and publicizing data that clearly identifies which schools are admitting and supporting students from families whose income falls below the poverty line. If we want to ensure that talented admitted students are not left on the sidelines, we need to measure and value data that matters for the future of our profession: We should measure how many students below the poverty line attend each law school and how much aid they receive. At Yale Law School, just under 10 percent of the class comes from families whose income is below the poverty line, and every one of them has a full-tuition scholarship. These students have overcome enormous odds to get to law school. They’ve had to deal with problems their peers never encounter, including homelessness, crushing debt, and food insecurity. While wealthy and middle-class students look to their families as a safety net, these students must serve as the safety net for their own families.
We have reached an inflection point in higher education, with leaders across the country choosing not to participate in a rankings system that directly opposes their institutions’ core values. This is a moment to encourage all law schools, the gatekeepers of the profession, to ensure our gates are open to all — through the award of critical financial aid.
