To the Editor:
A fierce debate over law schools’ continued participation in U.S. News has become a microcosm for broader debates over higher-education reform during a period of tremendous disruption.
In that debate, a recent opinion piece by Deans Heather Gerken and Tamara Lawson argues that U.S. News creates “perverse incentives” and has “pernicious effects” that force schools to make bad “policy choices” (“Law Schools Should Abandon Merit-Based Scholarships,” The Chronicle Review, April 13). Those choices include favoring merit-based over need-based financial aid. They contend that “we have reached an inflection point in higher education” and urge all law schools to embrace need-based aid.
I agree with the authors’ effort to support low-income students. Nonetheless, like a handheld flashlight shining in a vast forest, the argument ignores the terrain. It blames the wrong actor, supplies an incomplete account, and elides the importance of moral courage to make hard choices.
For starters, the timing of this campaign against U.S. News is curious: U.S. News has made laudable strides to address issues of socioeconomic mobility in its ranking formulas. It introduced “Pell-eligible students” in their undergraduate rankings. It asked law schools, which are not Pell-eligible, to supply various debt measures, and included them in its ranking formula (simultaneously reducing the weight accorded to law schools’ expenditures).
Given the authors’ and U.S. News’ shared concern over accessibility, why attack U.S. News?
Because debt measures rocked their world. Until debt was added, the U.S. News formula favored financially expensive variables (such as reputation, selectivity, and — perversely for those concerned with accessibility — direct expenditures per student).
The top-14 law schools’ (“the T14”) ordinal rankings among these traditional ranking inputs showed little variation and their overall composition almost never changed. Yet, among those sticky T14 law schools, the “best” ranking on the debt measures was — wait for it — 133 (out of nearly 200 schools); the worst was 191.
In other words, U.S. News exposed that these schools were not a great return on investment, especially for low-income students.
For over a year, some schools urged abandonment of the debt variables. But in March 2022, U.S. News stuck to its principles: It kept debt measures in the formula alongside reduced weight for direct expenditures. Dyspepsia on email soon followed, and Yale launched its campaign last fall.
If U.S. News really is an omnipotent magazine that forces law schools to bend to its will, it’s curious that its detractors don’t recognize the irony of their tactics.
Of course, U.S. News doesn’t force law schools to do anything. It’s only one of many magazines and rankings — like the National Jurist Best Value Law School Rankings, The Princeton Review Best Law Schools Rankings, or the Above the Law Top 50 Law School Rankings.
Blaming U.S. News only distracts the public from holding law schools responsible for their own moral choices — including their choice to increase the cost of attendance, to worsen the student-debt crisis and to become less accessible to low-income students.
Why is so much aid necessary at all? Starting roughly forty years ago, higher education inflation started to skyrocket. Previously accessible schools became unaffordable luxury brands. Today, the annual cost of attendance at some law schools exceeds $100,000. Had tuition tracked the broader inflation rate over that same period, it would be less than half of its present level.
Overpriced law schools now find themselves in a pickle. Not only have tuition increases outpaced inflation, they have also outstripped the growth rates for both family incomes and law graduates’ starting salaries. Confronted by these economic forces, most firms would reduce their prices and cut costs.
The authors’ proposal represents one type of price cut but avoids any acceptance of responsibility for decades of reckless price increases or any promise to control costs. The American Bar Association has recognized the student debt crisis in legal education, and it can help address that crisis by requiring all law schools to disclose various measures of student debt in their annual 509 reports (just like they presently require disclosure of various measures of student aid).
U.S. News’ inclusion of debt variables and diminution in expenditures exposed law schools’ moral choices. Those that charged students astronomical sums and cared little about debt suddenly lost their cover.
Even before U.S. News made these beneficial changes, nothing required law schools to dance to U.S. News’ tune. At the University of Georgia, we tried to hold the line on law school tuition and slashed student indebtedness by nearly 50 percent over the past nine years. That hurt us on variables like direct expenditures.
So what? We had a clear set of values that helped make our school more accessible to low-income students even if our choices didn’t help (and probably hurt) our own ranking.
Every law school dean — indeed, every academic leader — needs moral courage to make hard choices about where to prioritize the next marginal investment. Jobs? Bar passage? Student support? Buildings? Salaries? Tuition discounts? Scholarships?
Choices about merit-based aid and need-based aid simply represent one example. Yale deserves credit for the creation of its need-based Hurst-Horizon scholarship. At the University of Georgia, we offer financial assistance to every first-generation college graduate and to every veteran at the law school. Neither of us needs a permission slip from U.S. News to do these things.
More must be done to help low-income students. To borrow the author’s words, costs “keep law school financially out of reach for many highly qualified, indisputably meritorious applicants.” Schools must not only provide aid (however distributed) but also control costs. NYU Langone, for example, created a tuition-free medical school. Here at the University of Georgia School of Law, we have searched for numerous ways to reduce our students’ costs, whether for text books, professional clothing, summer stipends or housing. I look forward to hearing how other law schools — especially those that profess concern over needy students — can significantly reduce their costs.
Like the authors, I don’t agree with every decision by U.S. News. I hope it will restore debt measures to the formula. (Wouldn’t it help students and their families to know the anticipated debt loads at graduation?) I also wish it would return to a system where “university-funded jobs” do not carry the same weight as actual jobs in the private or public sectors. (In what other world does a “tuition transfer” to unemployed graduates equate with a paying job secured in the marketplace?)
These views are debatable. I have shared them with U.S. News and found its team to be receptive listeners. They don’t embrace every suggestion, nor should they. When they don’t, it makes no sense to act like the kid on the playground who quits the game once they realize they’re not going to win it. (Ironically, the boycott has produced one salutary effect: after U.S. News consulted with more than 100 deans, it listened to their feedback and increased the weight given to outcomes, far superior to the historical expense-driven formula.)
Right now, protesting schools are freed from U.S. News’ alleged stranglehold. If those schools want to help low-income students, then do that: Cut costs and admit low-income students.
Higher education can be one of the greatest engines of socioeconomic mobility. A self-inflicted affordability crisis in higher education has put that engine under enormous stress.
Consequently, tackling costs, debt, and student outcomes is a moral imperative for every academic leader— no matter what a magazine may say.
Peter B. (“Bo”) Rutledge
Dean and Talmadge Chair of Law
University of Georgia School of Law
Athens