Prospective law students across the United States are paying less attention and giving less credence to the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings of American law schools, according to new research from scholars at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law and University of Kentucky Rosenberg College of Law.
“The Decline and Fall of the U.S. News Rankings” was published this week on the Social Science Research Network by Indiana Law Professor CJ Ryan and Brian Frye, Kentucky’s Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law.
Contrary to what many in the legal education community believe, a rise in the U.S. News rankings one year does not mean the school becomes more attractive to prospective students in the next, according to Ryan and Frye.
“Changes in a law school’s U.S. News ranking don’t seem to affect the revealed preferences of prospective law students very much at all,” the authors wrote. “In fact, changes in a law school’s U.S. News ranking are apparently almost irrelevant to the revealed preferences of prospective law students.”
In other words, if a law school’s U.S. News ranking increases one year, then it should become more attractive to prospective students in the next, and vice versa.
Or so the thinking went.
Long considered the definitive source on a law school’s prestige, the U.S. News rankings have undergone significant change over the past three years, as some schools, frustrated by the magazine’s consistently changing methodology, have simply refused to provide any data beyond what is required by the American Bar Association. A switch from an input-weighted ranking (where a school’s ranking was heavily influenced by the credentials of its entering classes) to an output-weighted ranking (including employment after graduation and Bar passage results) has led to a shakeup in where schools fall every spring.
But with more sources of information available to prospective students—including a number of other rankings by other media outlets—U.S. News’ reputation as the premier independent resource of information for future law students is on the decline, Ryan and Frye said.
And it turns out, no one’s really paying attention anyway.
Ryan and Frye developed a methodology in 2017 that resulted in the first objective ranking of U.S. law schools, using only LSAT scores and undergraduate grade-point averages (GPAs) of matriculating students. The “Revealed Preference Ranking” asks which law schools prospective students choose to attend, all else equal—rather than subjective rankings, which attempt to tell prospective students which law schools they should attend.
The researchers created a decade’s worth of revealed preferences rankings, then tracked annual changes in a law school’s U.S. News ranking over the same time period, and finally examined annual changes in a school’s revealed preference ranking. The changes in U.S. News rankings were then correlated with annual changes in law school revealed preferences the following year. If a law school’s ranking in U.S. News changed in a given two-year period, its incoming class in the subsequent two-year period should reflect these changes. But the authors found otherwise.
“The results were surprising,” Ryan and Frye wrote. “We expected changes in a law school’s U.S. News ranking to be strongly positively correlated with changes in its revealed preferences rankings, at least most of the time.”
But for the past decade, changes in a law school’s ranking in U.S. News hasn’t affected the revealed preferences of prospective students much at all.
“In fact,” Ryan and Frye wrote, “changes in a law school’s U.S. News ranking are apparently almost irrelevant to the revealed preferences of prospective law students. This is a surprising result, because it suggests that changes in a law school’s U.S. News ranking at best weakly affect the preferences of prospective law students.”
So, while law school administrators are overcome with anxiety every spring as they await that year’s U.S. News rankings, the very population the rankings are produced for seem to care less and less about how high—or low—a school moves in any given year.
“If the U.S. News law school rankings are salient to prospective law students, they are at best weakly salient,” Ryan and Frye wrote. “And the positive correlation is so weak that it could easily be coincidental. In other words, maybe the U.S. News law school rankings are occasionally right about the relative prestige of law schools, but no one actually notices or cares.”