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Yesterday, Above the Law unveiled our annual law school rankings. The real ones… not the stupid ones we played to prove a point.
Longtime readers know the story, but years ago we grew frustrated with the U.S. News and World Report law school rankings methodology. Its self-fulfilling prophecy rankings didn’t answer any of the questions prospective law students needed answered. The T14 were the T14 because they were always the T14. We felt the magazine’s input-centric model locked in generational advantages. Reputation begat stronger applications, stronger applications begat more impressive admissions, more impressive admissions begat a weightier reputation. Rinse and repeat.
The Above the Law rankings began from the premise that law students cared more about outputs. Which law schools deliver real job and which law schools do it leaving the least financial ruin in their wake.
You’ve seen the rankings already — if not, click over there now — today we’ll talk about a few key takeaways.
1. No Wonder The Elite Schools Wanted To Boycott US News.
Yale launched what turned into a reasonably significant boycott of the USNWR rankings. As I said, ATL has no great love of the USNWR methodology, but even we found ourselves siding with the old guard ranking.
One of the key complaints was that US News gave too much weight to high-paying jobs as opposed to public interest gigs. Which may be true and it’s something ATL gives even more weight. But there’s a reason for this. It’s the best way to measure the professional value of the degree. When 80 percent of the class are in the Am Law 50, a statistician can feel a lot better that the other 20 percent are getting good jobs that they choose to have. It’s also a better sign that the graduates have portability to move to quality jobs outside the corporate sector long-term.
Yale also wanted school-funded positions counted, opening the door on a practice that schools have abused in the past to juice employment figures with glorified TA jobs. And most worrisome, the school complained about factoring student debt into the equation, claiming that it incentivized schools to accept more rich kids or something. As opposed to, say, not overcharging students.
So it’s not shocking that Yale continues to languish outside the “T14” of our ranking that puts higher stock in schools that produce real jobs with minimal debt.
2. Just Call Them ArchDuke.
Duke tops the ATL rankings again. That’s two in a row and three of the last four years.
The school is the poster child of the ATL rankings — a T14 that charges (both in tuition and cost of living) less than somewhere like Columbia or Stanford and can place grads in multiple markets. That’s core ATL methodology.
And it underscores another foundational principle of these rankings: don’t treat rankings as gospel. It’s all about balance. Duke gets the balance of our concerns right. But that doesn’t mean a student should necessarily choose Duke over Virginia. Take these rankings — and all rankings — as more of a mood.
3. An HBCU Law School Joins The Rankings!
Throughout the years, former ATL editor Elie Mystal and I have given a lot of unofficial law school selection advice. Students would give us a rundown of their offers and the packages they were weighing and we’d opine. Generally the traditionally higher ranked school would win out — it provided a better outcome and could often provide a better package.
The school that we consistently ended up recommending despite ranking lower was Howard. Whenever Howard entered one of these conversations the mix of cost and outcome always pushed us to go with the HBCU law school.
And this year our gut feeling matches the official ATL methodology, with Howard coming in at number 33.
4. No ASS?
Outside of our stupid popularity contest, Scalia Law was never going to top any ranking. But the George Mason University program sits at 32 in the USNWR rankings and is a public university providing a FedSoc-approved pipeline to jobs and clerkships. The combination of price and job outcome should give it more heft in our rankings than it appears to have.
Anyway, those were my quick hit impressions.
Earlier: Top Law Schools 2023
The Best Law School In The World According To The Worst Ranking Methodology In The World
Yale Law School Pulls Out Of U.S. News Rankings Like Michael Jordan Skipping Slam Dunk Contest
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
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