What Law Students Want (and What U.S. News Misses)

Law Schools

What Law Students Want (and What U.S. News Misses)

Posted Nov 15, 2007, 10:29 am CDT
By Debra Cassens Weiss

Law students care about factors that aren’t considered or aren’t influential in the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings, according to a survey by The National Jurist.

The top factors named by law students were quality of teaching, bar passage rate, placement rate at nine months, practical skills training and faculty-student relations. But U.S. News doesn’t consider quality of teaching, practical skills training or faculty-student relations, while bar passage rate and placement have low importance in the U.S. News rankings.

In U.S. News, reputation among law professors and deans accounts for 25 percent of a law school’s rank, while reputation by judges and lawyers accounts for 15 percent. That is followed by placement rate at nine months after graduation (14 percent), median LSAT scores (12.5 percent) and undergrad GPA (10 percent).

The National Jurist quoted a study by Theodore Seto, a tax law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. He findings suggest that the rankings can be fickle. He says law schools can affect their rank by placing more emphasis on placement rate and GPA factors.

A hat tip to the TaxProf Blog, which posted the article.

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Posted by JR - 9 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 3 hours, 4 minutes ago

What matters more in a law school rating, what students want or the profession thinks? I vote for the latter. Teachers, deans, judges and practiioners have the experience to know quality. To prove my point, the survey of the students does not include an important factor:approach to legal analysis.
Posted by Elizabeth Blair Toner - 9 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 2 hours, 39 minutes ago

I think one of the biggest things students SHOULD be looking at is how competitive a school is, that way you don’t show up the first day to a class full or liars and cheats who hide books in the library. Forget US News, I never wanted to be in a cut throat school and I’m so glad I’m not!!
Posted by Michael - 9 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 2 hours, 33 minutes ago

The student’s points all seem to point towards empirical results that lead to them getting jobs. One might surmise that those who get jobs are perfectly capable of performing legal analysis, so I’m not all that sure that focusing on the student’s desires for hireability is necessarily to the detriment of quality lawyering. In fact, most professors and deans are usually speaking about what they knew about a school’s reputation from years or decades prior to the time the question was asked by USNews, so I would daresay that professors’ and deans’ and judges’ are probably much less likely to accurately portray a school’s ability to teach than are the employers/firms that might hire from the schools. Those employers speak with their $$, which is usually a more accurate indicator of true feelings than is a poularity contest amongs deans (which is probably just as useful to predict which schools better serve the students and the profession as is your typical high school homecoming queen competition in predicting who is the best person to represent a whole class of students).
Posted by bcls07 - 9 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 2 hours, 27 minutes ago

The US NEWS reputation score is so irrelevant right now. Who cares what law professors and deans think of the other schools. They have no power, they are irrelevant. Hiring partners and lawyers who work with new graduates should have control over the “reputation” score...they are the ones who observe the quality of law schools product (ie its new grads) on a daily basis and can accurately comment on how effective a product a particular law school is producing. Scrap the professor+deans influence.
Posted by Daniel - 9 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 2 hours, 12 minutes ago

Agreed on all counts. Elizabeth, I don’t know where you go, but I also go to a collaborative, rather than competitive law school. Isn’t that what prepares you for the real world? Do firms want associates stabbing each other in the back?
Posted by andie - 9 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 2 hours, 6 minutes ago

Bcls07 has an excellent point. The USNWR rankings and Leiter rankings are largely based on the view of academics about the caliber of academic scholarship as well as the historical “prestige” effect. I’m the last person to denigrate scholarship, but the evidence is that judges and lawyers don’t read it much; it’s mostly written for other scholars and the public. The things that matter to student experience at law school and after—good teaching, bar passage, and job placement, probably correlate weakly with scholarship or with the rankings. Placement might be a stronger connection than the others because hiring partners are no more immune to the snob effect than anybody. I went as an in-state student to a first tier but not top 25 LS which had superb teaching (as well as the kind of nice classmates Michael mentions), and have never regretted it. I had a great time in LS and the LS has done very well by me since.I agree that teaching, bar passage, and placement should count for a lot more in the rankings.
Posted by jen - 9 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 1 hour, 52 minutes ago

I see the point about employer’s having a better idea than professors of what school prepares graduates. However, a problem with using reputaion is that the reputation is taken on a national basis. Smaller schools with a great reputation in the geographic area, but have never been heard of in the rest of the country suffer compared to large state schools that, while many may not have seen work from the graduates, assume they’re better because they’ve heard of the University.
Posted by Brian - 9 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 1 hour, 44 minutes ago

I’m for empirical measures. I’m skeptical of the opinions of deans and faculty. According to the ABA, the great majority of faculty at a given law school tend to come from one of six schools: Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan, Chicago, and that school’s own graduates. I expect in no other field are the faculty of nearly every school dominated by graduates of programs at so few schools. It would be natural for those faculty to favor their alma maters and schools like them in rankings. Note also that many law school professors have little (in some cases, no) practice experience. Faculty publications can also be deceptive; unlike the double-blind-peer-reviewed world of the social and “hard” sciences, the law review world encourages student-edited volumes to include articles by scholars already well-known from schools with good reputations. (Just ask the submissions editor at your school’s LR.) If you view law school as preparation for a career as a legal academic, rankings of professors and deans and quantities of faculty publications should sway you. If you view LS as training for a career practicing law - and I believe the vast majority of law school students do exactly that - you might seek to use other criteria.
Posted by Bill - 9 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 1 hour, 19 minutes ago

The problem with taking job placement into account, is that rankings are a self fulfilling prophecy. A higher ranked school will always have better job placement because people know it is high ranked. Many employers would rather hire a poorly ranked law student from a prestigious school than a top student from a tier three or four school.
Posted by boomr - 9 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 46 minutes ago

The real answer is that there’s no good way to rank law schools, because each student and each person reviewing the school is looking for something different. I pay more attention to the rankings’ “specialized” lists (like “international law,” “arbitration,” “entertainment law,” etc.) than the overall rankings.

Let’s say you’re from a small town and want a small town law school experience, so you can graduate and practice law in a small town. So you go to one of the smaller, lesser-known schools mentioned by Jen in #7 above. It works perfectly for you, you get the job you wanted, and your employer loves you.

But then let’s say you want a high-powered M&A career in New York or LA. So you find a well-known, national, top-tier university in an urban environment, then graduate and go to a well-known, national, top-tier firm in an urban environment. This school works perfectly for you, you get the job you wanted, and your employer loves you.

But what if you don’t want to practice at all, but you want to discuss legal theory for the rest of your life? So you find a top-tier school with pipelines into academia, location irrelevant, but reputation among scholars extremely important. You graduate, then work your way up through multiple universities until you get your endowed chair of the Whatever Law lecture series at some top-ranked university, and your employers and fellow scholars love you.

You can keep going: public interest law, international law, government service, business, family, politics—each one of these is an area of special interest for a student, so he’s going to choose a school based on those special interests. Employers and colleagues will likewise rank schools based on those subdivisions. If I owned a big ship, I’d take a Tulane-trained admiralty lawyer over a Harvard graduate any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Overall rankings are fairly meaningless because they’re general, and the practice of law is pretty specific. Until lawyers return to the days of “General Practice,” a general ranking will be fairly useless.
Posted by Bill - 9 months, 3 weeks, 2 days, 5 minutes ago

What matters is what the judges think. They are the ones hiring for clerkships, and that’s what perpetuates the old boys network among elite schools. Its not going away and it shouldn’t.

Students only care about job placement when they aren’t hireable and they aren’t the ones applying for clerkships anyways.
Posted by Melvina - 9 months, 3 weeks, 1 day, 23 hours, 8 minutes ago

Maybe the rankings should be done by region, and then have a ranking of 30 law schools that have a truly national reach (as far as placement and reputation are concerned). There are a lot of great law schools out there and having national rankings for all undermines the excellent law schools with a more regional reach. There is also a disconnect between what academics believe is important and what the practicing bar (including judges) knows is important. We need really talented academics who teach well in the classroom and require serious analytical rigor from their students, but we also need the graduates to be able to perform well and serve clients well after graduation. Perhaps there should be a ranking for academics (publications of note published, where, etc.) and a ranking focusing on performance and placement (law firm hires/judicial clerks/ public interest hires). The non-academic ranking could be broken into a national chart (30 or so schools) and then regional charts with other schools.
Posted by Jim Monroe - 9 months, 3 weeks, 1 day, 22 hours, 55 minutes ago

I’m intrigued by #5, Daniel’s comment in which he wonders whether firms want associates stabbing each other in the back. Associate attrition has to come from somewhere - how better to acheive that attrition by encouraging associates to rat each other out for actions that are benign. Over several years of practice I’ve become increasingly shocked by this practice of stabbing each other in the back. Aren’t we all colleagues? We have the same educations (generally) and there should be room for heated discussion about legal issues without being informed later that associates “x” reported up the chain that associate “y” is difficult to work for and an asshole. There has to be some sort of collaborative feeling in a law practice or associates will continue to leave.
Posted by Fred Hait - 9 months, 3 weeks, 1 day, 22 hours, 35 minutes ago

The one objective factor in rating a law school is it’s bar pass rate. It matters little what the faculty at other institutions think if a schools graduates cannot pass the bar exam.
Posted by JMW - 9 months, 3 weeks, 1 day, 21 hours, 37 minutes ago

Who cares about rankings? There are only 200 law schools in this country so they’re pretty much all prestigious. Passing the bar and having a good personality are the only things that matter in getting a job or a clerkship. Personally, I opted for solo practice so I can do what I want when I want and I only have to bill $200 an hour 25 hours a week to bring in $117,000 a year. That’s why it’s called a profession- we don’t have to work for anyone else! Plus, I have a large sign outside with just my name on it, I don’t have to share with others, it’s hard to stab myself in the back, I get to go on vacation (or just stay at home) when I want, and it doesn’t matter where I went to school- no one asks. My clients don’t ask, judges don’t ask- everyone is so wrapped up in their own lives that no one really cares!
Posted by Jonathan - 9 months, 3 weeks, 1 day, 20 hours, 13 minutes ago

JMW (15, above) has the right idea. I won’t be able to bill $200 in my town, but a solo in a small town can pay his bills on 800-900 hours a year and have a decent life. if you want to be forced to bill 2000 hours a year, go for it. I don’t need the law school to be high ranked, I needed it to teach me law. I even get to hire my own secretary. and yes, my name on the front door on day one is a plus!
Posted by MJ - 9 months, 3 weeks, 1 day, 19 hours, 46 minutes ago

The proof of a school’s effectiveness is in the results. I go to a tier 4 school that gets no respect, but our school has an 89% bar passage rate in the state. Who needs Georgetown when I can go to a state school for half the price and get a fantastic legal education? Re: JR’s comment below, the “profession” only cares about whether you go to a top 10 school or whether you have a 4.0 GPA - nothing else. The “profession” is full of arrogant elitists who SHOULD be concentrating on skills rather than GPAs!
Posted by Daniel X - 9 months, 3 weeks, 1 day, 12 hours, 10 minutes ago

If you really want a good law school experience you have to go to a small law school in a sparsely populated state with only one law school in it. There you have a much better chance of getting on moot court or law review or clinic, if that’s important to you, and you will probably meet all of the state supreme court justices in your first year. You might have a class taught by a U.S. Magistrate Judge, and the faculty will be as good as anywhere in the world. The curriculum is about the same as anywhere else because of ABA regs., and it probably won’t cost nearly as much as a bigger school. The last thing you think about when you are attending law school is what some stupid magazine thinks about your school. I agree with JMW completely. approach your professoin in a way that works for you and you’ll be fine.
Posted by ma449zda - 9 months, 3 weeks, 1 day, 57 minutes ago

c271t
Posted by Big&Rich - 9 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 32 minutes ago

Sadly, I have news for all of you. Law school is merely a preparation for your (hopefully) future as a practicing lawyer. You all rail and complain about the “profession” being full of elisits who only care about grades and rankings. Well, guess what? The majority of “clients” also care about grades and rankings. Unless you plan a career defending the indigent, in which you yourself will be on the verge of joining them as indigents, I suggest you all try harder in undergrad and get into the very best schools you can, as those schools are determined by the only source people pay attention to, the US News and World Report.

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