There’s nothing wrong with ranking the 10 Best Cat GIFs On The Internet, but once someone starts ranking something as serious as the quality of law schools, there’s a moral obligation not to recklessly steer grads wrong. People are depending on these rankings to make a massive professional and financial decision.
So you can’t go out and write something like:
A number of excellent law schools consistently graduating classes with high bar passage rates as well as significant employment outcomes exist outside the T14.
And then list schools with 50 percent employment scores. Spoiler: Someone wrote that and then listed schools with 50 percent employment scores.
We’re the first to cast a side eye upon U.S. News & World Report for throwing dubiously useful rankings at earnest undergrads trying to cut through the hype and figure out where to go to law school, but at least there’s a methodology to USNWR’s madness. We may not agree with counting library books to determine the best law school in the land, but at least the unnecessary rankings they introduce are backed by something.
After pointing out that New England Law Boston’s dean will be leaving with a retirement package of over $5.3 million despite guiding the school to absolutely nowhere in the rankings, a tipster pointed me to a publication, the College Gazette, promising readers that New England Law is “on the rise.” Since I’ve already seen Star Wars, I know how disappointing a “Rise” can be, but that didn’t prepare me for the ramshackle mess of this article.
“10 Prominent Law Schools On the Rise” is a mess from the headline because if a law school is already prominent… where is it rising to? But it boldly leaps from there to a misleading point about how you don’t need to go to a T14 to be successful — which is true — without noting that when it lists New York Law School that institution is not, in fact, Vanderbilt.
What qualifies as a law school on the rise?
One, the school has to have demonstrated significant achievement as well as excellent student outcomes over the past decade.
Secondly, the school cannot yet be ranked in the top 50 of the US News best law schools list.
They’ve got the last part covered. The first seems to be a mere suggestion.
Of New England Law Boston, the number 4 school on the rise, the College Gazette writes:
Impressively, their class of 2018 featured 83% of their graduates finding gainful employment within 9 months of graduation, with another 4% pursuing an additional degree.
That… is not actually impressive, but it’s also not tracking any numbers we can find. The USNWR entry lists a solid “N/A” for employment stats and Law School Transparency finds a mere 75.4 percent of 2018 grads employed and only 47.5 percent of those grads were in law jobs — the sort that require actually passing the bar exam.
From the good folks at Law School Transparency… does this look like “excellent student outcomes over the past decade”?
Because that’s the trend line for New England’s bar passage rate.
The list of rising law schools also includes University of Illinois Chicago John Marshall where the bar passage rate has gone from 87.9 percent in 2008 to 62.3 percent in 2018 though at least the employment score is up over the last 10 years. It’s only up to 51.6 percent, but astoundingly that’s a major improvement. New York Law School (or the NYU Tribeca campus) also makes the cut having gone from a 91.3 percent bar passage to 62.7 percent since 2008. Quite the rise!
Where are they getting the sense that these schools are on the rise? The New England blurb reads like they just cribbed the school’s promotional materials. “Historically, this prominent institution has had some of the most important faculty of any law school in the country; in fact, eight US Supreme Court Justices have lectured or taught at New England Law.” Cool story. And if you want to see them, but never be them, you too can go to New England.
By the time the reader clicks on the final page, you half expect to find Charlotte School of Law lauded for its immersive practical education in bankruptcy.
The list isn’t all bad. Rutgers took a bar passage dip in 2018, but has generally posted good numbers and has steadily boosted employment figures to a solid 79.4 percent with only a 10.3 percent underemployment score. Albany, the University of Denver and the University of Houston are all on the list and are models of consistency over the past decade. Maybe not “rising” but they would fulfill the promise to the reader of schools where one can find success outside the T14.
College Gazette also has a top 10 law school post that, mercifully, includes only legitimately elite schools, though it’s not without its shortcomings. About NYU they write:
According to Above the Law, a leading law school publication on the internet, NYU is ranked as having the best overall faculty in the country.
Nice to know we’re “a leading law school publication on the internet” but a quick glance past the headline would reveal that we didn’t make this claim, we merely reported on the academic study that did.
Who is writing this stuff? College Gazette was founded in the Fall of 2019 and almost exclusively publishes articles that find “10” of something though in December the folks over there let their hair down and listed “15” colleges. Again, pretentious journos get huffy about these sorts of posts, but there’s really nothing wrong with them — lists are psychologically appealing and readers appreciate some fluff to argue about. But these lists need to stay in their lane and not try to coax students into bad law school decisions.
Naming the 10 best college towns is a perfectly subjective frame to help kids explore some of the reasons that Austin, Texas really is empirically nicer than other college towns. On that note, the College Gazette article on this subject does not include Austin, Texas, which should have been the first clue that something was wrong.
10 Prominent Law Schools On the Rise [College Gazette]
Earlier: Dean Builds 146th Best Law School And Retires With $5.3 Million Package
‘Slap A Number On It, Who Cares?’: The US News Law School Ranking Story
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.