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In perhaps the biggest challenge facing the school-ranking industry, Yale and Harvard announced Wednesday that they would withdraw from the influential U.S. News & World Report ranking of the nation’s best law schools.
For decades, colleges and universities have been critical of the US News ranking system, saying it is unreliable and misrepresents educational priorities, but they have done little to thwart it and submit their data nearly every year for evaluation of a variety of undergraduate and Students judge. Graduate courses.
Now both Yale and Harvard Law School have announced that they will no longer cooperate. In two separate letters posted on their website, the deans of the law school condemned U.S. News for using an approach they said demeaned schools like their own for enrolling poor and working-class students, offering financial aid based on need, and Encourage students to work hard. After graduating into low paid public service law.
“It has become impossible to reconcile our principles and commitments with the methods and incentives reflected in the U.S. News rankings,” John F. Manning, dean of Harvard Law School, said in a statement. gone.”
The deans said they decided to withdraw only after they and “many” other schools took their concerns directly to U.S. News and were rejected.
Beginning Wednesday morning, Heather K. Gerken, dean of Yale Law School, made the announcement in dramatic fashion. Later, Harvard joined in.
U.S. News reacted somewhat softly to Yale, saying it stood by its “mission” to “ensure the law school is accountable for the education it will provide.”
Asked whether U.S. News would continue to rank Yale, U.S. News CEO Eric Gertler said the organization was reviewing options.
After Harvard’s announcement, the tone became more conciliatory. “We agree that test scores do not tell the whole story about an applicant, and that law schools determine the number of applicants for themselves based on the school’s mission,” U.S. News said in an email.
But the ABA still requires standardized testing for nearly all law schools, the statement said. “Rankings are a start, not an answer,” U.S. News said. “Our mission is, and has always been, to provide data about schools to prospective students and their families.”
The exit of heavyweight institutions such as Harvard and Yale is unlikely to upend the ranking industry. For one thing, only the law school dropped out of the ranking. Although US News asked schools to provide their own data, much of the information is public.
“Yale Law’s actions are unlikely to change the (profit-seeking) behavior of America’s news leaders unless a large number of other high-profile institutions follow suit,” said Robert Schaeffer, director of public education at FairTest, an anti-test group, on Wednesday. said in an email.
But, he added, with Harvard on board, “if more prestigious law schools join quickly, the move will make a difference.”
Rankings are ingrained in the culture of higher education — each new annual ranking is driven by the many schools that condemn them. Prospective students have few other seemingly objective, data-based ways to judge schools.
Also, lower ranking institutions often advertise prominently and rely on them to attract students compared to top 10 or even top 30 schools, so the rankings may be more meaningful given the reputation and brand awareness of these schools already established.
Yale ranks first, followed in this year’s law school rankings by Stanford, the University of Chicago, and then Columbia and Harvard, both in fourth place.
Many ranking critics say the data can be easily manipulated, pointing to questions about Columbia’s numbers this year.
Over the summer, Columbia University announced it was no longer participating in the national university rankings and said it was reviewing its data — which came in second after a maths professor questioned its accuracy. The university eventually acknowledged that some of its data were inaccurate, including undergraduate class sizes and the percentage of faculty with the highest degree in the field.
Still, US News kept Colombia in the rankings, but dropped it to 18th.
Although Yale Law School has been the highest-ranked school in the U.S. News rankings for the past 30 years, Gerken said she has been thinking about that ranking as she begins her second term as dean.
Asked why she worried about them when Yale was ranked No. 1, she said: “It’s not about Yale Law School. It’s about legal education and careers. It’s time to step back and think about what we’re doing.” “
In her letter, Gerken called U.S. News Rankings a “for-profit” and “commercial” enterprise that is “deeply flawed.” That approach, she said, doesn’t give enough weight to programs like Yale’s that “support public interest careers, support need-based aid, and welcome working-class students into the profession,” and, therefore, misrepresent the law school’s rankings by emphasizing that job.
She said 20 per cent of the college’s overall ranking came from grades and test scores. “This highly weighted metric puts enormous pressure on schools to overlook promising students, especially those who cannot afford costly test prep courses,” she said in the letter. “It also prompts schools to use financial aid to recruit high-achieving students.”
That money could be redirected to provide scholarships for low-income students, she said.
In addition, she said, the ranking is misleading in the way it portrays the post-graduation employment rate of Yale law students, which is a problem for students who are keenly aware that they must start earning money to pay off their often exorbitant student loans. an important measure.
Yale awards “more public interest scholarships per student than any of our peers.” she wrote. “While our scholarships are highly selective and pay comparable salaries to outside scholarships, U.S. News appears to discount these valuable opportunities to the point where these graduates are effectively classified as unemployed.”
These metrics also devalue students who want to pursue advanced degrees such as masters or doctorates, Gerken said.
Harvard’s Manning said the ranking method “could create perverse incentives to influence school decisions in ways that weaken student choice and harm potential students.”
For one thing, the “debt metric” U.S. News adopted two years ago appears to reflect lower debt at graduation due to generous financial aid, he said. But the metric could also mean that law schools admit “more students who have the resources to avoid borrowing,” he wrote. “To the extent that a debt metric incentivizes a school to enroll students with better resources who don’t need to borrow, it can hurt the very people it’s trying to help.”
Efforts are underway to eliminate the mandatory test for law school admissions, but no final decision has been made. Meanwhile, dozens of law schools have dropped the LSAT and replaced it with the GRE. Both are part of an effort to increase enrollment of low-income students and students of color.
As for the rankings, many other top 10 law schools appeared to be on hold Wednesday.
The University of Pennsylvania Law School praised Yale and Harvard for their “leadership” and said it was “evaluating the issue,” but did not immediately offer to join.
Columbia University and the University of Chicago declined to comment. NYU officials said they were aware of Harvard and Yale’s actions, but “we have not made any decisions on this matter.”
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