November 16, 2022 may be a date marking a sea change in legal education, or a blip that will offer a few concessions and tradeoffs in the near future. But the announcement by Yale Law School, and the swift ensuing announcement (an act of conscious parallelism) from Harvard Law School, that they would, if you will, “drop out” of participating in the USNWR law rankings, is extraordinary. I wondered last year whether the weakened position of USNWR may result in a fatal blow to them. Perhaps that blow is here, now.
I’ve written a lot about USNWR law rankings, some of the good and some of the bad. So let’s walk through Yale’s and Harvard’s expressed justifications for dropping out.
First, employment metrics. From Yale:
One of the most troubling aspects of the U.S. News rankings is that it discourages law schools from providing critical support for students seeking public interest careers and devalues graduates pursuing advanced degrees. Because service is a touchstone of our profession, Yale Law School is proud to award many more public interest fellowships per student than any of our peers. These fellowships have enabled some of our finest students to serve their communities and the nation on our dime. Even though our fellowships are highly selective and pay comparable salaries to outside fellowships, U.S. News appears to discount these invaluable opportunities to such an extent that these graduates are effectively classified as unemployed. When it comes to brilliant students training themselves for a scholarly life or a wide-ranging career by pursuing coveted Ph.D. and master’s degrees, U.S. News does the same. Both of these tracks are a venerable tradition at Yale Law School, and these career choices should be valued and encouraged throughout legal education.
And from Harvard:
[T]he U.S. News methodology undermines the efforts of many law schools to support public interest careers for their graduates. We share, and have expressed to U.S. News, the concern that their debt metric ignores school-funded loan forgiveness programs in calculating student debt. Such loan forgiveness programs assist students who pursue lower paying jobs, typically in the public interest sector. We have joined other schools in also sharing with U.S. News our concern about the magazine’s decision to discount, in the employment ranking, professional positions held by those who receive public interest fellowships funded by their home schools. These jobs not only provide lawyers to organizations for critical needs, they also often launch a graduate’s career in the public sector.
The salient critique is a right one. In the 2008-2010 era, schools often “concealed” the employment status of graduates, if you will (or, as was alleged at the time by a number of those “shedding light” on employment practices), by hiring their own graduates. That boosted overall employment rates of the school, even if those careers were not meaningful careers at all—indeed, even if they were only short-term and part-time.
Once upon a time, USNWR treated all employment outcomes equally. And the ABA didn’t have granular employment data. No more. The ABA collects this granular data. USNWR gives “full weight” to full-time, long-term, bar passage-required and JD-advantage positions, but it discounts those positions if they are school-funded.
In a different era, this made more sense, but it is harder to justify discounting those positions if they are full-time, long-term. It’s a substantial investment (Yale indicates its public interest fellows received a $50,000 annual salary plus benefits) in a way that the short-term, part-time positions didn’t. In fact, those positions have all but dried up now that USNWR double-discounts them (they’re discounted for not being full-time, long-term positions, and they’re further discounted as school-funded positions). Total law school-funded, short-term, part-time positions, regardless of type of employment: Class of 2011, 964; Class of 2016, 165; Class of 2021, 59. From nearly 1000 such jobs to about 50 such jobs in a decade.
My recent look at the employment data suggests that a handful of elite schools (including Yale and Harvard) place a disproportionate number into these full-time, long-term, school-funded positions. At Yale, it’s at times over 10% of the class. At Harvard, it can exceed 20 students, a substantial number but smaller as a percentage basis at a school of Harvard’s size.
I think Yale and Harvard are right to critique this point of USNWR, but it’s fallen on deaf ears for many years.
Briefly, Yale mentions graduate programs, which, as justified could be a refuge for some schools seeking to “conceal” a set of their graduates into, perhaps, that school’s own, say, master’s programs. The gist of this metric is to say that JD graduates should be pursuing careers in law, but Yale candidly sends more (7, 2, and 10 in the last three graduating class) than a typical cohort, and perhaps justifiably so. But USNWR certainly does discount those placements. It’s a problem that may be unique to Yale (albeit modest in scope).
Second, debt metrics. From Yale:
In addition, the rankings exclude a crucial form of support for public interest careers — loan forgiveness programs — when calculating student debt loads. Loan forgiveness programs matter enormously to students interested in service, as they partially or entirely forgive the debts of students taking low-paying public interest jobs. But the rankings exclude them when calculating debt even though they can entirely erase a student’s loans. In short, when law schools devote resources to encouraging students to pursue public interest careers, U.S. News mischaracterizes them as low-employment schools with high debt loads. That backward approach discourages law schools throughout the country from supporting students who dream of a service career.
. . .
[T]he way U.S. News accounts for student debt further undercuts the efforts of law schools to recruit the most capable students into the profession. To its credit, U.S. News has recognized that debt can deter excellent students from becoming lawyers and has tried to help by giving weight to a metric that rests on the average debt of graduating students and the percentage of students who graduate with debt. Yet a metric based on debt alone can backfire, incentivizing schools to admit students with the means to pay tuition over students with substantial financial need. A far better measure is how much financial aid a law school provides to its students, rewarding schools that admit students from low-income backgrounds and support them along the way. That crucial measure receives inadequate weight in the rankings.
And from Harvard:
[T]he debt metric adopted by U.S. News two years ago risks confusing more than it informs because a school may lower debt at graduation through generous financial aid, but it may also achieve the same effect by admitting more students who have the resources to avoid borrowing. The debt metric gives prospective students no way to tell which is which. And to the extent the debt metric creates an incentive for schools to admit better resourced students who don’t need to borrow, it risks harming those it is trying to help.
The indebtedness metric was introduced in 2021. I certainly had questions about its methodology. I also suggested there might be value in considering alternative metrics, including ones that considered earnings potential. Undoubtedly, however, these metrics sink schools like Yale and Harvard. They rightly point out that it could distort admissions to well-funded students over those who could take on debt. (I’ve chronicled the “first generation” issue here, too.)
That said, most students take on debt, and indebtedness is a real concern for graduates. First, I’m not sure it confuses students, as, I think, there are not many schools that principally fund their institutions through wealthy admittees in a way that distorts the average debt loads. Indeed, USNWR also separates those who incur no debt from those who do incur debt, so the average debt load portrait offers a more accurate picture if you end up incurring debt. Second, it does reflect the need-based or other scholarship-based opportunities for students at an output level—what will it look like after graduation?
But, Yale identifies a related concern, which has some truth and a new question. If a school wants to repay debts for those who performing public interest (as those going into private practice will have an ability to repay their loans, and the loans are a “good” investment for their future earnings career), this indebtedness metric can’t track that. But, if Yale offers its own loan forgiveness, more generous than federal loan forgiveness, for public interest or government work, it solves an ability to pay problem, and a raw “indebtedness” metric doesn’t account for the fact that many of these graduates will never need to repay these loans.
And that raises a new question. How many graduates feel compelled to pursue such work because of their loans, as opposed to those who enter knowing they intend to have their loans later forgiven? That is, do the high debt loads constrain the choices of students? Undoubtedly, lower loan totals free up students to more choices. And there’s a benefit, then, of indicating the raw debt loads, even with a robust forgiveness program. But this is something of an unknowable answer.
Furthermore, the flipside of indebtedness is expenditures per student. This has been, perhaps, the bane of existence of the USNWR formula for many years. Yale and Harvard have benefited tremendously from this metric for decades. They report exceedingly high costs per student, aided by their generous endowments, which has helped keep them atop the rankings. But expenditures are opaque data not readily auditable. And they, worse still, incentivize simply spending more money, not spending it more effectively or to any particular benefit of the students. For the schools here to be so concerned about indebtedness metrics but not to speak a word about the expenditures metric (which has lasted much longer, is a much larger component of the rankings, and exacerbates much greater inequality between schools, particularly private and public) rings a bit hollow.
Third, admissions. From Yale:
The U.S. News rankings also discourage law schools from admitting and providing aid to students with enormous promise who may come from modest means. Today, 20% of a law school’s overall ranking is median LSAT/GRE scores and GPAs. While academic scores are an important tool, they don’t always capture the full measure of an applicant. This heavily weighted metric imposes tremendous pressure on schools to overlook promising students, especially those who cannot afford expensive test preparation courses. It also pushes schools to use financial aid to recruit high-scoring students. As a result, millions of dollars of scholarship money now go to students with the highest scores, not the greatest need. At a moment when concerns about economic equity stand at the center of our national dialogue, only two law schools in the country continue to give aid based entirely on need — Harvard and Yale. Just this year, Yale Law School doubled down on that commitment, launching a tuition-free scholarship for students who come from families below the poverty line. These students overcame nearly insurmountable odds to get to Yale, and their stories are nothing short of inspiring. Regrettably, U.S. News has made it difficult for other law schools to eliminate the financial barriers that deter talented minds from joining our profession.
And from Harvard:
[B]y heavily weighting students’ test scores and college grades, the U.S. News rankings have over the years created incentives for law schools to direct more financial aid toward applicants based on their LSAT scores and college GPAs without regard to their financial need. Though HLS and YLS have each resisted the pull toward so-called merit aid, it has become increasingly prevalent, absorbing scarce resources that could be allocated more directly on the basis of need.
I want to set aside “expensive” test preparation for a moment, as there is lower cost test prep than ever thanks to free services provided by LSAC and others. But I do want to discuss the LSAT/UGPA topic.
It’s been quite obviously correct that schools have been obsessively focused on their median LSAT and undergraduate GPA of incoming students and directing scholarships toward those medians. It’s diverted resources from need-based aid. That said, of course, it’s hard to know how some schools being need-focused in their aid would affect students who may have options elsewhere, at schools where they are not focused on need-focused aid.
But Yale’s note emphasizes a different issue: “the full measure of an applicant.” The ABA is on the verge of ending the requirement of an admissions test. It is entirely possible that schools that want to move toward a more “holistic” admissions process will need to find alternative pathways to measure applicants and do not want to rely on the LSAT. But as long as USNWR measures the LSAT, it will remain important for them to consider. Jettisoning the LSAT, then, requires a consideration of how to jettison USNWR.
Finally, the unstated reasons. As I’ve indicated, some of these reasons are more persuasive than others, but, of course, the timing matters too. Yale and Harvard each experienced an unprecedented drop in their peer scores this past year. Harvard dropped to a tie for 4th last year, down from its typical “top three” status. Some may be attributable to these rankings decisions; others maybe not.
So I’m watching closely to see how other schools respond. Frankly, there are benefits to USNWR for law students. They roughly approximate school quality, albeit extremely imperfectly. They can help prospective students, especially those new to the legal profession, with some rough guides of quality. Obviously, they create some bad incentives for law schools, and law students can too easily conflate rank with quality, or over-rely on the rankings.
But given how difficult it is for the ABA to revoke accreditation, USNWR offers at least some quality control for law schools, or at least some law schools. The bar exam is another bound of quality control for law schools. We’ll see if other schools jump on board, and how it may affect school choices moving forward.
Furthermore, it’s worth considering how, if at all, USNWR responds. Much of the rankings are based on their self-collected data (peer scores) or data they could independently collect from the ABA. Others, like debt and expenditures, are not so readily available. Some schools currently do not report to USNWR, but they are unranked. Will USNWR attempt to impute or estimate data back into Yale and Harvard, then rank them anyway? Will they just drop them to the “unranked” category? Will they change their criteria to use only information they can collect independently? Time will tell.