Whether it’s Ralph Waldo Emerson or The Wire, the sentiment in the expression, “If you come at the king, you best not miss” is a memorable one. That is, if you seek to overthrow the one in charge of something, you must truly overthrow it. If you don’t, and merely wound or annoy, well, perhaps all you’ve done is make that person angry at you, and perhaps you’re in a worse place than when you began.

I’ve been puzzling over this sentiment over the last week as Yale and Harvard (and now a handful of other elite schools in tow) announce they will not “participate” in the USNWR rankings in the future.

The puzzle is this: so what? Or, what’s the endgame here?

To start, USNWR has announced it will continue to rank law schools. Not much of a surprise here. And, as I mentioned, much data USNWR uses is available from the American Bar Association or from its own internal collection.

Law schools refusing to participate, then, may do one of two things. First, they may “delegitimize” the rankings by refusing to participate and hope that prospective law students, employers, and others take note. A related form of “delegitimization” is asterisks beside “non-participating” schools where USNWR imputes data that it cannot otherwise obtain publicly, suggesting that the rankings are “tainted,” at least as far as these non-participating law schools are concerned.

I think there’s little likelihood of his happening because of the second reason, which I’ll get to in a moment. As more and more schools refuse to participate, I think the sense of the rankings being “tainted” is, well, less and less. Everyone’s doing the same thing (well, not everyone, and more on this a little after that). The incentive, then, is for USNWR to treat everyone the same.

So, second, persuade USNWR to change its formula. As I mentioned in the original Yale and Harvard post, their three concerns were employment (publicly available), admissions (publicly available), and debt data. So the only one with any real leverage is debt data. But the Department of Education does disclose a version of debt metrics of recent graduates, albeit a little messier to compile and calculate. It’s possible, then, that none of these three demanded areas would be subject to any material change if law schools simply stopped reporting it.

Instead, it’s the expenditure data. That is, as my original post noted, the most opaque measure is the one that may ultimately get dropped if USNWR chooses to go forward with ranking, it would need to use only publicly-available data. It may mean expenditure data drops out.

Ironically, that’s precisely where Yale and Harvard (and many other early boycotters) excel the most. They have the costliest law schools and are buoyed in the rankings by those high costs.

So, will the “boycott” redound to the boycotters’ benefit? Perhaps not, if the direction is toward more transparent data.

Paul Caron has blogged about another interesting feature. Many of the schools that have joined the early boycott have fallen in USNWR in recent years, perhaps a suggestion, again, of a desire to “lock in” the present ranking. And many other schools that have publicly come out against the boycott (or who have been noticeably silent) have had advantageous boosts in recent years. So there are different incentives for those who want to change the rankings (by boycotting, forcing the hand) and those who do not (by maintaining the status quo).

Another brief point. While it’s mostly elite law schools that have “boycotted” so far, a few others have joined, including those whose “ranking” is more marginal and those who are the sole flagship law school in a state. In another sense, these schools also have little to “lose,” if you will, like the most elite schools whose reputations are firmly cemented in the existing hierarchical structure. A few schools (including a couple of HBCUs) have not given USNWR data for many years (to no particular public praise, for what it’s worth). Schools with a more marginal ranking have little value in trying to stay at, say, #110 or #124. And for sole flagship law schools, they also often cater to a different market of prospective students and employers.

Instead, we see a number of schools not boycotting who are generally, perhaps, “indistinguishable” to the prospective student or the employer, and who need to understanding of what the school’s “peers” may be as a reference point. USNWR offers this crudely and imperfectly, but it certainly adds this value in some ways.

Finally, what “boycotting” looks like. I openly asked whether schools “boycotting” intended to “boycott” the surveys sent around to law schools. It’s apparent that answer is no. “Boycotting” law schools submitted promotional material to prospective USNWR reputation survey voters (including me) even after announcing the boycott. So it’s a partial boycott, one in which schools intend to maintain as high a ranking as possible while also being recalcitrant in handing over data.