Law schools say they're "boycotting" the USNWR rankings, but their admissions practices suggest otherwise
Earlier, I pointed out that law schools “boycotting” the USNWR law school rankings really meant that they would not be completing the survey forms circulated to them. Some data, including expenditures per student or law student indebtedness, cannot readily be gathered elsewhere. USNWR responded by modifying its rankings criteria to use only publicly-available data.
I also noted that some schools appeared to still be “participating” in other elements of the rankings. Some, for instance, circulated promotional material to prospective USNWR voting faculty about the achievements of their schools and their faculty.
But I wanted to focus on another mismatch between what law schools are saying and what they are doing. And that’s in admissions.
Yale and Harvard, in their opening salvo, lamented the over-emphasize on the median LSAT and UGPA of incoming students. So, the thought might have gone, we are going to consider admissions based on our own criteria, not dictated by USNWR. As I chronicled a decade ago, USNWR significantly distorts the incentives for law school admissions by driving schools to admit students with either an above-target-median LSAT or an above-target-median UGPA. Higher-caliber students who fall just below the cusp are not admitted, as measured by the “index score,” which is most predictive of law school performance. Lower-caliber students who excel on one of these two measures are admitted. (UPDATE: I added a link and clarified the points made here.)
One might expect other boycotting schools to go their own way on admissions. From UCLA:
The rankings’ reliance on unadjusted undergraduate grade point average as a measure of student quality penalizes students who pursue programs with classes that tend to award lower grades (in STEM fields, for example), regardless of these students’ academic ability or leadership potential.
And from Northwestern:
First, by over-valuing median LSAT and UGPA, it incentivizes law schools to provide scholarships to students at their medians and above rather than to students with the greatest need.
You can find similar approaches from schools like Vanderbilt, Fordham, and other schools. But it appears any admissions-related concerns have been a non sequitur. These schools acknowledge that ABA data already provides median statistics on incoming classes.
So would boycotting schools simply ignore the consequences of the USNWR formula and instead admit classes less focused on medians? It appears not.
With almost pinpoint precision, you can see that law schools continue to target a particular median LSAT and UGPA in their admissions statistics. Self-reported LSD.law, which in various iterations has been a go-to source of self-reported law school admissions information for twenty years, reflects that these law schools, so far, continue to push medians.
Each image is a snapshot of where law school admissions stand today. Each green dot is an acceptance. Each is a school purporting to “boycott” the USNWR rankings, which means, in theory, it need not worry about its median LSAT & UGPA. If that were the case, we would expect admissions to decrease from the upper right to the bottom left with some gradations.
Instead, you can see that these schools have four quadrants, strongly disfavoring anyone in the lower left quadrant, i.e., those who are “below” targeted medians.
In other words, these law schools are still admitting students principally on the basis of how it would affect their USNWR ranking.
Now, many caveats. Of course LSD.law (and Law School Numbers before that) is self-reported data and self-selected data. It may not get the schools’ precise medians right as I’ve outlined in red. But it certainly reflects a wide swath of prospective students, including those who were not admitted, both above and below any median. Some students are admitted below the medians, for personal statement reasons, for socioeconomic factors, and for a variety of other reasons. But you can see the overwhelming target of admissions remains centered around targeted medians. These, of course, could change by the time the class is admitted.
But I’ll be watching the schools purporting to “boycott” because USNWR inadequately values the things they purport to value in admissions, and then see if they have changed their approach to admissions. So far, it looks like they haven’t.