Law Blog – WSJ.com : Dean Calls on Peers to Unite, Kick U.S. News Rankings to the Curb
It’s no secret that law school administrators cater to the ranking methodology of the mighty U.S. News & World Report. To date, one way to keep your ranking up has been to admit students with sub-par LSATs and GPAs into the part-time program only, since those students’ so-called entering credentials will then be excluded from the U.S. News rankings calculus.
But now U.S. News is considering revising that calculus to include part-time students’ entering credentials. And that news, at least for one dean, is reason enough to say, well, enough!
Writes Case Western Dean Gary Simson in today’s NLJ: “I propose that law school faculties and administrations treat the announcement as a wake-up call and recognize how much they have allowed themselves to be at the mercy of editors whose primary interest is selling magazines, rather than providing a means of ranking schools that actually might promote the things that make for genuine greatness in a law school.”
[more at the link]
Ann Bartow’s comments on the bad unintended consequences of this are very compelling. And I agree with this dean, we are becoming the tools of our measurement tools.