Law School Deans, Law Schools, Rankings, U.S. News

The Annual Parade Of Law Deans Butthurt Over U.S. News

Deans try to explain away low U.S. News rankings.

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CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY, COLUMBUS SCHOOL OF LAW — RESPONSE TO U.S. NEWS RANKINGS

Given the ongoing turmoil in legal education precipitated by a dramatic decline in enrollment at all U.S. Law schools in recent years, our drop from # 80 to #107 in the just released US News rankings was not unexpected. This annually recalculated ranking has no connection to the excellence of the education we offer. We are the same law school with the same strengths that we were yesterday and that we will remain tomorrow. Let’s put the new rankings in context:

To begin with, let’s consider what else US News says about the Columbus School of Law. Our part-time JD program is ranked at #20 and clinical training in law is #14. Our Law School is also listed in the survey as being among the 100 most racially and ethnically diverse in the country.

The Law School ranks 22nd nationally on the list of “The Law Schools Whose Grads Earn the Biggest Paychecks,” according to a study released by Forbes magazine based on our graduates’ starting median salary of $81,500. Besides Georgetown, no other area law school appears on Forbes’ top 25 list.

CUA Law ranks 36th among the number of partners at the largest law firms (significantly outperforming our U.S. News ranking) and is the 6th ranked top feeder school for law firm partners in the Washington area (ahead of Yale, Chicago, Michigan, and Columbia). See Theodore P. Seto, Where Do Partners Come From? 62 J. Legal Educ. 242 (2012).

The Law School ranks 39th nationally in the number of alumni who were promoted from associate to partner at the nation’s 250 largest law firms during 2013, according to “The Top 50 Go-To Law Schools,” a new survey from The National Law Journal.

We will soon report to the ABA an employment rate of 82% for the class of 2013, an uptick of nearly two percentage points from the previous year. But, curiously, US News reports our class of 2012 employment rate at 62% (not the actual 80%), after making its own value judgments about the appropriate weight to be assigned different types of jobs.

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The formulas used by US News to calculate law school rankings should not be confused with an objective methodology. Fully 40% of a law school’s ranking consists of merely the “opinions” of those surveyed, meaning that those who fill out the annual questionnaires are asked to assign a 1 to 5 grade to every accredited law school in the country, regardless of what they really know about a given institution and without being asked to provide any information to support any ranking.

Beyond these rankings, it is important to focus on several key aspects of our program at CUA Law.

First, while over two-thirds of all ABA accredited law schools experienced a decline in their first-year classes in the fall of 2013, our Law School is one of only 13% of all ABA law schools where the size of the incoming first-year class this past fall increased by 10% or more over the previous year.

Second, what’s most important about our program — both full-time and part-time — is not any ranking but our quality: we are adamant about continuing our commitment to attracting high-caliber students and offering them a first-rate education. Our innovative educational program ensures that our graduates will remain among the best-prepared and most practice-ready in the nation.

Third, our academic and co-curricular offerings are richer and more diverse than ever. We continue to offer a variety of outstanding opportunities to students in our excellent courses, clinics, and externships enriched by doctrinal teaching and practical training. In addition to our highly-regarded certificate programs in communications, comparative and international law, law and public policy, and securities law, we now offer new specialized concentrations in civil litigation, criminal litigation, family law, intellectual property law, and labor and employment. We also have initiated three new clinics in the areas of clemency, criminal defense, and immigration through novel partnerships with, respectively, former Gov. Bob Ehrlich, the Arlington Public Defender, and Catholic Charities.

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AMERICAN UNIVERSITY WASHINGTON COLLEGE OF LAW — RESPONSE TO U.S. NEWS RANKINGS

Dear AUWCL Community,

American University Washington College of Law (AUWCL) provides a superb educational experience to its students, produces first-rate scholarship, and engages the community, nation, and world through specialized programs that emphasize the values of access to justice at home and abroad. Our law school was founded in 1896 by two pioneering women whose powerful message of opportunity is a source of continuous inspiration to the community and the foundation of our unwavering rejection of all sources of discrimination and injustice. These solid and vibrant values will continue to serve as a cornerstone of our institutional commitment to the rule of law and access to legal education and justice itself.

Our law school has long prioritized diversity, need-based scholarships, innovative programs, service to those in need, and well-rounded admissions criteria. These are among the key factors that make American University Washington College of Law an institution of opportunity that is well-equipped to respond to changes in legal education and to serve the future need of its students, the legal profession, and the nation. Some commercial rankings like those released today by U.S. News and World Report do not fully embrace or even recognize these core values.

We are not pleased with our decline from 56 to 72 in the U.S. News general ranking of U.S. law schools, but the educational policies of our institution should not be compromised by a commercial ranking. The volatility, inconsistency, and unreliability of this ranking is well-known within and outside of legal education. In fact, changes in the rankings criteria year to year have resulted in extreme movements up and down, affecting schools whose relative quality remains unchanged. The same publication provides a diversity index that is not factored into their law school ranking, despite the central importance of diversity on the depth and quality of a legal education in particular. AUWCL ranks near the top of this index as one of the most diverse law schools in the country, yet our U.S. News rank fails to take into account, in any form whatsoever, this important and valuable distinction.

The same U.S. News survey consistently recognizes AUWCL’s leadership in specialized programs along with schools like Harvard, NYU, UC-Berkeley, and Georgetown. We are 3rd in clinical education (behind only Georgetown and NYU), 5th in international law (behind only NYU, Columbia, Georgetown, and Harvard) and 7th in intellectual property (behind schools such as Stanford, NYU, and UC-Berkeley). None of these specialty rankings are factored into the general ranking.

Other rankings also recognize the superb value of the educational experience provided by AUWCL:

· QS World University Rankings: AUWCL was named a Top 100 University for Law in the world, placing in the top 20 U.S. law schools on the list.

· The National Jurist: AUWCL was named one of the top 25 Best Law Schools for Public Interest Law.

· Hispanic Business Magazine: AUWCL was recognized as the #1 Law School for Hispanic Diversity.

· Business Insider: AUWCL is ranked #23 on their list of the 50 Best Law Schools in America.

· National Law Journal: AUWCL placed 25th on their ranking of schools whose alumni base had the most associates promoted to partner at the top 250 law firms.

The quality of our students and graduates is exceptional. We do not believe in compromising our admissions criteria merely to adapt to particular commercial rankings. To do so would mean denying scholarship awards to highly qualified candidates in great need of financial assistance and dramatically reducing diversity as a key component of our admissions. Our fall 2013 incoming class was comprised of 40% minority students, and more than 50% of our scholarships for the class were based on financial need.

Central to our values is our dedication to the success of our students and graduates. Recent statistical gains in our graduates’ rate of employment, even as narrowly defined by U.S. News, do not take fully into account those graduates’ success in seizing other opportunities in Washington, D.C., and beyond: jobs in the business sector, law-related professional jobs in government and policy, further graduate study, and fellowships.

We continue to make every effort to help our graduates find quality post-graduate positions to support their career goals. This year alone the law school has:

· Seen unparalleled faculty involvement in our students’ career development. Every law professor is participating in one or more of 11 faculty practice groups whose purpose is to connect students to practitioners in each of those practice areas and to mentor them in the job search process;

· Enhanced programs for first-year students, stressing the importance of focusing early on career development; and

· Allocated additional resources for employer outreach and increased the number of alumni participating in our mentorship programs.

We will continue to focus on our strengths and expand into new areas, including the myriad experiential learning opportunities through our renowned clinics, externships, trial advocacy program, and more. Our leading programs in international law, law and government, criminal law, women and the law, international commercial arbitration, human rights, intellectual property, business law, and environmental law, to mention only some, will continue to provide intellectual leadership and opportunity for our students. Our curriculum is both broad and deep, and the sheer number of elective courses offered here each year is among the largest in the country.

AUWCL’s unique environment of opportunity, diversity, and specialized knowledge puts students and values first. We make no apologies for this distinction and, to the contrary, take great pride in it. We look forward to continuing to reflect those values as we move to the new Tenley Campus in fall 2015—a state-of-the-art facility one block from the Metro that will expand possibilities to continue to attract bright, diverse students and connect those students even more to the professional opportunities found in Washington, DC. The move to Tenley Campus will mark a new chapter in our school’s unwavering commitment to promoting the rule of law, opportunity, and access to justice, through high quality and inclusive legal education.

Sincerely,

Claudio Grossman,
Dean

BOSTON COLLEGE LAW SCHOOL — RESPONSE TO U.S. NEWS RANKINGS

Dear members of the BC Law community,

The 2015 U.S. News and World Report rankings were released this morning. BC Law is ranked 36th overall, and our clinical programs are ranked 25th. U.S. News ranks schools with a total score from 1 to 100, based on a variety of different data points. Our overall score was 56, and there was a five-way tie at 31 with an overall score of 57, which pushed us to where we stand today.

This year’s ranking is not an accurate picture of who we are as a school. In evaluating the numbers more closely, our drop was caused by a decline in some key data points including our peer assessment score and our employment numbers. I will be working with the faculty, administration, and representatives from the University to take concrete steps to improve our standing in these areas. We will build upon plans put in motion during the last year, intensify our efforts to ensure that our true value is more properly represented, and implement new initiatives that impact these points. These efforts and initiatives include:

A focus on reputation. We have received funding from the University to support faculty research and scholarship, which are important drivers of reputational scores. I will ensure that these resources are utilized for the maximum benefit. Working with the University Office of Marketing Communications, we will be releasing to key law school leaders a series of communications pieces highlighting our new faculty hires, publications and institutional initiatives. I am also in conversations with the University regarding a consulting firm that would help address our reputation. I strongly believe that the quality of our institution is not properly reflected in these scores. We are finding better ways to highlight our strengths.

A focus on jobs. Placement statistics are a large component of the rankings, but more importantly, increasing our employment numbers helps our graduates. While our placement statistics are the third highest of all New England law schools, we are fully committed to improving our numbers. Last summer, we completed a restructuring of our Career Services Office that included an upgrade of three positions for key existing staff and the hiring of new personnel into the remaining three positions. This was a major commitment to the law school by Boston College.

We worked with this new team to provide ongoing one-on-one job search counseling for all 2013 graduates who were still seeking employment. We also greatly increased our outreach to employers, including a series of “Employer Breakfasts” with law firm partners, general counsel, and leaders in the public sector to educate them on the changes we are making at the law school and to get their input on preparation at BC Law. We helped increase our experiential learning opportunities through new initiatives such as the MA Appeals Court externship program for 2/3Ls and a partnership with LegalOnRamp, which gives our recent graduates vital work experience in legal transactional and compliance work. Finally, we revamped our professional development programming to focus heavily on networking and interviewing skills (for example, our very successful “1L Boot Camp” series that partnered Career Services with the Law Student Association), and we saw increased student participation across our programs.

A number of these new initiatives are already resulting in higher placements. U.S. News placement statistics lag a year behind and they often vary their formula. But what we do know at this point is that our actual employed at graduation rate for the class of 2013 is 6.53% higher than for the class of 2012.

Although I am disappointed in this year’s ranking, I want to state once again that any single ranking is not a true representation of the quality of our institution. We have made tremendous strides during the past year, including plans for our new Center for Experiential Learning, opening this fall, and the launch of our Global Practice Program, which includes a new J.D./LL.M. program with the Sorbonne in Paris. We have continued to reduce our incoming class size in order to be responsive to the market, and I am pleased to say that I have received permission from the University to make these reductions permanent. The Office of Career Services has worked extremely hard to offer additional services to students. We have also announced our new Dean’s Scholars program, meant to attract the very best and brightest students to BC Law.

There are more changes I will share with you in the coming months. I understand the rankings are extremely important to the perception others have of Boston College Law School, and I am fully committed to doing what is necessary to move our numbers back up. But we are more than numbers. We must stay focused as an institution on providing the best possible education for our students. Our school is a remarkable place to study law. Our care for the individual, combined with our rigorous curriculum, focus on justice and ethics, and experiential opportunities around the globe, makes us unique, and our incredibly dedicated faculty and staff, along with our talented students and alumni, will continue to lead us toward our long-term goals and a stronger future.

Sincerely,
Vincent Rougeau
Dean

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