Everything Wrong With The Above the Law Rankings

The ATL Law School Rankings are out. Here's what's wrong with them.

Take a look at the Above the Law Law School Rankings, released yesterday. What’s the first thing that jumps out at you? Yale, right? Yale, the best law school in the country, is ranked number five.

Let me say this: If you get into Yale but go to Penn because the Above the Law Rankings told you to, I will shoot you on general principles. That’s not a threat, it’s a promise. Nothing against Penn, but come on. If Yale charged twice as much and Penn were free, you’d probably still be better off going to Yale.

Yale’s underperformance is defensible given our metrics — check out this podcast where ATL’s Director of Research, Brian Dalton, tries to explain to me why I wasn’t allowed to just make Yale number one and be done with it. But the school’s underperformance highlights a weakness with our outcome-based metrics: not everybody wants the same outcome.

At the bottom of the scale, it’s fine to overlook that point. People who go to the 201st-best law school (however defined) want “a job” that doesn’t involve “cleaning gas station bathrooms with their tongues.” Looking at good lawyer jobs effectively captures what they want out of their law school.

But at the top end, not everybody who goes to Yale Law School or Harvard Law School or, you know, Penn Law dreams of becoming a drone in a corporate office who gets intimately familiar with Kroll Ontrack. Not everybody cares how much law school costs when Mommy and Daddy are footing the bill anyway. Some top students don’t want a law degree to become a lawyer, some of them want a law degree so they don’t have to hire a lawyer when they are running their own companies. Some people want a law degree because it helps them get on TV.

Yale Law is one of the best schools to go to if you want to be a lawyer. It’s also one of the best schools to go to if you want to do anything else in life. And because the school is so small, if like 10 people one year decide they want to free Tibet instead of clerk on the Second Circuit, well, that’s going to show up in our rankings.

That’s not a defense of so-called “JD Advantage” jobs. Those remain a stupid way for law schools to plump up their employment numbers. I’m just acknowledging that there are a lot of “Yale Advantage” jobs that are rewarding outcomes, yet not captured in our rankings.

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Whatever, luckily nobody who is smart enough to get into Yale needs me to remind them that Yale has advantages not captured in our rankings.

Another problem with our rankings that is really evident this year is that we seem to overvalue regional powerhouses versus national law schools. New Mexico Law is ranked 17th, for instance, while Georgetown is ranked 20th. That is really useful information… IF YOU WANT TO LIVE SOMEWHERE IN THE FREAKING DESERT. I mean Jesus, we’re basically telling you that rattlesnake antidote is more useful than a winter coat. IT’S TRUE, I guess. But it really has way more to do with how you want to live your life than anything intrinsic about the quality of the items. Are rattlesnakes even poisonous? That’s a question the Above the Law Rankings can’t answer.

If it sounds like I’m just defending East Coast prestige in the face of facts, rest assured, all of the elitist-based problem with our rankings are back for another year. We still count SCOTUS clerks, which doubles down on the rankings advantage for the top schools (and Yale somehow still ended up at 5).

Look, rankings are like cocaine: super fun right up until the moment it kills you. There is a lot of useful information in this year’s results. Come on, we’re the only people using an independent, third-party metric to look at student indebtedness. Just use them responsibly.

The ATL Top 50 Law Schools Rankings [Above the Law]

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