Ever since the beginning of the law school crisis, more and more law schools have publicized the fact that they have willingly decreased the size of their entering classes in order to maintain the integrity of their admissions standards (and accordingly, ensure that they’d retain their precious U.S. News ranking, or at least be able to keep it somewhat stable).
In an interesting piece in Forbes, Yale Law Professor Ian Ayres suggests that it’s because of that “ranking competition” that many unranked and lower-ranked law schools have been able to stay in business instead of collapsing and closing their doors. He explains:
[After 2011,] highly ranked schools reduced their enrollments. The top 50 schools with the highest U.S. News rankings saw their enrollments drop by about 8%.
Why wouldn’t highly ranked schools be willing to reduce their admission standards to keep their classes filled? One important reason is the fear of falling in future U.S. News rankings. A school that dramatically reduced its admission standards would fall in the rankings and have a harder time recruiting applicants in future years….
If the top 150 ranked schools had maintained their 2011 enrollment class size, there would have likely been 5828 fewer students for the 53 unranked law schools to admit. This would have forced the unranked schools as a group to shrink their first year classes by 57.4%. The unranked schools had already seen their first-year enrollment drop by 29.5% (4255) so the loss of 5828 more students would have counterfactually meant a total contraction of 70%. …
Ranking competition acted as dam to protect part of the lower-ranked schools’ applicant pool from being sucked up by their higher-ranked competitors.
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That said, which law schools does Professor Ayres think were the most likely to have closed but for this U.S. News ranking competition? With data taken from ABA-required disclosures, he came up with the following table showing the 10 law schools with the largest percentage contraction in their first-year classes from 2011 to 2014. Take a look:
From Cooley to Thomas Jefferson to Arizona Summit, many of the usual suspects that leave their graduates with high student loans and low job prospects appear on this list. Would students who have since enrolled and been condemned to debt have been better off if these schools had closed? Professor Ayres seems to think so: “Part of me wonders whether the world would have been a better place if higher ranked schools maintained their class sizes and forced some of these weaker schools out of existence.”
Law schools that continue to operate under a “there but for the grace of God go I” enrollment strategy may be lining their coffers, but they’re also punishing their graduates. Maybe it’s time for law school deans and administrators to stop thinking about money and start thinking about the lives and careers that are being decimated in the process of running their already mediocre law schools into the ground.
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Lower-Ranked Law Schools Should Be Thanking U.S. News [Forbes]