Career Center, Law School Rankings, Law Schools, Rankings

Everything Wrong With The ATL 2016 Top 50 Law School Rankings

Let's get into everything that is wrong with our rankings, and by extension, everything that is wrong with me.

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ATl-Law-School-Rankings-340The 2016 ATL Top 50 Law School Rankings are out, come and see. This year we added a new metric that looks at how much debt law students have relative to their starting salary, come and see. Our rankings have absolutely skull-crushed popular schools in large cities, come and see.

These law school rankings represent a lot of work by a lot of people here at Above the Law, and also are the closest thing I have to a life’s philosophy in list form. Obviously, I’m a fan of the work. But every year, I write a post about the things that are crappy, because I am incapable of interacting with the world in any other way.

Let’s get into everything that is wrong with our rankings, and by extension, everything that is wrong with me. I’ve captured three main criticism for this year’s list.

1. The Columbia Problem

This year, one giant issue is really bugging me: Columbia ranks 9th, down three spots. NYU Law ranks 15th, down five spots. Georgetown ranks 21st, and is down one, behind schools like Iowa and the interchangeable Boston Rindge And Law Industrial Complex. What in the hell do our rankings have against popular schools in large cities?

There are a lot of issues here for why the big New York schools underperform, but the biggest is cost. Columbia charges over $65,000 in tuition and fees, and that’s before you take into account the cost of living in Manhattan. NYU Law charges upwards of $57,000 in tuition, but their estimated student expense is $85,000 per year, once you include room and board. And we know schools are always very conservative with their “living expenses” estimation.

We’ve always had an “education costs” metric in our methodology, but we are getting better and better at looking at the real debt of graduating students. Last year, we introduced a metric that weighed student debt against all jobs received. This year, we’re looking at debt as a function of starting salary. So the difference between Columbia tuition and Cornell tuition ($61,000) might be slight. But when you count that spread over three years, and you add in the cost of living difference between the Upper West Side and Ithaca, you’re looking at a lot more debt for students in big cities than students in the middle of nowhere.

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That’s all important information for students to consider. But when you put all of it into the sorting hat and it tells you to go to Iowa Law instead of Georgetown… I mean… not if you want to WORK AND LIVE in any of these expensive ass cities that have a high cost of living. It’s like the people who come to your one-bedroom, shoebox condo in the Village and say “You know, y’all could have a MANSION in Poteet.” Thanks, Tex. OBVIOUSLY, I’ve decided that living in a cosmopolitan capital of the world is worth more to me than having a five-bedroom ranch house where I can ride my armadillo to work.

Our rankings are good at telling you which major market school is a safer bet, and which small market school is better than you think. It’s not really good at comparing the two between each other.

2. The Harvard Problem

Last year, Harvard Law was #1 and Yale was relatively low. This year, Yale captures the top spot while Harvard Law falls to #5. Our rankings are not turning conventional wisdom on its head. Instead, this shows that our rankings are wrong, at least a little bit.

Our “outcome-based” rankings tend to focus on the highest paying outcomes. Biglaw jobs. Federal clerkships. Dollar, dollar bill, y’all. The problem is that those lucrative outcomes tend to also be the worst jobs on the market in terms of lifestyle and social utility. Nobody says, “I want to be a cog in the giant machine, when I grow up.”

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Given how expensive law school is, most students flock to these difficult jobs anyway. The most important chart in the legal profession is the NALP bimodal salary distribution curve. It shows in a concrete way that there are very few jobs at the very top that people need in order to pay off their debts. Then there is a giant hump on the low end full of people just trying to make ends meet before the creditors come knocking. There are very few “good” jobs in the middle where a person can do great legal or professional work, and still clock in at six figures and make enough money to cover their debts.

NALP DistributionCurve2014

Thing is: schools like Harvard or Yale can get you those non-legal or “barely legal” jobs in the salary distribution valley. Most Harvard kids will go into Biglaw or some other “full-time, bar-passage required” job that we track in our rankings. But some of them will go work for the NGO in Switzerland. Some of them will go work for Mommy’s hedge fund. If you have family money, the cost means nothing to you. Maybe you are just going to HLS to burnish your T.V. talking head credentials?

If a slight blip of HLS students, relative to Yale or Stanford students, takes these opportunities instead of getting onto the Biglaw train, they might be missed by our rankings. This year, the HLS employment score fell. That’s doesn’t mean that HLS students are out here on these streets. It means that instead of going to Skadden or SullCrom or law firms that don’t start with an “S,” 10 kids went to the U.N., or went to work on an app, or joined the Ted Cruz campaign (shudders). Our rankings can’t pick that up, so HLS is 5th.

Now, lots of school that underperform in our rankings (or don’t crack the top 50) make the same argument. “Oh, our kids don’t go into Biglaw, but they get really good jobs in other fields.” Slow your roll, tuition apologists, this issue is a limited purpose critique. There’s big difference between rejecting a Biglaw offer, and not being able to get one. Just like there’s a big difference between being the VP in charge of copyright and the VP in charge of writing the names on the cups of coffee.

The real problem I have with our rankings is that I can’t prove which schools are legitimately generating attractive non-legal opportunities, and which schools are throwing crap against the wall trying to juke the stats. We don’t count “JD Advantage” jobs, because it is a misleading category meant to sucker students who are about to invest a quarter million dollars into legal education. But in a world of perfect information, we’d know every job of every graduate, and be able to separate the good jobs from the giant ripoffs. Maybe next year.

3. The Alabama/Minnesota Problem

The University of Alabama School of Law shot up to #26 in this year’s ranking. The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities fell to #34. That means that very soon I’m going to get an email from some complete moron who asks “Should I go to Alabama or Minnesota for law school? I want to work in Biglaw and it seems like Alabama is a much better school.”

I like our list and I like list making, but if you need a list to tell you if you’d rather live in Alabama or Minnesota for three years, you need more help than can be gleaned by counting things. NO LIST, ours included, should be able to influence your decision in that way. GO to Minnesota, then go to Alabama. If you can’t afford the airfare, just plug the locations into Google Earth. Most likely, at least one of those places will strike you as a blasted hellscape. GO TO THE OTHER ONE.

The conceit behind publishing the top 50 law schools (we rank all of them, if your school isn’t on the list, it’s not because we forgot about you) is that we say we are trying to limit ourselves to the schools that have some kind of “national” cache. But if that was the only goal, we could stop at #15 and call it a day. Most of the schools on this list and there because they are regional powerhouses. For instance, the University of Richmond School of Law squeaked onto this year’s list. That’s great, and if this list helps even one person go to Richmond instead of one of the InfiLaw diploma mills, then the entire effort has been worth it.

But you wouldn’t go to Richmond unless you were pretty sure you wanted to live and work in and around Richmond, Virginia. USC Gould School of Law just missed our top 50. If there’s a person out there interested in entertainment law who goes to Richmond, instead of USC, because USC isn’t a “top 50” law school, I’d probably feel justified in murdering that person and stealing their lifeforce, because I can put it to better use.

I can say all that, I can add all kinds of caveats, but we just published a list saying that Alabama is a better law school than Minnesota. Our rankings are not fool-proof. But fools will read them, and potentially be harmed by them.

I haven’t figured out a way to prevent the rankings from being used for bad intentions. This must be how gun manufactures feel — minus all the cash money. Also, please click here to read the rankings.

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