Everything Wrong With The 2017 Law School Rankings
Our list is not woke.
My favorite disaster movie is Deep Impact. Most disaster movies involve the plucky scientist desperately trying to convince everybody that a disaster is imminent, then DISASTER, but heroes survive and life goes on, then roll credits. But Deep Impact exists in the space after the threat has been recognized, before things start blowing up. It is a movie about life going on in the face of disaster: people still go to work, get promoted, get divorced, and go to school, even though there’s a giant meteor barrelling towards Earth likely to end all life on the planet.
In my world, Donald Trump is a giant orange meteor in the sky. We’ve already seen some effects, but the extinction level impact hasn’t happened yet. There are people furiously trying to stop the meteor. There are others who welcome it, they view the destruction as a chance to make the world anew. And while all that is happening up there in the sky, on the ground we are still supposed to go to work, and go to school.
The Above the Law Law School Rankings proceed from the simple premise that people go to law school in order to get jobs as lawyers. Our rankings focus on jobs, good jobs, that people are able to get after attending law school. I believe that is the correct premise. But in 2017, with a giant meteor baring down on us, the “heroes” who are trying to stop the disaster are lawyers. Lawyers are the first responders to the Trump shenanigans. Lawyers have put a (temporary) stop on his most evil intentions. Lawyers are providing aid and comfort to the most vulnerable.
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In that context, our list of top 50 law schools seems woefully unable to capture what a “good job” is anymore, given these times of trouble. The premise is still sound: people are still going to law school in order to get a job as a lawyer. But our methodology would count a job at Jones Day more favorably than an unpaid public interest internship helping asylum seekers.
I can’t in good conscience say that investing $250,000 and three years of your life to take an internship counts as a “good” decision. Trump is a meteor, but he can’t change the laws of physics. But I also can’t tell you that the student trying to assess where to go to law school right now is thinking: “Maybe one day I can work at Morgan Lewis and be ridiculed by every decent person I know, with a few exceptions.”
Every year, I try to tell you everything wrong with our law school rankings. This year, our focus on high paid and high prestige outcomes seems wrong. It seems almost gross. There’s a giant meteor in the sky, and I’m here listing the top-50 money bunkers, instead of the top-50 planetary legal defense installations.
Our list is not woke.
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Of course, I might just be projecting my sense of civic doom. Maybe you really do want to work for Jones Day. Maybe you’re out there thinking “I wonder which firm President Mike Pence will rely on?” I don’t know you. Onto some more mundane concerns with how we arranged this year’s set of deck chairs.
The Yale Problem.
Yale ranks #3 this year, down from #1 last year and #2 a couple of years ago. I’ve said repeatedly, if you need our list, or any other, to tell you whether or not you should go to Yale Law School, you are an idiot who will probably not get into Yale.
We had internal conversations this year about whether to exclude Yale from our rankings entirely. Yale is unique. It’s incredibly small, relative even to its “peer” law schools. Because of the small sample size, minor changes in its graduate outcomes can have major effects on its various employment scores.
And those minor changes come about not because of any change in Yale’s relationship with the employment market, but because of the overwhelming choices available to Yale Law graduates. Other schools say you can use your law degree to go into “business.” What they really mean is that you can go be a Starbucks barrista. We refuse to count those jobs as “JD Advantage.” But when Yale says you can go into “business,” they really mean “Yo, Google is hiring. They need people with legal training to teach Google what ‘false imprisonment’ means when she locks you in your car and drives you to the rehab clinic.”
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Schools won’t break out their “real” JD Advantage jobs from their fake ones, and so we ignore all of it. But that hurts schools like Yale which really can place its students with awesome opportunities outside the strictly “legal” fields. Then Yale gets slammed again for every student that takes, say, a Skadden Fellowship instead of just going to work for Skadden like a good little drone. Since, again, the class size is so small, 10 kids doing something off the expected track can bounce Yale around in our rankings.
So yeah, we talked about excluding them entirely instead of trying to attach some ordinal value to the utility of a Yale law degree. But… we can’t very well have a law school rankings that doesn’t include Yale because people would make fun of us on Twitter.
So… what do you want from me. Go to Yale, if you can.
The Millennial Problem
As I said upon returning from NALP, law firms are more and more concerned with how their practices mesh with the young talent in their offices.
Anecdotally, we know that law schools are looking at the same issue. Some law schools are trying to be at the forefront of the new ways of teaching and learning that Millennials have come to expect. Other law schools are stuck in the past, determined to force Millennials into a traditional structure that has worked for decades.
Which law schools are adjusting to the demands of its young students most effectively? Which law schools are arming those students with the skills needed to thrive in the new economy?
I can’t tell you. I’m not a Republican so I don’t believe that “the market” magically and invisibly tells you which schools are doing it best based on which students are getting the highest paying jobs. We’ve made a list that tells you that Stanford Law School is the best school. The other list will tell you that SLS is #2. A legal employer will go to Stanford and hire all the lawyers it can. Does that mean Stanford has cracked the code on preparing Millennials for the 21st Century legal market? Or are we locked in a Kafkaesque loop where Stanford’s rep begets Stanford’s employment success which begets Stanford’s rep?
It’s a problem for every ranking: you never really know if your list is prescriptive or descriptive. But given how Millennials are changing the workplace, it makes sense to me that there will be some schools who are doing it right that we undervalue, while there will be other schools who are doing it all wrong that the market will overvalue based on past reputation.
As always, use our rankings responsibly. It’s just a list, it’s not an answer.
Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.
