4 Big Problems With The Above The Law Law School Rankings

It took a bit longer than usual, but the Above the Law Top 50 Law Schools rankings are here. For the unfamiliar, we rank law schools a little differently than the folks over at that place that used to be a news magazine but now exclusively sells rankings. Instead of rewarding schools for cornering the market on high LSATs and sterling GPAs — the inputs — we credit schools for landing graduates in jobs as affordably as possible — the outputs.

It’s a good ranking, and it helps prospective law students see that there are schools that might just provide more bang for the buck.

But that doesn’t mean the rankings are perfect. Here are a few big problems we’ve got with our own rankings.

1. Jobs Aren’t The Same As Salary

Am I salty to see NYU fall out of the top ten of a law school ranking? Probably.

Over the years of putting out this ranking, both Columbia and NYU have fared poorly because they’re more costly than the competition. It’s more expensive to live in Manhattan than it is in St. Louis. There’s not much anyone can do about that. So watching the elite NYC schools clock in toward the bottom of the top 10 was an outcome we accepted because any student looking to get the best deal probably would be marginally better off going to Chicago than Columbia.

But when elite programs fall out of the top ten entirely, there’s something wrong. Personally, I blame the formula we use for calculating the debt to job figure.

It’s critical to us that our rankings take into account all law school outcomes and part of that is the ratio of debt to the likelihood the diploma is going to land the graduate a job. For the employment number we use the classic “full-time, long-term” statistic. That allows us to count having a real job in the legal industry as opposed to a J.D. Advantage^TM position as a barista in the law school coffee lounge.

We juice that with the quality jobs stat that privileges getting jobs at “the country’s largest and best-paying law firms” but all offices aren’t the same and some of the “largest” firms aren’t the “best-paying.”

A Columbia (#13) or NYU (#16) graduate is, most likely, walking into a $205K starting salary at a Manhattan Biglaw firm. An Alabama (#17) graduate might earn that too, but has a much higher likelihood of landing at an off-the-national scale firm, even if it’s a well-known and large regional player. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, and to some extent the lower cost of living in Birmingham smooths out the difference. But it’s still a distinction our rankings don’t quite reflect, bumping up the Tuscaloosa program for its lower tuition without crediting the kind of job the grad is getting on the other side.

Or take top 10 law school Washington University of St. Louis (#9). A WUSTL student is paying almost what Columbia and NYU are paying, but with a significant chance of ending up in St. Louis or Kansas City and, consequently, not on the national scale. Debt is debt no matter where you live and clocking the same tuition and coming out at 75 percent of the salary matters.

Or if you go to Yale (#6), how do we account for the fact that you’re not going to be a lawyer but a feared despot heading up a mid-sized island nation somewhere?

Is it really worth it to pay a little less to get a job paying substantially less? Maybe. But our rankings don’t help prospective students make that distinction.

2. Enough With The SCOTUS Clerks Already

Clerkships are an important career chit and should be considered in any outcome-based ranking of law schools. Currently, we only count clerks as part of the quality jobs stat in order to avoid dinging a school for graduates heading into clerkships instead of an associate job. That makes sense, but what doesn’t is lumping a career accelerant into a run-of-the mill gig.

But as much as we inappropriately downplay clerkships as a whole, we supercharge Supreme Court clerks for no particular reason.

Frankly, I think this is a vestigial feature from an earlier iteration of the rankings when some folks were disproportionately worried about the credibility of a ranking that didn’t put Yale and Harvard in the top handful of slots. A weird fear when the whole point of this ranking was to not present a carbon copy of more established ranking systems, but there you are.

If we were to divide the current 5 percent accounting for SCOTUS clerkships to provide, maybe a 4 percent boost for graduates earning federal clerkships of any stripe and then maybe giving Supreme Court clerks an extra 1 percent accounting it would be a lot better.

Because Supreme Court clerkships do matter to the extent they provide access to Triforce, but they’re also not something that 99 percent of prospective law students will be considering in making a decision. Let’s give the whole panoply of clerkships their due — at least for this calculation even though we’re increasingly seeing savvier folks discriminating about suspect clerkships — and reduce the SCOTUS role to a peppercorn of an enhancement.

3. Judging A Career On… Federal Judgeships?

There’s a stat in there designed to reflect long-term career prospects. And that stat is… federal judgeships?

I guess the last four years proved that in the right circumstances just about anyone can earn a lifetime appointment. But in times of marginally responsible government, these positions will be few and far between and hyperprivilege the elite schools and the flagship schools of a given state. And — working in concert with tuition — that’s why there’s an abundance of land grant university law schools on here.

But most lawyers are going pro in something other than the federal bench.

How many graduates secure partnership? Become general counsel? Earn a full professorship? And among all those, how profitable/prestigious are those gigs.

Maybe federal judgeships are meant to be a rough proxy for all long-term success, but it seems like a stretch.

4. Too Much Volatility

A ranking that keeps the same 14 schools at the top for decades may be boring, but it’s also a mark of credibility. Not a single school in this year’s rankings is in the same place it was the last time we did this. There are schools up 12 and down 16. No one in top 5 has kept their spot the following year since 2017 — and even then only number 5 stayed in the same place.

Law school quality isn’t really turning on a dime year after year so rankings really shouldn’t feature a lot of wild swings. Moreover, as a tool for making long-term life choices, it’s not particularly helpful to know that the top school when you enter school might be the 10th by 2L and somewhere else entirely by the time you’re interviewing.

A savvy student can take a longer view with our rankings and compare the last several years to divine some trends, but ideally they shouldn’t have to do more work to decipher a ranking.

I don’t know what the answer is here. Maybe it’s elevating the tuition stat a bit because that tends to be “stickier” over the medium-term?

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Anyway, we’ve got rankings. And they’re good rankings. They give the prospective student a sense of the value proposition of law schools as opposed to how well the school has gamed the admissions process. To the extent schools can game the ATL formula, they can do so by making law school cheaper and getting students jobs and that’s… a totally acceptable outcome.

Just remember to take all rankings with an appropriate grain of salt.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.