Corporate Governance

US News and a Change in the Formula for Law School Rankings: Part Time v. Full Time Students (Part 1)

By J. Robert Brown

While we typically focus on issues of corporate governance, we are also tangentially interested in law school rankings.  An example can be found in the paper, Of Empires, Independents, and Captives: Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings.  The paper makes the case that blogging by law faculty can positively impact rankings, particularly for law schools outside the top tier.

Law schools are uniquely dependent upon the annual rankings published by the US News and World Report.  In part it is because of the monopoly effect of the rankings.  While others have tried, there is essentially no other widely used system of rankings for law schools.  For all of its faults, therefore, US News is largely the only game in town. 

US News mostly relies for the rankings on data submitted by laws schools to the ABA (although the largest component, reputation, accounting for 40% of the formula, comes from a survey distributed by the magazine).  Nonetheless, US News periodically tinkers with the formula, something that can have an enormous impact on a law school's rankings.  With respect to next year, US News is at it again. 

US News is suggesting that it will change the formula for ranking law schools (as it does from time to time).  Under the current system, 22.5% of the rankings are based upon the median LSAT and undergraduate GPA of the full time students matriculating at each law school.  How important are these numbers to overall rankings?  A study done in 1998 concluded that "90% of the overall differences in ranks among schools can be explained solely by the median LSAT score of their entering classes."  Klein & Hamilton, The Validity of the US News and World Report Ranking of ABA Law Schools. 

The calculation of median LSAT, however, excludes part time students, mostly those associated with a law school's evening division (although some apparently have part time day programs).  The exclusion provides an opportunity for gaming the system.  Full time divisions can be reduced in size, with a concomitant improvement in median LSAT scores, and the revenues foregone made up by increasing the size of the part time (evening) division.  The result would be a higher median reported to US News and a higher ranking.  Some have noted this phenomena and concluded that it works.  See William D. Henderson & Andrew P. Morriss, Student Quality as Measured by LSAT Scores: Migration Patterns in the U.S. News Rankings Era, 81 Ind. L.J. 163 (Winter 2006). 

The proposed change at US News would do away with this discrepancy and base the median on all students, part time and full time.  The proposed change has produced a deluge of comments, many negative.  As the blog at US News summarized:

• Some people -- including Brian Leiter --- have argued that if U.S. News combines the scores for all entering students, regardless of the part-time or full-time status?it could reduce the options for certain types of students to go to law school. These critics say that some law schools would de-emphasize their part-time programs to maintain their position in the rankings. Some law school deans (and others on the blog) have written me and said that their part-time programs are truly separate and serve working adults who can?t afford to go full time. Others say that those enrolled in part-time programs come disproportionately from minority populations; a reduction in part-time programs thus would also diminish racial diversity in the law school student body. These people state that by including part-time student data in our student selectivity factors, U.S. News would be doing more harm that good: We would curb the gaming of admission data, but actual students could get hurt in the process.

The proposed change has generated a considerable amount of commentary from the online community, with most crtical  (see the comments of Dean Gary Simpson of Case Western, Dan Solove at Concurring Opinions and Bill Araiza at Prawfsblog), some more equivocal (see the comments of Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors), and some containing personal observations (see Christine Hurt at  The Conglomerate).  It has caused a renewed discussion about the benefit/harm of the rankings by US News (see Brian Leiter on one hand and Larry Ribstein on the other).

Nonetheless, the US News Blog suggests that the change will be made.  As the Blog again pointed out:

• In any case, aren't law schools the sum of all their students (full-time, part-time, and transfer), and shouldn't the profile of the entire law school be the basis under which ranking comparisons are made? It should be noted that part-time student data are included in computing all the other variables (expenditures per students, student-faculty ratios, employment rates, and bar-pass rates) in the U.S. News law school rankings that involve statistical data.

Moreover, frankly, US News has business reasons for wanting the change the formula.  If the formula did not change and rankings remained fairly stable, there would be less interest when the new edition comes out.  If this change goes into effect, there is no doubt that the interest in the new rankings when they come out in April 2009 will be increased (and no doubt improve magazine sales).  Whatever the merits, we thought it would be an interesting exercise to examine the schools that have part time divisions to assess the impact of the change.  We will do so in the next post.  The data is reported to the ABA and publicly available. 

By the way, for the law schools in the top 100, we have the data on the differences in the median LSAT scores for full and part time programs and the number of students as a percentage of the day division that each part time program accepts.  If you want a the data, it will be sent gratis to anyone who writes a comment on this series and asks for the data.  

Full post as published by The Race to the Bottom on July 28, 2008 (boomark / email).