gregh  2008-03-28 11:59  Law_School  law_school_rankings  usf   

On our class mailing list, a correspondent responded to the news of our decline in the rankings like this:

WTF. We have the 4th highest bar passage rate in California...

Bar passage rate doesn't really matter. In effect, all that matters is that your graduates are employed -- not that they can practice -- and that your name resonates with those answering surveys about 200 law schools spread throughout the country. (Wait and see. UC Irvine will have sky-high reputation rankings as soon as US News includes them, even though they will have little academic output and respondents will have little if any exposure to their grads.)

Bar passage rate is a minuscule part (2%) of the ranking index. What's more, the data that US News uses lags, so our numbers wouldn't be affected by last year's bar passage rate, which may have been anomalous, in any case. The largest component of the ranking index is the so-called "quality assessment," which is based on the surveys sent to law school deans, professors, judges, and practitioners. We don't do particularly well on that front, and that certainly impacts our ranking. I haven't seen the actual numbers, but I've read some reports that suggest our reputation score dropped, while Santa Clara's climbed, which explains why they jumped way up while we fell.

Unfortunately, the reputation numbers -- despite what US News claims -- appear to be readily swayed by marketing, the "law porn" that is sent out. After reputation, placement statistics come into play. We've had enough churn in the administrative side of the school that there are lots of things that can explain what happened, both in marketing and in collecting and reporting placement stats.

Fortunately, it doesn't really matter. Reputation informs the rankings in the short term, but the rankings are only going to inform reputation in the long term, as churn in the legal community from those obsessed by the rankings go into the world with their notions of who's good and who's bad. Whatever reputation we had yesterday is likely to be the reputation we'll have as we go off into the community. (Of course, it also makes it very difficult and expensive to increase reputation score.)