Otherwise Occupied - law_school_rankings

Because bar passage rate doesn't matter.

gregh — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 13:59:04 -0600

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.)

How do you decrease your law school's ranking?

gregh — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 00:57:29 -0600

I don't know exactly. But it's clear -- it actually is very clear looking at the methodology -- that increasing bar passage rate isn't much help. Of the USF-competitive California schools, Santa Clara up, USD down but still T2, McGeorge up, and Pepperdine way up.

Leiter asks that bloggers not reveal actual rankings. Not hard to do when you're posting about a school that's unranked, as it fell back into T3.

See here.

There are many possible reasons for this to happen. When KU plunged several years ago, the fingers were pointed at the changing of the guard at career services; we've had similar changes at USF. However, it's really the reputation numbers that can be painful, and they're the most meaningful. After all, they reflect what drives employers to USF (or affect employers who post that, even with years of experience, you must come from a top-ranked law school.) And that just keeps cycling, as future reputation is driven both by those who enter the profession and the lingering shadows of past reputations.

Oh well.

TTT parking?

gregh — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 11:49:44 -0600

Yesterday morning while going into work, I noticed a sign around a block from Piedmont and Bancroft. For those unaware, Boalt Hall's just a hop, skip, and a jump down Bancroft off of Piedmont. The sign? "TTT Parking" and an arrow pointing ahead.

Now, I know Boalt's dean has been asking the state to allow them to collect more money, along with other requests for funding changes. However, I had no idea just how bad things had become.