Bill Henderson & Andrew Morriss put the US News & World rankings in the right context, then provide hard data and common sense

In the past few years, it's been exciting to see the recent empirical work being done on the profession, and it's not surprising that once again Bill Henderson and Andrew Morriss bring us common sense and hard data -- this time about rankings and how to choose law schools.

Comments

[Mark]

Some people say that law school closes no doors, but only opens them. The truth of the matter is though that the stagering economic debt leaves a person in the precarious situation where so many of these open doors are precluded from being viable career options.

I'd like to propose an end to the current tier system. It seems that by categorizing the schools into these tiers places them in like company. From the article presented here and its attached tables, it seems pretty clear that once you get beyond the first 15 schools, that there is a massive drop off in the chances for NLJ 250 employment. Yet, by classifying all of the first 50 schools in one tier it presents the impression that they are equivalent, in terms of employment at NLJ 250 firms upon graduation. Perhaps a reclassification of the tiers to keep these schools seperate at the top, as a distinct unit, would be a helpful guide to the prospective student.

Many the law student I have met made the choice between their preferred schools depending on where they fell on one side or another of that seperating line at 50. Tier one or tier two. With the US Weekly World News and their multiple 8 way ties, a few numbers on the chart may not make that big of a difference to a prospective student, but a seperation of tier on and tier 2 or tier 2 and tier 3, etc, is a much more significant factor in a student's mind.

While the article does talk to some degree about leveraging above average scores into tuition discounts "the numbers (LSATs and undergraduate GPAs) that will get someone admitted to an Ivy-League school with $120,000 in debt can get the same person a free ride at one of the Tier 1 schools in the table." With law school as a vague backup for people with philosophy degrees or politial science majors, it is asking an awful lot of students to sacrifice prospects of big dollar salaries. However, such request is precisely the kind of thing that students need to be made aware of these days.