How to Choose a Law School: Rankings

One of the biggest factors law school applicants use in choosing a law school is its US News & World Report ranking. In this posting, I’ll discuss how this variable might rationally play into your decision to choose one law school over another. The question requires more complex analysis than might appear at first blush.

The rankings have been subjected to criticism ever since they began and, like all rankings, have inherent imperfections. I don’t propose here to criticize them, or to disregard them. In some respects, they are reasonable proxies for law school quality (depending of course on what you mean by quality). And, perhaps even more important, they are the most widely used metric by which prospective students choose law schools. Simply put, the rankings matter.

But it’s not enough to stop here. The question remains to be asked how to use the rankings. At first blush, one might think an ordinal ranking to be the appropriate way to choose. If you get into #1, go to #1. If you get in to #2, go there, and so forth. But remember that there are 188 ranked law schools in the United States and, as someone who has participated in the rankings, I can tell you that it is impossible to know enough about all of them to rank them intelligently. In my own completion of the rankings survey (which forms part of the reputational ranking indicator), I simply abstained from ranking the vast majority of law schools because I couldn’t in good faith assign a number. My guess is that most deans, academics, lawyers, and judges chosen to participate in the rankings make the same good faith decision. So, at least as to reputation, which forms about 40% of the total rankings score, relatively few people are ranking relatively few schools.

There are other factors that go into the rankings. Median GPA and LSAT scores tell you something about the relative quality of your classmates, at least as numbers. (Please recall that in my last posting, I noted that numbers are only one small indicia of the kind of person you are and lawyer you will be. That is why we at Case Western Reserve offer interviews to each of our applicants.) Expenditures per student matter, but that doesn’t tell you very much. A law school could be spending heavily but inefficiently, while a school that appears more penurious actually may be using its resources very efficiently and socking away some money to ensure a stable future.

Be all this as it may, we still have to figure out how to use the rankings as they are presented, for ultimately it is the overall ranking of a school that gets your attention. And using the rankings ties back into my last posting on how to get in to law school. An applicant with a very high LSAT and GPA might only concentrate on the top ten schools. As one drops in either or both LSAT score and GPA, those schools become beyond reach. That leaves more than 175 schools from which to choose. How do you do it?

I would suggest grouping law schools. The top ten or twelve schools are largely interchangeable in terms of quality and career prospects (although faculty at those schools might hotly debate this point). The next ten or so schools are the same. For what it’s worth, in my opinion, once you get to the 30th ranked school, the forty or so following are in many ways competitive with one another in terms of their ability to provide a quality legal education and good job prospects. And their quality is consistently high. Just as one metric, the difference in reputation ranking by academics between the average of those schools ranked #30 and those ranked #67 (the rankings then jump to #71) is .81 on a 5.0 scale. This is not much of a quality distinction at all.

So it’s apparent that all of these schools have excellent faculty. But there’s more to the analysis. That bundle of schools includes some with a distinctly local influence and some with a more national outreach. At Case Western Reserve (#61), for example, almost two-thirds of our alumni practice outside Ohio and throughout the United States and the world, with our heaviest concentrations in Washington, D.C., New York, Chicago, and on the West Coast.  (This is almost twice the national average of law schools in terms of out -of-state placement.) This doesn’t make one school necessarily better than the others. It does suggest that, at least as a statistical matter, your choice of school has the potential to limit or expand your opportunity set. So, in looking at schools in this bandwidth, ask questions of their career services office about where the school’s alumni body lives and works.

But it’s not just about job placement (although that’s certainly important). A very important factor is what the school has to offer you. I have heard legal education in this group of schools described as a “commodity,” but nothing could be further from the truth. Some schools may indeed provide a basic legal education that is consistently good among all areas of study, but others are known for particular specialties, programs, or ways of thinking. Again, disposition and taste matter a lot. At my own Case Western Reserve, our most distinguished specialties are in experiential education (teaching you the skills of lawyering), international law (one of our faculty members and the center he runs was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize), the first (and one of the best) law and medicine centers in the country, our robust intellectual property program (organized in our Center for Law, Technology, and the Arts), and a burgeoning business law program. Like all law schools, we do other things very, very well. But we, like some others, have our areas of special renown.

Another consideration is whether the school is state or private, and where it is located (city or rural). Of the 41 schools ranked between #30 and #70, 20 are private, 21 are state, and 13 (based on my own assessment) either are rural or in small cities. State versus private is a real issue, especially these days. State schools have the advantage of lower tuition. But most states have severely cut their education budgets, and law schools tend not to be on top of the funding priorities list. If you choose a state school, choose it carefully to be sure that it has other sources of funding so that you can assess the level of resources that are being, and are likely to be, devoted to your education. Private schools are more expensive. But while private schools, like state schools, rely heavily on tuition revenue, the better private schools have spent years building their endowments and annual giving base in order to ensure that funds to maintain top-quality educational programs are available in good years and bad. (Again, as an example I know best, Case Western Reserve’s School of Law receives 20% of its annual revenue from income on our endowment. That gives us a margin of safety in years where enrollment might be constrained because of market forces or our own choices). You can’t necessarily see the books of a private law school. But you can ask questions about its financing model and fundraising success that might make you more or less comfortable with paying the higher tuition. You are, after all, making an investment that will be with you for your life.

Urban versus rural is also a factor. Urban schools are likely to provide a greater array of externship opportunities, internships during the school year and summers, and access to legal employers. Rural schools or schools in smaller cities create fewer distractions to take you away from your studies. And, again, if you know where you want to live, the rural versus urban decision might be easy to make.

You might wonder how important rankings are to employers once you get past the top twenty or so law schools, at least up to a point (which I have, not entirely arbitrarily, cut off in this posting at #70). The answer, from what I have so far written, should be clear – not a lot. The largest law firms in the country might focus on graduates of the top ten or twenty schools. Beyond that, my experience is that employers look to see that the student has attended an excellent school (of which there are many), has done reasonably well, and brings something special to the table (hence my point about attention to specialty programs, law school character, etc.) Since most large firms now have branches in most major cities, the chances of being hired by the local branch (local to your school) of a large law firm are, as a general matter, probably better, than being hired at New York or LA headquarters if you go to school out-of-town and haven’t lived in those cities. If a large-firm job is your aspiration, it pays to be in a city in which there are relatively few law schools and many large legal employers. The fact that this happens to describe Cleveland should not detract from the validity of the point.

All of this is to say that the distinctions among the quality of schools in the #30-#70 bandwidth are very fine-grained. You’ll have to do some work beyond the numbers to determine which school is right for you.

In my next posting, I’ll talk about how to evaluate competing financial aid offers. As should be obvious, that discussion depends heavily on your initial assessment of the best law school for you.