There was little to no correlation between law schools' ranking changes and behaviour
US News & World Report’s annual law school ranking were found to have little impact on applicants, according to a study by two professors from the University of Kentucky and Indiana University, as reported in an article by Reuters.
Law professors Brian Frye from University of Kentucky and Christopher Ryan from Indiana University’s study titled “The Decline and the Fall of the US News Rankings” found that there was little to no correlation between a law school’s change in its rankings and the behaviour of those that were applying.
The rise of a law school’s rankings did not invite stronger classes and those whose rankings fell did not take in a class that was considerably weaker.
“In a nutshell, our study shows that the U.S. News law school rankings have been largely irrelevant to prospective law students for a decade, and have recently become entirely irrelevant,” the law professors said in their study.
According to a spokesperson from US News, its admission officers have said that the rankings affected the applications and that it should be a factor that applicants considered when it comes to which law school they chose to attend.
The study furthered found that there were weak positive correlations between the changes in the Law School Admission Test scores and the undergraduate grade-point averages of students who enrolled after a law school’s ranking either rose or fell.
In order to gather the data, Frye and Ryan tracked the changes to the US News rankings of the 197 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association over the last 10 years and examined the activity of the academic credentials of entering classes in line with the ranking of a law school in the previous year.
“[The study] suggests that law schools can safely stop paying attention to the U.S. News rankings, because their customers don’t care,” said Frye and Ryan in the report.
