How Important Is A Law School's Ranking? On your list of ideal schools, does the rank of the school matter? Whenever I browse websites such as encarta.com or princetonreview.com, I always run into "The toughest schools to get into," "Best classroom experience," or "Best starting salaries." How credible are rankings? Although, it is the responsibility of the student to do the research and find a school that is best for him or her. However, I find that students want to go to the top laws--who wouldn't? Not only do students look at rankings to decide where to attend law school; in addition, employers also recruit potential employees from the top law schools, which make getting into the best laws even more competitive.
The competitiveness to get accepted into a top law is ridiculous with some schools accepting less than 10% of overall applications submitted. I find it tempting to research a school and then look at where it ranks according to; for example, U.S. News & World Report. Every year I look at the rankings and there is not much change especially in the top schools. Every year Princeton, Harvard, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, Berkeley, Stanford, Chicago University, and Northwestern University are examples of schools that always rank in the top 10-15%. How many people are planning to apply to any of these schools? Why? What are the reasons you chose these schools? Did the rank of the school play a major part?
Nancy Rapoport, former dean of University of Houston Law Center, resigned in 2006 when her school dropped five places. Previously the school rank 59th in 2004, 65th in 2005, then fell to 70th in 2006. She says that her resignation is not entirely a result of the ranking, but also internal problems. However, the fact that her school dropped to the 70th place, left her with no choice but to resign from her position.
Depending on where a school ranks can either make or break a law school's credibility. Therefore, law schools must struggle to raise their rank in order to gain credibility while appealing to prospective law students.
On Law.com there is an article about two law students who chose to attend schools that do not hold the highest rank. Both students did research beyond just looking at a school's rank. They researched the following areas: strong faculty, better clerkship placement, and better national-firm placement.
I advise everyone planning to apply to law school to definitely do some research on a law school beyond looking at a ranking system such as campus visits, talking with a current student, sitting in on a class, meeting a faculty member, finding out the student to faculty ratio, what percentage of students pass the bar examination--these are just a few suggestions. The purpose of me writing this article is to stress the importance of doing research before making a decision.
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1 comment:
Interesting post. Actually, though, I resigned because there was a small group of faculty members who used the rankings to whip some of the law students into a frenzy to increase the pressure on me. If several of the faculty members at UHLC had told that small group that such behavior wasn't appropriate--that faculty members shouldn't draw law students into their fight--I would have stayed on. Basically, I was tired of fighting for a sense of community that the majority of the faculty wasn't also willing to fight for, and I decided that I'd had enough. The good news is that I'm much happier where I am now, and I believe that UHLC is doing quite well with its present dean.
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