Each year, U.S. News & World Report releases a barrage of rankings for colleges and universities. This year, there have been significant disruptions in the media company’s publication of the rankings, especially in the rankings for law schools.
After early copies of the latest graduate school rankings were released on April 11, U.S. News announced that it would release an updated list on April 18. That list’s updated release was postponed a second time to April 25.
U.S. News issued a statement on April 14 saying it was taking additional time to address an “unprecedented” number of inquiries from schools. Rankings for law schools and medical schools are scheduled for announcement today.
Last November, more than 40 law schools said they would no longer furnish U.S. News with internal data for its rankings, citing, among other issues, that the ranking methodology penalizes schools that support and promote careers in public service law and disincentivizes law schools from attracting students with broad qualities and experiences. At a conference at Harvard Law School on March 1, the U.S. Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, said, “It’s time to stop worshipping at the false altar of U.S. News & World Report.”
U.S. News said that it would continue to include schools that decided against supplying internal data in the rankings and would base the rankings on publicly available information, a decision that changes the manner in which rankings are achieved, sometimes with results that deviate wildly with past ranking trends.
In the law school rankings released today, for example, with the new algorithm, Boston University law school is ranked 27, dropping 10 spots. The University of Alabama law school dropped nine places to 35, while law schools such as the University of Kansas, Texas A & M University and Villanova University jumped 28, 17 and 13 positions, respectively.
On this year’s list of law school rankings from U.S. News, GW Law is ranked in a five-way tie at 35.
“GW Law is a better law school today than we have ever been,” Dean Dayna Bowen Matthew said. “We are attracting the best new scholars to continue our historical strength as a home for intellectual giants in the legal academy. Our students emerge from a D.C.-infused education that is guided by these engaged faculty, where renowned scholarship and classroom teaching are intertwined with outstanding experiential opportunities to prepare them to shape solutions to the pressing challenges of our times.”
Eric Gertler, CEO for U.S. News, told NPR the rankings help students compare schools, but acknowledged that by “no means do we believe that our rankings and the journalism that surrounds those rankings should be the sole resource. When students make this important decision, they should do as much research as possible.”
Angel Pérez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, told NPR he didn’t think a majority of students pay much attention to the rankings, though their parents might.
More and more people seem to be concluding that the rankings give too much weight to standardized test scores and not enough weight to financial aid. Schools are sent questionnaires asking about grade point averages, test scores and debt levels of their students, but these measures have been found to be biased toward greater wealth.
As Pérez and other experts acknowledge, ranking is a kind of shortcut for getting the message across of a school’s quality. The U.S. Department of Education maintains a college navigator website where people can find facts and data about colleges, and there are numerous other sources of information. But some of these tools require time and knowledge that wealthier families with greater familiarity with higher education will find easier to access.