Long Live U.S. News

Brian Frye has posted a recent essay entitled, "The Gray Lady's Guide to Legal Education." Here's the abstract:

For better or worse, the U.S. News & World Report law school ranking has dominated legal education for decades, by giving prospective law students information about the relative prestige of law schools. But in recent years, it has become largely irrelevant, as prospective law students have begun to look elsewhere when deciding which law school to attend. Apparently, we need a new law school ranking to provide useful information about prestige. This essay provides such a ranking.

Frye briefly summarizes the history of the U.S. News rankings, their trend toward fluctuation, and growing irrelevance. Sophisticated readers will find much to enjoy in this discussion.

Like all good attorneys (and a few law professors), Frye doesn't stop with identifying a problem. He also presents a solution: rank law schools using the "NYT ranking" instead. What does this mean?

The methodology of the NYT ranking is simple, but elegant. I created a list of 196 United States law schools by copying it from the U.S. News & World Report “Best Law Schools” 2024 ranking. I then searched for the official name of each law school in the New York Times archive and recorded how many times the law school had been mentioned by name in the past 12 months. I then ranked all 196 law schools according to the number of times they were mentioned by the New York Times in the last 12 months. The law school with the highest number of mentions was ranked number one, the law schools with no mentions were ranked last, and the rest of the law schools came in between.

Frye goes on to address and dismiss potential objections and concerns with the method--including worries over typos (won't happen / if so, disrespectful), bad publicity (doesn't exist), and regional bias (the NYT is Everyone's Paper). Plus, Frye notes the comparative benefits of the NYT ranking, as it is "much funnier than other law school ranking methodologies." Count me convinced!

But Frye goes even further, comparing his present project to the task of "writ[ing] the New York Times obituary for the U.S. News law school rankings." Frye concludes that U.S. News "must cede the vessel to another"--the New York Times.

Here, I think, Frye goes too far (something he's never done before).

Frye's "Conclusion" section is followed by a further section (which Frye should probably label an "Appendix" if he wants to appeal to the fancier publications), entitled "The New York Times 'Best Law Schools' 2024 Rankings." Here, Frye lays out the New York Times rankings for all to see. 

In doing so, though, Frye reveals that a ranking system is an idea that must ultimately be expressed in some visual form--typically a list. And in laying out the list for readers, one faces the question: how to display those schools that end up tying in the rankings? In the list, one school must still come first, and one must come last. As the overall list corresponds to the ranking system, a physically higher placement among tied entries leads to the appearance of more prestige, even if this prestige is simply illusory. But for readers in a busy world increasingly dominated by images, video, and charts rather than dense text, illusory prestige is the coin of the realm.

As it turns out, ties pervade the NYT rankings. Five schools are tied in 18th place, eight in 24th, 10(?) in 32nd, 17 in 42nd, 44 at 59th, and 94(!) at 103rd. This leaves a lot of schools to list, despite having the same ranking.

And how does the New York Times rankings proceed to list these tied entries? By resorting to the very thing this list was supposed to replace--if not actively destroy: the U.S. News Rankings of each of the tied institutions.

One could have resorted to all manner of alternate ordering mechanisms. Perhaps list tied schools in alphabetical order--resulting in dramatic movement for schools like Ave Maria and Appalachian School of Law. Perhaps use Excel's random-number function to change the ordering each year, giving Microsoft a well-deserved, outsized influence in law schools' prestige appearances. Perhaps one can write the names of law schools onto a set of uniform balls that are deposited in a box and drawn out by lot.

But by listing tied schools in order of their U.S. News rankings, the NYT ranking list perpetuates that which it was meant to replace, as schools with higher U.S. News rankings appear higher--sometimes much higher--on the list than their purportedly equally ranked counterparts. The result is a blow to the appearance of prestige that corresponds to U.S. News rankings, bringing us back to a situation not unlike the status quo. The U.S. News rankings are dead. Long live U.S. News.

To be sure, there are plenty of fixes for those who wish to see U.S. News truly buried. I've listed a few above--though one must not count out the addition of a secondary set of tie-breaking newspaper references to add onto New York Times references. I think the San Antonio Express News is a good choice, as it adds geographic and political diversity to the list.