Harvard and Yale Law Schools Withdraw from U.S. News Rankings
Both Harvard and Yale Law Schools announced that they will no longer be participating in the U.S. News and World Report’s rankings, saying the ranking discourages support for low-income students and public-interest careers.
“Selectivity is a proxy of student excellence,” U.S. News & World Report says on its methodology page. According to Yale Law School Dean Gerken, “With 20% of the overall ranking score based on median LSAT or GRE test scores and undergraduate grade-point averages…the ranking…hurts schools that want to admit promising students who couldn’t afford test-prep courses and rewards schools that give millions in scholarships to students with the best scores, not the most financial need.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, HLS Dean Manning said that HLS ”had been deliberating the move for several months” and that “a student-debt metric the rankings adopted a few years ago may reward schools that offer generous financial aid, but could also lead schools to admit more well-off students who don’t need to borrow.”
Adding to the issues, Ms. Gerken said “U.S. News appeared to classify graduates as unemployed if they had school-funded fellowships to take jobs in public-interest fields, or if they went on to enroll in a Ph.D. program or other graduate school. She said the ranking also doesn’t give schools credit for having generous loan-forgiveness programs, which can erase students’ debt loads.”
Read Coverage: NYT, WSJ, Crimson
Related:
Why Elite Law and Medical Schools Can’t Stand U.S. News (WSJ, 2/28/23)
U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona Criticizes U.S. News Rankings at Harvard Law School Conference.(Crimson, 3/3/23)
Cornell, University of Chicago law schools stick with U.S. News rankings (Higher Ed Dive, 11/29/22)
Has college rank exodus begun? (The Hill, 11/21/22)
Stanford, Michigan, Duke, Northwestern law schools join wave swearing off U.S. News rankings (Higher Ed Dive, 11/21/22)
Harvard and Yale Law Schools Unrank Themselves (WSJ, 11/18/22)
