Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder’s new book, “Engines of Anxiety,” explains how law schools try to game the U.S. News & World Report’s academic rankings to attract students. I interviewed them by email to understand why these rankings are so important, and what law schools do to try to improve their rating.
HF — Your book looks at the crucial role that the U.S. News & World Report rankings play in shaping law schools. Why did these rankings come to be so important and how are they calculated?
WNE & MS — The emergence of rankings stemmed from their appeal to prospective students and their parents. The accessible comparative information provided by U.S. News was particularly valuable at a time when higher education was becoming more accessible, more people were going to college, and as students increasingly looked beyond their local or regional schools when considering their college choices.
The USN law school ranking is based on an algorithm composed of four composite factors: reputation (based on surveys of administrators and practitioners), selectivity, placement and faculty resources. While the general structure of the formula has stayed the same over the past 20 years, USN has made tweaks when it believed it could improve the formula or to discourage certain types of gaming strategies.
HF — Most law school deans seem to detest these rankings — you quote one who compares the rankings to a cockroach infestation, and another who wishes that al-Qaeda would go after U.S. News. Why do deans pay so much attention to the rankings if they hate them so much?
WNE & MS — The primary reason most deans pay attention to the rankings is that there are a number of external audiences — prospective students, current students, employers, boards of trustees — who either take the rankings at face value or use them to make decisions. Deans believe that rankings (no matter how questionable their methodology) can have real effects on their school as these external audiences decide where to go to school or whom to hire based on them. Many deans also fear losing their jobs if they don’t produce good numbers. This fear is warranted, given the number of deans and administrators who have lost their jobs as a result of not meeting expectations in the rankings.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.
- Publication Type:Other Writing
- Publication Date:11/28/2016