Dive Brief:
- Sociologists Wendy Espeland and Michael Sauder interviewed more than 200 law school admissions officers, deans and others for their new book, Engines of Anxiety: Academic Rankings, Reputation, and Accountability, finding significant efforts to game the U.S. News & World Report ranking system.
- Inside Higher Ed reports law schools routinely preference high LSAT scores above all other application elements because they count for 12.5% of the rank (and impact another 25% because of peer assessment), reducing black and Latino student enrollment and increasing non-need-based aid to wealthier white and Asian applicants.
- The pressure to improve a school's rank comes from deans, presidents and trustees, and career center directors told Espeland and Sauder they also do as much as they can to inflate job placement numbers, even if that means getting students into jobs that are a poor fit.
Dive Insight:
A number of major for-profit college chains have faced intense scrutiny of their job placement rates as federal agencies dig into the legality of their recruitment and marketing practices. Law school students graduating with a lot of debt and few job prospects have tried to sue their schools in the past, but the first case to actually go to trial is in California, where Anna Alaburda is suing the Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Like the accusations against for-profits, Alaburda says the job placements statistics were misleading.
What continues to be seen in analyses of rankings is their destructive power to control schools. When the U.S. news rankings debuted in 1983, administrators scoffed at the results and the methodology. But even as they continue to criticize the methods and the validity of the rankings, they also continue to play the game.