I occasionally hear stories of law schools cooking the numbers that they submit to U.S. News in order to improve their rankings. The New York Times had a story on this last year, and bloggers such as Brian Leiter occasionally have touched on the question. But I’m sure there are lots of other examples. If you know of any particularly egregious cases that haven’t been covered elsewhere already, please consider sending me an e-mail with the details (okerr (at) law.gwu.edu) or leaving a comment (anonymous or not) to this post.
Oh, and this isn’t for anything in particular. I’m just interested in getting an idea of some of the techniques schools use.
In 2004, Tulane University law school was ranked 56th. This caused a panic because for the first time ever Tulane was not ranked as a top 50 school.
In 2005, Tulane made one of the biggest jumps in the U.S. News rankings, skyrocketing from 56th to 41st. A 15 spot jump.
The reason?. . .
The law school dean decided to keep better track of whether students got jobs after graduation. 14% of the U.S. News ranking comes from job placement after graduation. Turns out that the more students you know have jobs after graduation, the more you can report have jobs after graduation.
Is this dishonest? No. Silly gamesmanship foisted upon us by U.S. News? Yes.
[OK Comments: It's not "cooking the books" to report information accurately. The more interesting story is the schools that don't report the numbers accurately, but rather puff the numbers by coming up with very creative ways of saying that almost everyone has a job.]
Penn seems to be cooking the books with employment numbers. They include categories like “Not pursuing employment upon graduation” and, more creatively, “Studying for the bar full time” in their employment statistics to get to their 99.2% employment (2 of the class of 314 are excluded altogether). It seems like they’ve gotten more honest, though, as last year I remember them reporting 100% employment–the only school to do so. Including the students not seeking employment, studying for the bar, and not reported, it would bring its percentage down 4 percentage points to 95.2%, the second lowest in the top 10.
http://www.law.upenn.edu/cpp/prospective/statistics.html
“Including the students not seeking employment, studying for the bar, and not reported, it would bring its percentage down 4 percentage points to 95.2%, the second lowest in the top 10.”
Umm, how is that gaming the system when *every single school* has people like that?
# not seeking employment, from the ABA Guide:
Harvard – 5
Yale – 0
Stanford – 2
NYU – 11
Columbia – 1
Chicago – 5
Cornell – 0
Michigan – 10
Northwestern – 1
Georgetown – 38
Virginia – 6
Boalt – 8
Duke – 2
Given those #s, Penn isn’t exactly out of place with 3. If this is “gaming” (which I don’t think it is) then every school outside of Yale and Cornell is guilty of it.
I think that what bothers Prof. Leiter and others more is schools changing their admission practices to manipulate the statistics. It’s not that they’re making numbers up.
For example, many “top” schools have recently begun waitlisting students that they would accept in other years, for fear that they will lose those students to other schools (i.e. if Michigan likes your application, but thinks that you’re *too* good and likely to end up at Yale, they’ll waitlist you and wait for a response). The result is that the schools boost their rankings by having a higher ratio of admission offers to matriculations.
Another thing that gets reported a lot is law schools giving unemployed recent graduates placeholder jobs, where they work 20 hours a week doing clerical stuff at the school so that they can be counted as “employed at graduation.”
I’m not sure on which side of the line these practices fall between accurate reporting and “cooking the books,” but both practices strike me as less than honest.
One professor who hinted that he was a bit of an expert on cooking the U.S. News books gave me one example – schools might try to attract many visiting professors during the fall semester, only to let large numbers of its own professors visit elsewhere in the spring. Apparently, at the time this story was told to me, the survey only counted heads during the Fall, so this would pump up the faculty-to-student ratio.
If true, this strikes me as particularly eggregious, since the students would tend to get the shaft when it came to spring semester course selection.
Consider NOT including the LSAT/GPA of part-time/evening division students in the calculation. Then RAMMING applicants who don’t wuite make teh numbers for the day program into the night program, only to let them freely trasfer back to the day program after first year by taking a summer class or two (over half of all evening students do this), and graduating in three years overall.
I have heard a persistent rumor that Northwestern has a tacit policy of hiring up its graduates for various assistant-type positions, in order to tweak its employment-on-graduation numbers. Does that count as “cooking the books?”
One easy scam–I don’t know how common it is–is for the law school to “hire” as research assistants or what-have-you’s–creative titles vary–students who have failed to get real jobs, so that it falsely appears that all graduates, or seemingly all graduates, got real jobs. Emory Law School used this practice from 2001 forward, though I don’t know whether it was used in ’05.
When I was applying to law school Cornell was notorious on the applicant bulletin boards for rejecting “overqualified” applicants who they didn’t expect to actually attend. It happened to me: my stats were well over Cornell’s averages, and I got a letter inviting me to interview. Reports from others who had gone through the same thing said the interview was all about how much you actually wanted to go to Cornell; if you expressed much interest, you were admitted. I thought the thing was kind of sleazy and didn’t really want to travel to Ithica, so I ignored the letter and was in due course rejected. (I don’t particularly blame them for rejecting me when I wouldn’t go through with the interview; I was just put off by the whole charade.)
One thing I’ve seen is that lots of schools offer fee waivers to students that they know they will reject in order to increase their number of applications/selectivity… If you look at lawschoolnumbers.com you’ll see lots of kids with 3.25/155 type numbers applying to top 15 schools because they were offered fee waivers… Of course they all get rejected…
Earlier this year, the new Assistant Dean of Admissions at Harvard Law held a student forum to discuss changes in the admissions process. There, he announced that he was going to start personally calling every student who had been selected for admission and giving them a phone interview before officially extending an offer of acceptance.
When he got a negative reaction from a number of students, he defended the plan by saying it would allow him to weed out people who weren’t really committed to choosing Harvard. I couldn’t believe he was openly admitting that he was going to reject qualified applicants solely because he believed that they might choose Yale or Stanford over Harvard.
This isn’t exactly on point, but perhaps interesting nonetheless: http://www.withoutbound.net/blog/2006/04/26/how-embarrassing/