University Of Chicago, Cornell Law Schools To Continue With U.S. News Rankings

The law schools of the University of Chicago and Cornell University have announced their intention to continue participating in the U.S. News & World Report rankings, despite the recent departures of Yale, Harvard and other top law schools.

In a message to current students, University of Chicago Law School Dean Thomas J. Miles said that while “the essential features” of his institution are not captured in any ranking, most of the data supplied to U.S. News was already public and the rest of the information “we have no reason to withhold.”

“The rankings of academic institutions clearly have a readership, and we wish to prevent the use of inaccurate information,” Miles said.

Similarly, in a statement, Cornell Law School Dean Jens David Ohlin voiced similar sentiment.

“U.S. News has said it will continue to rank all law schools regardless of their level of participation,” Ohlin said, adding that “all law schools are already required to report most of the relevant data used in the rankings to the American Bar Association, and this information is publicly available by ABA rule.”

Indeed, U.S. News & World Report said in an article it will continue to rank “the nearly 200” fully accredited law schools, regardless of whether schools agree to participate in the process.

“U.S. News has a responsibility to prospective students to provide comparative information that allows them to assess these institutions,” the article stated. “U.S. News will therefore continue to rank the nearly 200 accredited law schools in the United States.”

Cornell’s Ohlin said in his statement that law schools must report to the ABA details about the LSAT, GPA, acceptance rate, yield, average financial aid package, bar passage rates and career outcomes, among other items.

While he believed “rankings distort academic decision-making … and create perverse incentives that are not in the best interests of students or the legal profession,” U.S. News already has “ready access to information from the ABA and other public sources to construct their rankings.”

“Fundamentally, a ranking of schools is an opinion,” said University of Chicago’s Miles in his statement. “A ranking is the product of innumerable and contestable design choices. As our University is dedicated to the free expression of ideas and to questioning viewpoints, our aim is not to suppress opinions.”

After Yale Law School left the U.S. News rankings on November 16 over methodology, a number of other highly-rated law schools, including Harvard, Columbia and Georgetown, withdrew as well. One of the key reasons given by the law schools for the departures was how rankings work against institutional commitments to support diversity and public interest work.

Several other law schools – UCLA, UC Davis and UC Irvine among them – also followed suit.