Last week, Harvard Law School and Yale Law School co-hosted a conference to discuss “best practices for law school data.” This is in response to the current U.S. News rankings boycott, which has prompted law schools to consider alternative ways to provide data transparency to prospective students and the public. The event included representatives from more than 100 law schools, 30 graduate-level educational institutions, and the Department of Education.
U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, in a keynote address, expressed support for the boycott, noting that rankings systems can create perverse incentives for institutions. “Rankings discourage institutions with the largest endowments and greatest capacity to enroll and graduate more underserved students from doing so because it may hurt their selectivity,” he said. “Instead, the most life-changing higher education opportunities go to young people who already have every socioeconomic advantage.”
Secretary Cardona encouraged those in higher education to “set the agenda” rather than allowing U.S. News to do it for them. However, the intricacies of making data available to prospective students wishing to evaluate graduate options, proves complicated. Currently the ABA site does not allow for easy comparison between schools and other existing data sources, including Law School Transparency, XploreJD, and the Law School Admission Council, lack a desirable user experience for reviewing and comparing data.
Christopher Avery, a Harvard Kennedy School Professor with experience studying college ranking systems, noted that while transparency is critical, it is important to give careful consideration to what will be used as a replacement for the U.S. News ranking. He recommended against jumping from “one bad system” to “another system that may be bad in a wide variety of other ways.”
U.S. Under Secretary of Education James Kvaal also expressed a need to move with thoughtful consideration. He encouraged conference attendees to “not lose sight of why the rankings are important.” And, in an interview afterwards, Kvaal expressed an interest in working with the U.S. News to make the ratings more equitable. He noted that the Education Department has reached out to the organization with suggestions for improvement.