Two theories behind the sudden decision of many top law schools to withdraw from participating in the annual U.S. News ranking
On November 16, 2022, Yale Law School announced that it would no longer participate in U.S. News & World Report’s (U.S. News) annual law school ranking. A few hours later, Harvard Law School followed suit. In the following days, multiple prestigious law schools like Columbia and Stanford also withdrew their participation from the annual ranking. By mid-December, only two of the top 14 ranked law schools, the University of Chicago and Cornell, said they would continue to participate in the annual rankings.
Two major theories have been advanced to explain the sudden decision of so many top U.S. schools to withdraw from the annual ranking. The first theory, shared by the law schools themselves, states that the ranking formula disincentivizes schools from furthering diversity and public interest careers. The second theory has to do with affirmative action, anti-Asian discrimination, and the U.S. Supreme Court.
The first theory casts the decision to withdraw due to a disagreement between U.S. News and the schools. For example, Dean Heather Gerken of Yale Law School stated that “the U.S. News rankings are profoundly flawed—they disincentivize programs that support public interest careers, champion need-based aid, and welcome working-class students into the profession.” Likewise, Dean John Manning of Harvard Law School expressed his disagreement with U.S. News’ heavy weighting of LSAT and GPA scores, stating that “the U.S. News rankings have over the years created incentives for law schools to direct more financial aid toward applicants based on their LSAT scores and college GPAs without regard to their financial need.”
In response, U.S. News announced in early January 2023 that it would change its ranking formula. Going forward, assessment surveys from academics, lawyers, and judges would carry less weight, whereas bar exam passage, employment, and school-funded fellowships, which often serve as a launchpad for students seeking public interest careers, would be assigned more weight. Nevertheless, these changes have not convinced schools like Harvard and Yale to participate in the rankings again.
However, the reasons given by the law schools for withdrawing from the U.S. News ranking have left many unconvinced, particularly because these schools have a long history of participating in, and even boasting about, their high rankings. Additionally, nothing new has occurred with respect to the ranking formula that would trigger such a dramatic and speedy withdrawal of so many schools. Instead, multiple commentators have proposed a second theory that is very different from the law schools’ stated reasons, and instead involves two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
These two cases involve Asian American plaintiffs who are suing Harvard and the University of North Carolina for racial discrimination in admissions. They point to examples like Harvard’s own data showing that “Asian American applicants earned consistently lower ‘personal’ ratings from Harvard admissions officers than did applicants of other races despite earning consistently higher rankings for their academic records and tests scores.”
Indeed, anti-Asian discrimination in American university admissions has become so widespread that many admissions advisors, including large companies like the Princeton Review, tell Asian American students to actively downplay their heritage to increase their chances of admission.
If the Supreme Court rules in favour of the Asian American plaintiffs later this year, as many expect, Harvard, Yale, and most of the law schools which have withdrawn from participating in the ranking will no longer be allowed to allegedly discriminate against Asian American applicants in their admissions processes. This would likely result in an increase in Asian American enrollment at America’s top law schools, as Asian Americans, on average, have higher LSAT scores than other minority test-takers. If these schools want to continue to admit an artificially low number of Asian American students, the schools will likely have to lower their LSAT and GPA standards, and instead place much greater emphasis on subjective criteria like personal statements. For any law school, implementing these changes would almost certainly cause that school’s rating to drop significantly.
Thus, as Professor Dan Epps from Washington University in St. Louis hypothesized, “Yale is planning to significantly change its admissions strategy in the wake of the expected [U.S. Supreme Court] affirmative action decisions, and they are doing this proactively rather than dealing with any rankings implications later.”
Similarly, Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle wrote that while “[t]he schools cite only the highest motives…it’s impossible not to notice the timing,” referring to the court cases. Vivek Ramaswamy, an alumnus of Yale Law School, also wrote of his “strong suspicion that the factors behind it, and especially the curious timing of these decisions, is driven by preparation for the Supreme Court striking down affirmative action.”
As McArdle suggests, “[o]ne way to keep from being held accountable for discriminating against Asian students, or in favor of underrepresented minorities, is to down-weight or eliminate objective metrics such as test scores in favor of harder-to-compare criteria such as essays, interviews and recommendations. Since doing so would cause the schools to suffer in the U.S. News rankings, perhaps they’re preemptively taking their ball and going home.”
Ultimately, the way these law schools respond to the U.S. Supreme Court could prove which theory is correct. If the schools do not change their admissions policies, the first theory, advanced by the schools themselves, will more likely have been correct. However, if the Court rules as expected—banning racial discrimination in university admissions—and these law schools respond by finding new ways to allegedly discriminate against Asian Americans in their admissions processes, proponents of the second theory will have a much stronger case.
