BC Misses the Cut in Vault Top 25 Rankings
09erThough Vault called BCLS “underrated” last year, the self-described “most trusted name in career information” publishing group left BCLS off its 2008 Top 25 Law School Rankings.
According to the Vault web site:
Vault surveyed nearly 400 hiring partners, hiring commitee members, associate interviewers and recruiting professionals across the country on which law schools best prepare their graduates to achieve in the firm environment.
Vault surveyed only those people who directly assess the value of law school graduates in the real world once they enter the workforce- those individuals responsible for evaluating and hiring law school students. The respondents—who represent over 100 law firms— were advised to consider the following factors in their rankings: research and writing skills; knowledge of legal doctrine; possession of other relevant knowledge (e.g., science for IP lawyers); and ability to manage a calendar and work with an assistant.
Eagleionline Question of the Day: Is BCLS being underrated yet again? If not, how would you improve “real world” preparation at the school?
Update: BU students began boasting about rankings a week early due to Vault.
Reader Comments (1)
I have a hard time taking this seriously -- as I do any of the commercial rankings (e.g., U.S. News). Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Michigan, Chicago et al. should use their position to do the responsible thing and disavow these and other strict numerical rankings as sophistry. That's what my undergraduate institution (which does not have a law school) did. The "honor" of a high rank may be nice, but the deleterious effect these idiotic and decidedly unscientific rankings have upon American education is a remarkable tragedy.
Need anyone wonder why admission to "top" law schools is based almost entirely upon one's ability to seat people on an airplane according to various constraints? Or to skim a vapid passage on some politically-correct topic and then answer inane questions? We have U.S. News to thank for that. And no wonder BC is falling in the rankings! It has nothing to do with Dean Garvey. Rather, it is likely because our admissions office remains thoughtful and conscientious, using a variety of data points to discern which applicants will make the finest students and attorneys. It is certainly not happenstance that BC is an unusually pleasant law school. Probably, it is a direct result of the fact that admissions seems to prioritize selecting a thoughtful and genuinely capable class above ensuring that the median LSAT reported to U.S. News is as high as the applicant pool will permit. There is nothing wrong with considering the LSAT in making admissions choices, and indeed there is nothing wrong with weighting the LSAT heavily where, for a particular individual, there is an absence of other credible data upon which to base the decision. But, by creating the artificial imperative for law schools to report the median LSAT score of admitted candidates, and using this data as a partial basis for ranking the various schools, U.S. News (or, more precisely, those schools that pander to its self-serving greed and stupidity) transforms the LSAT from a useful data point into a "hurdle" or stratification device--a purpose for which it was not designed and to which it is ill-suited. For the most part, U.S. News rankings are a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those candidates with the highest LSAT scores will gravitate towards the top-ranked schools--which will remain the top-ranked schools (regardless of actual quality, at least for an interval) because their students will, by operation of the cycle, continue to have the highest LSAT scores. Is such a ranking scheme helpful in the slightest?
The Vault rankings at issue here are no more credible, although they at least are based on the performance of graduates (rather than applicants) and are therefore unable to skew admissions decisions. I suppose some people may find it helpful to know the aggregated opinion of 400 attorney-interviewers, which is what the Vault ranking purports to convey. But let's be honest here. How many of those attorneys were appraising an associate educated at, e.g., Twin Cities Law School (#16)? A sufficient number that an outlier would not statistically affect the result? And did those particular attorneys represent a nationwide sample, or were they but a regionalized subset of the general nationwide sample? Besides -- it seems odd to rank a law school based on the "practical skills" of its graduates. Law school is principally theoretical; it is not a trade school. I find it hard to give much credence to an organization that purports to rank law schools on the basis of graduates' abilities to maintain a calendar and work harmoniously with secretaries. I think that would be more probative of the quality of one's primary school education.
Long and short of it: Whatever one's view of BC Law (I happen to like it), there seems to be scant justification for caring, in particular, about these rankings. Someone who bases a decision as momentous as where to attend law school on U.S. News deserves what he or she gets -- and, to be perfectly frank, those are the exact sorts of people whom we should work most assiduously to keep out. More importantly, a law school that bases its admissions decisions on U.S. News rankings deserves what it gets. I would not in the slightest be surprised to discover that the next generation of legal luminaries was educated, by and large, at lower-ranked (not Top 10) schools. Let the rankings rise and fall, and let U.S. News and Vault see their publications growing dusty on the shelves of Barnes & Noble where they belong. The legal community's appraisal of our school has remained undiminished -- and that, in many respects, is all the proof one should need.