Rankings

The blogosphere has come down hard on Michigan Law School's recently announced Wolverine Scholars Program. I'm excited when any law school innovates, so I chatted with Dean of Admissions Sarah Zearfoss to find out what's what. Our Q&A below:

 

1. Could you explain what the Wolverine Scholars Program is and who is eligible for it.

Our new Wolverine Scholars Program will invite applications from University of Michigan undergraduates who have at least completed their junior year and at most are scheduled to graduate in Winter or Spring 2009 (that is, rising and graduating seniors) who have cumulative GPAs of 3.80 or higher; review will take place during the summer, and will substitute for the usual LSAT requirement an intensive review of the undergraduate curriculum. It is a non-binding program; if an applicant is admitted, he or she is free to apply to other law schools—but since we are not requiring the LSAT of the applicants, it is of course our hope that we will attract people for whom Michigan is their first choice, and who will choose to enroll here rather than going through the hassle of applying to other law schools (including the necessity of taking the LSAT).

2. You've come under a lot of fire in the blogosphere for the program. For example, MoneyLaw, Above the Law, TaxProf, and Prof. Henderson (of Indiana) have basically accused you of a transparent attempt to game the rankings. Prof. Henderson has gone so far as to say that "the only rational explanation is that Michigan seeks a rankings payoff." How do you respond to that? If gaming the rankings wasn't your only motivation, or your main motivation, what was your reasoning behind the program?

Well, I’d have to actually say the opposite is the case—that is, a desire to manipulate the rankings would NOT have been a rational motivation for this program. Consider, if that were the purpose, whether it would make sense for a public institution whose every admission decision in recent years has been subject to FOIA requests from multiple organizations to announce something so publicly! Further, since we anticipate being able to matriculate at most 5 to 10 Wolverine Scholars—a fractional sliver of our typical entering class of 360—this couldn't be a successful route for manipulating the rankings, even if we were so inclined. That number of people couldn't possibly affect our LSAT median, and is quite unlikely to affect the GPA median by even 1/100th, let alone materially.

Instead, we were motivated by a desire to strengthen our intra-institutional ties with the undergrad community, which is our single biggest feeder and at which, nonetheless, there is a persistent, unshakeable rumor that it is impossible to be admitted to Michigan Law if one attended Michigan for undergrad. As a result, we lose a lot of people who don’t apply, thinking it’s just not worth their time—and we therefore we miss getting applications from many students who would be great additions to our class. Relatedly, we needed to think creatively about ways to increase the applications we receive from our single biggest source of in-state residents (given that we are a public institution with a goal of matriculating 20% of the class as in-state residents). Bottom-line, we had well-considered policy objectives here, and our policy decisions have never been dictated by blind obeisance to rankings.

3. If you are willing to admit X students a year without an LSAT score, why require an LSAT score from the rest of the class? Why not just do away with it completely?

We have found the LSAT to be an excellent tool for predicting first-year grades, and believe that it is an exceptionally well-designed standardized test. That does not mean, however, that there may not be limited, special circumstances where reliance is not necessary, or not appropriate. We have a LOT of data on Michigan undergrads who enroll here at the law school, and the data lead us to be very confident that we can learn what we need to about ability to succeed here from a rigorous examination of the curriculum of those students who have proven themselves able to achieve at a very high level. We just don't have that body of data for other schools.

4. Some other law schools -- including top law schools like Georgetown and Northwestern -- have admissions programs that do not require an LSAT score. Any idea why people are piling on Michigan and not on those other schools?

Michigan certainly does get people's attention when it comes to admissions issues! But I suppose it's also timing; the programs that I know of are not of recent vintage, and I do think that attention to standardized tests and to rankings has really amped up in the last couple of years.

5. Colleges and business schools innovate constantly with their admissions requirements. For example, a number of top colleges make the SAT optional, while Harvard Business School has the 2+2 program. Why do you think law schools are generally so resistant to experimenting?

I confess I have found it rather surprising that in a climate where many organizations are examining the appropriate use of standardized tests, one very small outside-the-box step by one law school should attract such apparent shocked skepticism. Law schools (and the law as a field, more generally) tend to be very conservative in their approach to any proposed changes, however, and so I suppose the reaction was not completely unpredictable. I’ve had a lot of supportive emails, though, from prelaw advisors and admissions consultants, so I’m hoping that once the initial excitement winds down, the people who really matter to us—i.e., our applicants—will see that we're trying to be critically thinking about what we're doing. That can only be a good thing from their perspective.

I'm intrigued by Brian Leiter's rankings of law schools based on the success rates of its graduates in the 2006-2008 law school teaching market. If you don't want to read the rankings, here are some take-aways:

1. Yale was the most successful school (45% placement rate); Chicago was second (43%), followed by Stanford (41%), Harvard (37%), and UVa (35%).

2. Harvard and Yale accounted for 40% of all new faculty hires (90 out of 231).

3. Harvard had 126 grads in the market last year; Yale had 97. (The Yale number is astonishing, since they have a class about one third the size of Harvard's. By comparison, Chicago, which is the same size as Yale, had 28.)

4. DC schools apparently attract lots of people who want to teach, but few of them are successful. Three DC-area schools (Georgetown, American, and GW) had 125 grads in the market -- only 8 were placed, and all of them were from Georgetown. Georgetown alone had 80 grads in the market (placing 10%), while American placed 0 out of 27 and GW placed 0 out of 18.

5. Tulane is a real oddball in the top tier of placing schools -- its 20% placement rate outperformed Berkeley, Duke, Penn, and some other top schools.

One of the really interesting things about Gen Y is how dramatically its preferences are driving changes in everything from workplace policies to luxury goods marketing to real estate development.

Last week, I headed over to the Boston Society of Architects to hear a talk by a woman named Persis Rickes about ways in which architects who design for universities need to be thinking about what Gen Y wants out of its academic and living spaces.

The talk was in many ways a primer on Gen Y for an audience that didn’t know much about this generation. Dr. Rickes did a great job pulling together some of the basic information about Gen Y (much of it culled, with attribution, from the seminal work Millennials Rising by Neil Howe and William Strauss). I was most interested in the following points from the talk (and for clarity, I'll break out the parts that are my own editorializing):

Many buildings will be around for 50 or 100 years -- how do you design a building that may already be outdated 10 years from now?

Just ten years ago, university architects were putting jacks in every wall on the assumption that everyone would want to be able to plug in anywhere for internet access. Of course, today everyone expects wifi, and all that wiring isn't getting used. Wired? That's so last millennium. Trying to predict what people will want out of their spaces for the next half century is perhaps a quixotic exercise, but architects are trying to be as forward-thinking as possible.

What about the ideal architecture for Gen Y? Part of that depends on their aspirations, which brings us to:

Gen Y is civic minded, socially conscious, dedicated to justice and the environment, and involved in a variety of causes.

Gen Yers expect to learn in real-life scenarios to prepare for their careers after college, and colleges need to be building the equivalent of “moot court” classrooms for students to get hands-on experience that approximates what they’ll face out in the real world. Students expect opportunities for real-world internships and service work. Schools need to offer “blended spaces” for teaching and learning a mix of academic and practical skills.

Anna says: This desire flies in the face of the mission of a liberal arts education, which values teaching you “how to think” over teaching specialized or pre-professional skills. But even at staunch liberal arts colleges, students are demanding hands-on experience through their extracurricular activities and internships, even if they don’t receive academic credit for them. Schools will need to think about what kinds of spaces they’re offering for hands-on training and learning, whether that happens as part of the curriculum or as an extracurricular activity.

I also wonder what it means for business schools that an entire generation is obsessed with social or environmental justice jobs (that's not the best short-hand and doesn't really cover the whole range, but I'll use it for these purposes). I personally think it would be impossible to do good without the private sector, but I suspect that business schools have a marketing problem on their hands with this cohort, and it explains the big uptick in social entrepreneurship and corporate citizenship offerings at business schools.

It also explains why so many college students are flocking to law school. I often talk to people who think they can litigate away the world's big problems -- poverty, hunger, international conflict, and war -- and they have every expectation that they’ll do so while making six figures or more in the process and living a somewhat glamorous life. (Brangelina and Bono have created some unreasonable expectations.) The social justice jobs are definitely out there, but many people I hear from struggle with the paychecks associated with those jobs. Sometimes people come out of school with unrealistic expectations about what kinds of salaries they can command in a certain job or with a certain diploma hanging on the wall, and those expectations (reasonable and unreasonable) are a big subject of this whole blog more generally.

Because realistic expectations are so important, it is absolutely necessary for college students to observe different jobs first-hand, whether it's through an internship or some other avenue.

Gen Y is obsessed with achievement and is really, really stressed out.

Gen Y is under a lot of pressure to achieve and excel. They like conformity and rules, because conformity and rules relieve some of that pressure. They have an overachiever culture. They know that they are being measured. They want constant feedback.

That means schools will need to offer a lot of tutoring and testing help, as well as spaces where those services can be accessed 24/7. Students also want a lot of very nice extracurricular spaces to blow off some of that steam, and there’s also increased demand for spirituality and meditation spaces. They also need spaces to be overachievers and show off their work, for example through state-of-the art performance halls.

Anna says: This has absolutely been my experience counseling Gen Yers for the last eight or so years. They are so worried about making the slightest mistake, because they feel that the stakes are so high, and I continue to grapple with the best ways to deal with their high anxiety levels.

This is a generation for whom mental health treatment and mental health prescription drugs are fairly routine, and I wonder how people who work with, manage, counsel, teach, and mentor Gen Y can best prepare themselves to work with these high anxiety levels. It's not specifically what most of us are trained to do, but maybe we need to be. From time to time we hear awful stories about college students going over the edge in one form or another, and I'm intrigued by Cornell's efforts to train the university community to deal with anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues.

More generally, these are the most risk-averse people I’ve ever encountered, and they fear doing things on their own (more on that below in the teamwork discussion). The kinds of questions people run by me every day reflect that fear. (“The application instructions say to put my name in a header. Could you please look at my header and sign off on it before I submit?”) Part of that phenomenon I also attribute to their parents (more on that below too). Part of our challenge as mentors for Gen Y is to help them develop their confidence to make decisions on their own when they are feeling that immense pressure to spread the risk. It's an interesting contrast to the strong confidence they feel in other ways (the next topic).

Gen Yers all think they’re special, don’t leave their parents behind, and want everything tailored to them and at their disposal 24/7.

Gen Y requires constant praise, much of it gratuitous, and feels entitled to it. Their parents have fed this sense of entitlement by making their kids feel as if they are the center of the universe, and the parents’ lives do indeed revolve around their kids. Gen Yers are sheltered and overprotected. They expect everyone else to jump at their say-so and are supremely confident -- some would say over-confident -- in their abilities.

For space planning, this means that Gen Y students expect 24/7 access to people and spaces and services, and schools will have to provide the technology to enable that kind of access. They expect private bathrooms and showers, single dorm rooms and apartments, and customized everything (such as cafeterias with 24/7 access to vegan food or whatever the case may be). They expect top-of-the-line health and wellness centers, academic support centers, and larger admissions offices (because they bring their whole families along).

Anna says: Yep - I’ve already said plenty on this subject (here and here -- note that the posting you're reading now will show up at the top of both links, so you'll have to scroll down for the older postings). The brouhaha over this recent voicemail is the perfect example. (Gen Y high school student finds it completely appropriate to call the COO of his county school system -- at home -- to complain that classes haven’t been canceled after three inches of snowfall; COO’s wife leaves an angry voicemail telling the kid to “get over it”; kid then posts the COO’s email and phone numbers on facebook.)

I'm also reminded of something an admissions officer once said to me: "With Gen Y's parents, their kid is always gifted or learning disabled. Those are the only two options." It's no accident that their children take that self-perception with them to college and into the workplace.

Gen Yers are always part of a group.

As much as they all want their own dorm rooms and bathrooms, they spend all their time together, travel in packs, work together, and study together. They therefore need lots of informal spaces that let them learn and study in groups.

Anna says: I've noticed that they also like to work on their applications in groups. Their college and grad school essays get passed around all over God's creation for feedback from parents, friends, neighbors, you name it. That's why so many essays read as if they were written by committee... because they were written by committee, and that rarely makes for a good essay, because the applicant's voice gets completely lost in the shuffle.

On an unrelated note: I've observed that Gen Yers also like to date in packs. In a way, it's not even a date at all, at least as someone Gen X or older would understand it.

 

Gen Yers multitask.

They need blended spaces for work and play because they’re never doing just one or the other.

Anna says: Definitely true. Whether they’re surfing the internet while in class, writing a paper at Starbucks, or instant messaging every five seconds while studying for an exam, this is an "ADD" generation that can’t focus on one thing for any length of time -- not necessarily because they literally have ADD (although some of them do, and that can compound the challenge), but because competing technology is always pulling them away from the task at hand. In that sense, young or old, we're all ADD'ers now, certainly in the workplace, but Gen Y takes multitasking to new extremes.

I wonder whether it’s a good idea for schools to accommodate this need to multitask. I know professors don’t like it when their students are buying shoes online during their lectures, and there has been some research showing that the human brain just doesn't do things all that well when it's multitasking (a lesson for us all, myself included). Just because Gen Y (or anyone, for that matter) wants something, does that mean it’s always good to give it to them?

 

Gen Yers are respectful of authority.

I’m not sure how respect for authority plays itself out in architecture and space planning, but the architects in the room found this characteristic very interesting.

Anna says: I disagree strongly with this characterization of Gen Y. I think the confusion on this point comes from a Boomer baseline of what it means to defy or disrespect authority. I suspect that in Boomer minds, if college students aren't lighting fires, smashing windows, and threatening to burn down Yale like in the Boomers' college days, then Gen Y must be pretty respectful of authority. And it's true that Gen Y, because of that risk-aversion I discussed above, doesn't like to rock the boat the way Boomers seemed to take a certain kind of pride in doing. But I would argue that Gen Y's admirable refusal to destroy things doesn't mean that they are respectful of authority.

Aside from that voicemail example I linked to above, I'll also point out the following:

I get an earful all day long from employers when they hear that I write about Gen Y. I hear about Gen Yers marching into the workplace thinking they can do the CEO’s job better than the CEO, and sometimes even saying so out loud. They expect management responsibility their first day out of college. I’ve even heard one employer tell me about a recent college grad who, on being given certain instructions, rolled her eyes, threw her pen on the table, and said, “That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard.” That loud thud you hear is the sound of jaws dropping at workplaces across the country.

I routinely have applicants tell me, in effect, “Yes, I know you were an admissions officer, but here’s why I think you’re wrong.” I get some level of push-back just about every day. I do want people to disagree with me, because I know I'm not omniscient and often the input is helpful. Still, I'm curious that there is so much push-back when it's my expertise and experience they're seeking out in the first place, and I get that only from Gen Y, and the younger set of Gen Y in particular. It's interesting.

I hear this kind of feedback from professors as well, who are also surprised by the way in which their students communicate with them, and the ways in they make demands. For example, I have heard from several professors who are shocked to receive what they consider shamelessly casual emails demanding (not asking for -- demanding) special considerations, extensions, etc. These professors are also, in some cases, shocked to be referred to as "hey john" or whatever their first names happen to be.

Over the years, all this leads me to conclude that this is not a generation that as a group respects authority, experience, age, or a higher position on the org chart, although individual differences certainly occur (as with any of these generalizations).

On this subject, one of my Gen Y colleagues pointed out the following to me -- great food for thought:

While Gen Yers may not have respect for the trappings of authority (emailing profs with first names, office etiquette, etc.), I think they have tremendous respect for the value of authority. That is, they know what it means to be ranked X, or in position Y, or to be offered a job at a particular bank or office. They also know what it means to "know" someone in authority -- how to pull strings, ask for favors, and use connections to authority figures to advance their careers, percentages (of admission?), etc.

I recognize that this is a wholly different "respect for authority" than that term usually involves, but it it still a type of respect. It's a respect for the power of authority -- for the access, advancement, and "step skipping" that authority can grant you (i.e. if you "know" someone you can avoid some of the bottom rungs of the ladder).

So in that sense, I don't think Gen Y is entirely disrespectful of authority. I think the concept of "authority" has changed; instead of authority being representative of "the man," it's about "the connection," the "hookup," or the favor. Why apply through HR if your father's partner can put your resume on the desk of an executive? The recognition of the executive's power is a certain "respect" for his authority. Not the same type of respect we're talking about, but a respect nonetheless.

There were a lot of other interesting nuggets at this talk, but I’ll conclude by asking the following:

Anna Also Says: This stuff doesn’t come cheap. Who's paying for all of this?

I know applicants who decide where to go to college because one school has a cool rock climbing wall or that other school’s dormitories have seen better days or that school has the best cafeteria.

Somewhere in the application frenzy, the big picture seems sometimes to get lost. This country club approach to college doesn’t come cheap, and when Gen Y complains about its staggering student loans, I have to wonder who they think is financing those Olympic size swimming pools, state of the art performance halls, 24/7 access to freshly prepared vegan menus, spa-like wellness centers, and so on. That lifestyle is very expensive, and college students are paying for it with a staggering amount of borrowed money, plus interest.

It makes me wonder what some people's priorities are, what they're looking for in their college experience. Sounds to me as if some of them want a 4, 5, 6-year stay at Canyon Ranch rather than the best education they can find. I don't knock any of those wonderful features -- I know I would have loved them when I was in college too -- but I see some people focusing a lot on the immediate benefits and not on the long-term costs.

It also becomes very clear to me why many college students find it such a shock to join the real world after college, when they no longer have student loans to fund such a posh lifestyle. No wonder most of this age group moves back in with mom and dad for some period after school. This goes back to my theme of expectations and figuring out what's realistic and what isn't.

I heard one university representative at the talk say that her college had to offer this lavish lifestyle because that’s what they have to do to compete for applicants. Having been an admissions officer, I understand the pressures schools face to attract applicants. I do wonder, though, about the college administrators and trustees who are perhaps allowing their educational missions to be compromised too much, the parents who are letting their kids pick a college based on a rock climbing wall or a cafeteria menu, and the magazine rankings that reward schools for increasing their expenditures per student. Something is out of whack.

17-year-olds are 17-year olds, and I don't fault them if they are still figuring out what their priorities are, how compound interest works, and what kind of life they want to be living five or ten or twenty years down the road. And it’s our job, as the ones with a bit more life experience, to help them think about those things (even if they're not always inclined to listen to us).

Readers of the Ivey Files and also my book (The Ivey Guide to Law School Admissions) know that I've been discouraging people from attending all but the top law schools in the country, mainly because of simple math. As I wrote in The Ivey Guide:

You need to think of your legal education as an investment, and you should calculate your expected return on that investment. That's why it's so important to think about your career options coming out of various schools. If you have to pay $1,000 a month in after-tax dollars to cover your student loans, you'd better be sure you will be able to find work at a well-paying law firm after you graduate. If you graduate $100,000 in the hole, don't assume for as second you can run off and work for a public-interest legal clinic. And until you've paid off your debt, or unless you attend a law school with a generous loan-forgiveness program..., you won't have the freedom to go sit on a beach and stare at your belly button while you contemplate what you really want to do with your life. Think of it this way: Lots of people rush off to law school on the assumption that a law degree gives them freedom, but you don't really have freedom when you've mortgaged the next ten -- or thirty -- years of your life. (Law school graduates who join big firms don't have much trouble repaying their loans on the ten-year payment plan, but most law school graduates don't end up joining big firms, and many end up extending their loan-repayment schedules to thirty years.)

...

The top fifteen [law schools] also offer a level of job security that other law schools can't. People at the top schools who find themselves in the middle of the pack or even below still do just fine on the job market, even at the highest levels of the job market. The further down the food chain you go, though, the less of a safety net you have. Once you get to the second tier and below, you need to be at or near the top of your class to end up at a top firm in your region or with a top judge in your region (the national market is a much more difficult proposition), and people in the bottom half of the class often face grim hiring prospects.

Law school applicants fight me on this all the time, but I stick to my guns. Most ABA-approved law schools are not worth the investment. It's painful for people to hear, and most insist on learning this truth the hard way.

Now comes an article in today's Wall Street Journal, front page and above-the-fold no less, making the same argument:

A law degree isn't necessarily a license to print money these days. For graduates of elite law schools, prospects have never been better. Big law firms this year boosted their starting salaries to as high as $160,000. But the majority of law-school graduates are suffering from a supply-and-demand imbalance that's suppressing pay and job growth. The result: Graduates who don't score at the top of their class are struggling to find well-paying jobs to make payments on law-school debts that can exceed $100,000. Some are taking temporary contract work, reviewing documents for as little as $20 an hour, without benefits. And many are blaming their law schools for failing to warn them about the dark side of the job market.

The article gives some harrowing examples (all bullets in this posting are verbatim):

• The law degree that Scott Bullock gained in 2005 from Seton Hall University -- where he says he ranked in the top third of his class -- is a "waste," he says. Some former high-school friends are earning considerably more as plumbers and electricians than the $50,000-a-year Mr. Bullock is making as a personal-injury attorney in Manhattan. To boot, he is paying off $118,000 in law-school debt.
• A 2005 graduate of Brooklyn Law School, [Israel Meth] earns about $30 an hour as a contract attorney reviewing legal documents for big firms. He says he uses 60% of his paycheck to pay off student loans -- $100,000 for law school on top of $100,000 for the bachelor's degree he received from Columbia University.
• Sue Clark... this year received her degree from second-tier Chicago-Kent College of Law, one of six law schools in the Chicago area. Despite graduating near the top half of her class, she has been unable to find a job and is doing temp work "essentially as a paralegal," she says. "A lot of people, including myself, feel frustrated about the lack of jobs," she says.
• Mike Altmann, 29, a graduate of New York University who went to Brooklyn Law School, says he accumulated $130,000 in student-loan debt and graduated in 2002 with no meaningful employment opportunities -- one offer was a $33,000 job with no benefits. So Mr. Altmann became a contract attorney, reviewing electronic documents for big firms for around $20 to $30 an hour, and hasn't been able to find higher-paying work since.
• Matthew Fox Curl graduated in 2004 from second-tier University of Houston in the bottom quarter of his class. After months of job hunting, he took his first job working for a sole practitioner focused on personal injury in the Houston area and made $32,000 in his first year. He quickly found that tort-reform legislation has been "brutal" to Texas plaintiffs' lawyers and last year left the firm to open up his own criminal-defense private practice. He's making less money than at his last job and has thought about moving back to his parents' house. "I didn't think three years out I'd be uninsured, thinking it's a great day when a crackhead brings me $500.

Are there some law schools that are honest about their graduates' job prospects? Refreshingly, yes:

• Many students "simply cannot earn enough income after graduation to support the debt they incur," wrote Richard Matasar, dean of New York Law School, in 2005, concluding that, "We may be reaching the end of a golden era for law schools."
• The University of Richmond School of Law in the last couple of years started to be more open about its employment statistics; it now breaks out how many of its grads work as contract attorneys. Of 57 2006 graduates working in private practice, for example, seven were contract employees nine months after graduation. Schools "should be sharing more information than they are now," says Joshua Burstein, associate dean for career services who put the changes in place. "Most people graduating from law school," he says, "are not going to be earning big salaries."

More typical are the dodgy (and some would argue fraudulent) recruiting practices of many law schools. As the article points out, "students entering law school have little way of knowing how tight a job market they might face. The only employment data that many prospective students see comes from school-promoted surveys that provide a far-from-complete portrait of graduate experiences." Examples:

• Tulane University... reports to U.S. News & World Report magazine, which publishes widely watched annual law-school rankings, that its law-school graduates entering the job market in 2005 had a median salary of $135,000. But that is based on a survey that only 24% of that year's graduates completed, and those who did so likely represent the cream of the class, a Tulane official concedes. On its Web site, the school currently reports an average starting salary of $96,356 for graduates in private practice but doesn't include what percentage of graduates reported salaries for the survey.
• A glossy admissions brochure for Brooklyn Law School, considered second-tier, reports a median salary for recent graduates at law firms of well above $100,000. But that figure doesn't reflect all incomes of graduates at firms; fewer than half of graduates at firms responded to the survey, the school reported to U.S. News. On its Web site, the school reports that 41% of last year's graduates work for firms of more than 100 lawyers, but it fails to mention that that percentage includes temporary attorneys, often working for hourly wages without benefits, Joan King, director of the school's career center, concedes. Ms. King says she believes the figures for her school accurately represent the broader graduating class. She says the number of contract attorneys is "minimal" but declined to give a number.

Declined to give a number? When annual tuition for full-time students at Brooklyn hovers around $40,000 before expenses (which tack on another $20,000)? That says it all. If these were for-profit companies trying to raise funds from clueless investors and publishing questionable data in their prospectuses, the SEC would be all over them. Universities get away with a lot, so buyer beware.

And note that the US News rankings do not provide information you can necessarily rely on. Their data is self-reported by the schools, and schools have huge incentives to fudge the numbers.

Finally, note that tuition and expenses are about the same to attend Brooklyn Law School as to attend Columbia Law School, even though graduates face wildly different job and income prospects during law school and afterwards. It is simply not rational to pay Columbia-level tuition to attend Brooklyn Law School. That's just one example, but you get my point.

And another article in which I discuss what I perceive as one of the downsides of conventional college rankings: that they focus on and try to measure the quality of incoming freshmen (SAT scores etc.) rather than the quality of education they receive at their respective colleges or the value added by those colleges. Basically, it's an input vs. output argument. I'm not the first or only person to make it (the Spellings Commission has been grappling with the output side of the equation for a while now), but it's something to keep in mind as you use rankings to help you think about different schools, whether at the college or the graduate school level.

A friend of the Ivey Files sends me this news story and asks whether MIT should drop in the rankings for admitting someone that stupid. I'll let you be the judge. Guess some people didn't learn from Adult Swim's little bomb scare here in Boston back in February. If my grandmother were around to read this story, she'd no doubt whip out one of her favorite sayings: "She's brilliant, but not very bright."

This will make for one doozie of a disclosure addendum if Ms. MIT (evocatively named Star Simpson) ever applies to grad school.

The Boston Globe reports that Williams, Amherst, and Swarthmore plan to opt out of the US News college rankings. The departure of these heavy-hitters should have some impact, but I suspect that until Harvard, Yale, and Princeton boycott the rankings, the rankings will continue to lumber along.

I wonder if US News will just start making up data for the departing schools, as it did with Sarah Lawrence College? Also interesting: BusinessWeek uses regression analysis to "fill in" historical data for business schools that it hasn't surveyed before in its MBA rankings.

On a related note: I've heard from several people who attended this year's Admitted Students Weekend at Stanford Law School that Dean Kramer repeatedly flaunted the school's US News rankings in his sales pitches. Ironic, given Kramer's caterwauling to the NYT about the lunacy of the rankings methodology. Guess he thinks he can have it both ways.

I have been known to criticize law schools for being far less adaptable to changing markets and real world needs, and being generally less self-critical, than business schools are (see here, here, and here). Law school curricula have remained mostly static for a long, long time, and of course the law schools' cartel status* means they don't have to innovate as much as graduate programs that have to make the case for their value proposition year in and year out.

That's why I love this article in today's WSJ about Detroit Mercy Law School. It's not a "top law school" by anyone's definition, and yet their forward-looking and creative dean has plowed ahead with an initiative to place its graduates at top law firms. That's quite an accomplishment. And what a brilliant and novel concept: teach students how to practice law and enlist a powerful network to help spread the word. Most of the top (and not-so-top) law schools are above that. They sniff at practical education and like to pretend that law isn't a trade, so every year they churn out graduates who arrive at fancy law firms knowing less about real-world legal practice than their paralegals and often even their secretaries. (See Cameron Stracher, one of my favorite commentators on this subject, here and here.)

From the article:

In the stratified world of law, educational pedigree largely dictates where students will get a look. Firms want to signal to clients and colleagues that they only hire the best. As firms have grown and competition for junior lawyers has intensified, some firms have dipped below the Ivies and their equivalents. Nonetheless, a student from a school like Detroit Mercy -- firmly in the cellar of U.S. News & World Report's rankings of 184 accredited law schools -- hasn't stood a chance at the fancy firms.

But thanks to some masterful marketing by Detroit Mercy's dean, Mark C. Gordon, top students at the school are now gaining entree to the big leagues. In the last two years, a half-dozen students have been hired for summer or full-time jobs at firms like Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Maw LLP. Firms such as Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP now include Detroit Mercy in their select on-campus interview circuit.

A first-time dean and Harvard Law grad, Mr. Gordon got his school on the radar of the top-tier firms by enlisting a stable of big-time private-practice lawyers to join an advisory board that's now some 60 members strong. His pitch: Help Detroit Mercy improve its third-year curriculum by creating a required set of courses that simulate real-life practice.

Attorneys quickly suited up for the cause. When they arrived in Detroit for twice-a-year meetings, starting in 2005, Mr. Gordon made sure they not only helped remake the school's coursework but also inspected his top second-year students during private interviews, as well as others who were trotted out to give presentations on everything from trial advocacy to interpreting statutes. After last month's meeting, about 40 first-year students, handpicked by professors, were allowed to mingle with the board.

The idea of focusing the curriculum on practice resonated with the lawyers. In fact, many have long complained that law school devotes too much attention to theory and leaves students unprepared to practice, even as the market demands that firms pay new hires high salaries from day one. Many students are also no fans of the third year of school, feeling it's a repeat of the same kind of work analyzing cases that they did in the first two years.

Students "arrive and they don't know where they fit in, how to draft an escrow, a merger agreement," says Jonathan J. Lerner, a corporate partner at Skadden Arps who is on the Detroit Mercy board.

While some schools, like Columbia Law School, have coursework oriented to law-firm practice, it's generally not required. Stanford Law School offers a few elective "deals"-type courses, but the school is emphasizing new joint J.D.-master's degrees in which a law student, for example, would also study bioengineering. Transaction-simulation classes are an "inefficient way to learn content" says Stanford Law School Dean Larry Kramer, who recommends students take no more than one or two of them.

From Mr. Gordon's vantage point, if the practical coursework and advisory board help his students get a top job, it's fine with him.

Good for Detroit Mercy, good for its graduates, and good for the firms who hire them.

* You can't practice law in this country without having attended an ABA-approved law school. In contrast, although there are industries that impose a de facto and only mildly permeable glass ceiling on people without an MBA (investment banking, fancypants consulting), in general the business world is open to anyone with smarts and ambition. No fancy, expensive degree is mandated by law, and only the free market determines whether companies will reward or require an MBA.

BusinessWeek releases its latest rankings of top undergraduate business schools, with Wharton, UVA, and Haas taking the top three spots.

Even more exciting: UVA's program is a steal, with annual tuition around $8,000 for in-state students.

"Getting hired" seems like a low bar to be setting, but their little blurb adds language about receiving "lots of job offers," getting hired "quickly," and earning "big paychecks."

Here's the list, with Wharton, Harvard, and Sloan leading the pack.