Yale Law School announced on Wednesday that it is withdrawing from the influential U.S. News rankings of the best law schools, because the ratings put too much focus on grades and test scores and not enough emphasis on recruiting low-income students or encouraginglow-paid public service law as a career choice.
Yale’s law school ranks No. 1 this year and has consistently been the top-rated school on the U.S. News & World Report list for the last 30 years, the dean, Heather K. Gerken, noted in a lengthy, blistering statement posted on the university’s website.
Yet, she said, the U.S. News rankings are a “for-profit” and “commercial” enterprise that is “profoundly flawed.” She said it does not give enough weight to programs “that support public interest careers, champion need-based aid, and welcome working-class students into the profession,” and as a result, skews the rankings of law schools that emphasize that work.
“This is a moment when both inside the profession and inside higher education, everyone is thinking about the role of academic institutions in the world, and thinking about economic inequality,” Ms. Gerken said in an interview on Wednesday. “So this is an especially important time to pay attention to exactly the things that U.S. News & World Report is making it harder for law schools to do.”
Ms. Gerken said that she and other law school deans had presented their concerns about the rankings to U.S. News, “trying to give them a chance to change, and they just haven’t.”
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Eric Gertler, chief executive of U.S. News, said the organization would not be deterred by Yale’s decision. “As part of our mission, we must continue to ensure that law schools are held accountable for the education they will provide to these students, and that mission does not change with this recent announcement,” he said.
Yale is followed in the rankings this year by Stanford, the University of Chicago, and then Columbia and Harvard, which were both ranked fourth.
Yale’s decision is the latest blow to the U.S. News rankings. Many critics of the rankings have said that the data can be easily manipulated, and have pointed to the doubts this year over Columbia University’s data.
Over the summer, Columbia announced that it would no longer participate in the rankings, and said it was reviewing its data — which had resulted in a No. 2 spot in the rankings of national universities — after a math professor at the university questioned its accuracy. The university ultimately admitted that some of its data, including class size and the percentage of faculty with the highest degree in their field, had been inaccurate.
U.S. News kept Columbia in the rankings nonetheless but dropped it to No. 18. And U.S. News could still choose to rank Yale law, even without the university’s cooperation. U.S. News asks schools to provide data that is used in its rankings, though much of the information is also publicly available.
Asked whether U.S. News would continue to rank Yale, Mr. Gertler said that the organization was reviewing options.
Ms. Gerken said the U.S. News rankings discouraged law schools from supporting students who wanted public interest careers, as well as those going on to pursue advanced degrees like a master’s or a Ph.D.
“Because service is a touchstone of our profession, Yale Law School is proud to award many more public interest fellowships per student than any of our peers,” she wrote. “Even though our fellowships are highly selective and pay comparable salaries to outside fellowships, U.S. News appears to discount these invaluable opportunities to such an extent that these graduates are effectively classified as unemployed.”
The same is true for graduates who pursue other advanced degrees, she said.
She said that 20 percent of a law school’s overall ranking comes from grades and test scores. “This heavily weighted metric imposes tremendous pressure on schools to overlook promising students, especially those who cannot afford expensive test preparation courses,” she said. “It also pushes schools to use financial aid to recruit high-scoring students.”
That money, she said, could be diverted to scholarships for low-income students.
Dozens of law schools — including Yale — are now accepting the GRE as well as the LSAT for admission. And in April, a committee of the American Bar Association recommended that law schools make standardized testing optional for applicants.
Yale’s decision is unlikely to change the rankings system, “unless a significant number of other name-brand institutions follow suit,” said Bob Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, an anti-testing group.
University administrators have long had a love-hate relationship with the rankings. The rankings are closely followed by students and families who are looking for some kind of objective measure of schools. Administrators know that a high rank can boost applications.
At the same time, administrators — like Ms. Gerken — complain that the rankings are a relatively crude tool that fails to take into account the more nuanced differences among schools.
Cheating scandals and irregularities in the data have also cost the rankings some of their luster. The former dean of Temple University’s business school, Moshe Porat, was convicted of falsifying data to secure a No. 1 rating for its online M.B.A. program.
In March, the University of California said it would withdraw its Rossier School of Education from the best graduate school rankings because of a history of inaccuracies in the data submitted by the school.
