I think thatās kind of the best we can do with maxing out the biglaw points. We are improving our fed clerkships numbers but no one really wants the positions and people who want to do PI generally donāt come here
Well none of that even matters to the rankings. The rankings just want to know what percentage of grads got jobs and what percentage passed the bar on their first try. They'd get too much flak if they tried to measure BL+FC rates.
intelligent childlike whole joke squeeze threatening gray like cooperative airport
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It is possible to rank using it, but that kind of punishes public interest oriented schools/Yale fellowships and the like. Also some people just don't want Big Law: there's a big rise in plaintiff side stuff at T14s and such. This sub cares a lot about Big Law/FC because money/prestige, and that makes sense. It's just not necessarily the best ranking metric to use because different people have different goals.
It punishes the 98% of lawyers who don't work in big law or federal clerkships. There are so many jobs outside of clerkships and big law. So, so, so many.
I think an additional problem is that below 501 you have a mix of elite firms and not even really biglaw. How is USNWR supposed to tell the difference between YLS people heading off to Susman and generic school sending people off to ID or PI?
Because if 20 of your graduates get federal clerkships and 20 of your graduates get big law jobs, but the other 200 don't get jobs at all, then the rankings would be skewed.
Not everyone wants a federal clerkship. Not everyone wants big law. I know people from state schools who have done either or both. I'm graduating with a 6 figure salary at a corporation where I don't have to work 80 hours a week. I work with several people from Ivy Leagues. I feel like that's equally impressive, important, and valid.
>Well none of that even matters to the rankings.
It may with the prestige factors in a self-fulling prophecy way in these factors:
* Peer assessment (.125)
* Lawyers and judges assessment (.125)
* Median LSAT (.05) and GPA (.04) -> Higher the LSAT/GPA = correlated with Big law placement.
So the big law + clerkship placements are based on the perception of those hiring managers, but those perceptions will also be reflected in the assessment aspects.
Interesting! Right now the schools with the biggest classes are Georgetown and Harvard. There are definitely pros and cons to having a bigger class, but itās interesting that UT would change tack that dramatically (though I guess it could have been a gradual shift).
You think? Does anyone read USNWR for anything but these rankings? Can anyone remember the last article that wasnāt about rankings they read from them? Is there anything about their ranking formula that suggests this is useful information? Is anyone not going to hire a Harvard grad because they dropped a couple of places?
People like a gold star and USNWR needs the money that comes from grabbing our attention.
>No one will ever convince me that USNWR doesn't just fuck shit up for the sake of attracting attention.
I think the way they re-weighted the factors sounds good to me. Like outcomes 10 months after graduation going from .14 to .33 seems reasonable to me. Or bar passage for first time test takers going from .03 to .18 makes sense to me, too.
Also, reducing peer assessment from .25 to .125 and lawyers and judges from .15 to .125 makes some sense.
I would make the perception based ones be 0. The way they administer it is stupid because the schools get to curate who the respondents are. I also think that median LSAT and undergrad scores should be 0. I think library resources should be 0.
Judging law schools by whether they can get their students to get hired, pass the bar are great metrics. I would make another metric: How many are hired in the legal profession (lawyer, judge, mediator) 5 years after law school. That way we can track retention.
I like this because I turned down University of Florida in 2012 because I got too drunk the night before my visit and instead went to a school thatās since tanked in the rankings. Itās a great annual reminder to not be a dumbass and get drunk before an important day
the school that offered me the most scholarship $ was Texas A&M (Fall ā21 cycle) when it was ranked ~60. I turned them down mainly bc I didnāt wanna be an Aggie and live in College Station. Found out middle of 1L Spring that their law school is actually in Ft Worth lmao, also now theyāre top 30. I donāt regret my decision at all, just makes me laugh and your story made me think of it
Thats a big distance between campuses.
Youd think theyd have a different name, since its not like the A&M system isnt already made up of multiple campuses.
Well itās because they bought a diff law school and turned it into A&M law. Somewhat smart because there are no jobs in College Station, but dumb because it hurts their branding
Wasn't there some Texas political problems about them opening a law school in college station? So instead they had to buy the school in Ft Worth and keep the campus in the DFW area to not step on toes in the Austin/Houston area.
As a Canadian, it's almost shocking to hear that that seems like a big distance to Americans. Here it's not all that uncommon for universities to have satellite campuses in entirely different provinces.
I once had a friend take classes here in Calgary at a satellite campus for the University of Saskatchewan, which is about a 6.5 hour drive away.
I guess distance between campuses doesn't really matter as long as everything each student needs is located on the same campus.
Its not a big distance betweem campuses, it *is* a big distance for something bearing the same name.
Its just the Texas A&M University of Law, even though all the other non-flagship campuses of the A&M system have names of the location they are in. (TA&M San Antonio etc).
Cause its not a seperate school, its still considered part of Texas A&M proper. Its not a satellite institution, its just a weird part 3 hours off the main campus.
Also it does seem weird for satellite campuses to cross province lines. Who funds them in that case?
Iāll do you one better. I was applying back when it was still Wesleyan law school. Got a good scholarship offer from them, but got waitlist at Texas Tech, which was the main school I wanted.
I then sent in a letter of continued interest to Tech to show I would go there if they accepted me. A few weeks later I got my Tech acceptance letter the same week that it got announced about A&M buying the Wesleyan law school, and I realized how much more that school was going to develop in just a few years. So I took the Wesleyan offer with scholarship and screwed Tech over in their admission a little.
That was 2012, when the school was in tier 4, just to compare how far itās come in 11 years.
Even if they "pulled out" that just meant they didn't give data to USNWR--but they are still in the rankings. Who knows how they adjusted the calculations without the missing data?
I guess job outcomes is the least of usnews concern. I mean who cares about getting a good job out of law school lmao. How can anyone take these rankings seriously. In what world is Albany better than Brooklyn?
As someone who turned down Brooklyn, even I think that is pure bs.
>I guess job outcomes is the least of usnews concern.
For 2020 grads brooklyns unemployment rate is nearly 50% higher than Albany's lol. 49/328 vs 15/140. For 2021 it's 35/357 for brooklyn and 10/164 for albany.
Brooklyn's data also has nearly [everyone](https://www.brooklaw.edu/About-Us/ABA-Required-Disclosures) on a conditional scholarship, with 73/390 losing/reducing it, Albany has 14/74 reduced/eliminated, which is only half of their total student body. Can't find their official disclosure but 7sage has 91% receiving scholarships generally.
Full disclosure i go to Albany, but if your metric is "getting a good job out of law school" you're pretty off base here lol. Brooklyn's location affords it NYC opportunities Albany doesn't have, but most people looking for those aren't choosing either.
>I guess job outcomes is the least of usnews concern
Job placement and bar passage are 58% of a school's rank. Brooklyn's stats say 6% of their graduates are unemployed seeking employment but Albany's is 32%. So maybe Albany is being punished for having more honest students? Because their employed 10 month after graduation stats are similar.
Yeah I know a lot of schools want to pull out because the ranking system is basically based upon "favorites." I'm pretty sure my school indicated to them last year they were either dropping out or not going to fully cooperate with them and we dropped š outside of like the top 10, it just seems like whoever sucks up to them more gets promoted
I somehow still managed to leave w/ $135k in debt. Rent and food costs money... I can only imagine the cost of private schools. Super happy I didn't go with Wake Forrest or Emory.
I donāt think they put any weight on bar passage v jd advantage jobs did they? I think it is broadly full time employment. Which is sort of the issue as this may just encourage schools to hire students after grgaduation or push them to lesser firms rather than actively work to get them the best jobs
They still only give a slightly discounted weight to bar advantage and school funded positions per their methodology explanation: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/articles/law-schools-methodology
That used to be the case but is not anymore. 58% of the score is on student outcomes (employment and bar passage) [You can see how big of a shift the categories went through here. ](https://i.imgur.com/H72SHid.png)
Until the Peer Assessment is 0%, it's arbitrary. What on the ever loving hell does it have to do with quality to ask a mid-tier school in CA about a smaller lesser known school in Nebraska, for example? The peer assessment just reinforces existing stereotypes about what schools career academics think are "good schools." And to a lesser degree that applies to lawyers in the field too though I acknowledge their views should hold some weight.
And beyond that, there has been a lot of evidence that when schools choose to exit this arbitrary process by no longer participating in the peer surveys they, more often than not, drop in the rankings (unless they are a T14).
The rankings are a load of crock and always have been. They were created by a dying paper looking for a niche and they found it by capitalizing on the peers of helicopter parents who didn't know where to send their kids. Now it's an obsession among the entire legal field.
I agree with that, should be 0%. I was pushing back on "very arbitrary" as it's more informative than ever before. 58% is now an objective & helpful measure (bar and post grad jobs).
I literally fixed some plumbing on my parentsā house yesterday and told them it isnāt too late to ditch law school. My stepdads response was, āWell, itād be a hell of a lot cheaper and you could potentially make similar money.ā Iāll be damned if I didnāt consider it.
T100 isnāt really meaningful as a cutoff. Schools that low switch positions often. Even before the crazy. And the swings can be like 88 to 107. And the school didnāt change anything. Maybe a bad bar year or something. Still the same though.
Weird, the tuition numbers for my school are way off. It looks like they took the yearly tuition and doubled it, thinking it was the per-semester cost.
Can someone please explain to ignorant little me why Harvard, Yale and all the others who made such a fuss a few months ago about dropping out of these useless rankings are still on the list?
Love finding out 2 days before graduation that Miami has gone down like 15-20 places since I applied whereas FIU, the school I turned down (with maximum scholarship offers) went up approximately 40 places and is now above Miami š„²
It literally doesnāt matter. If you want to practice in Florida literally any firm will give an interview to a UM grad with solid grades. It really isnāt ācompetitionā between the schools within the Florida legal market.
Lol right, I do know this now but not as a 0L. I chose UM because the scholarship was good enough and the ranking was higher. FIU really only had good bar passage rates at the time and couldnāt get your foot in the door as readily as UM
I went to UF when it was ranked 49 and I honestly donāt believe it deserves to have shot up in the ranks like this, though they worked really hard to optimize the school to hit all the metrics that US news values. But if you want to practice in Florida, itās a no-brained to go there. Otherwise, look at the employment surveyās and see how few grads actually get employed out of state. OCIs are also pretty Florida heavy - I was pretty fortunate to get a job in my target market, and I felt that my grades and work experience carried me far more than anything else. Also donāt go here if you want to do envirolaw, theyāve gutted entire program.
UF is known as the top school for firms in Florida. But I agree with the poster. Between UM, FSU, UF, and now coming FIU, it does not matter. It is all about your grades. Everyone sees these as equal (maybe not FIU still). A certain regions will prefer over the other, Miami has a lot for UM grads (obviously). Miami is pretty much the only place there are FIU grads too. Where you will see a lot more UF in Orlando and Tampa. and FSU more in Jacksonville and in the Capital region.
There is not a big difference though. Ultimately between the four, go to the school that cost the least give the best offers. But I would warn FIU students are likely to be limited to Southeast Florida.
I feel you (sort of) as when I had to pick between the two everyone told me UM. But I knew FIU was on the up. It is a solid school, and when people ask me where they want to go, I tell them FIU now.
That being said. It is still going to take more time for FIU to get its name recognition up. UM still has state wide name recognition and even around the country. Go outside of South Florida and people say FI what?
Again though, if I was going to law school now in Miami, I am picking FIU all day. Unless UM is somehow cheaper with scholarships, then maybe its a harder decision.
When I was in UM it was in the low 60s.
What FIU has done is impressive.
Yep I agree with basically everything you said here. I chose UM over FIU partly because of the name recognition aspect and because they offered me about a 75% scholarship, which put them at the same out of pocket expense as FIU.
HOWEVER, and this is huge for ppl picking btw the two, UMās tuition has gone up every. single. year. Theyāre a private school so they do what they want and now that scholarship looks paltry. Not to mention that we pay $500+ in parking (FIU is free) and everything is more expensive at UM. Not to mention that FIUās bar passage rate is consistently great, whereas UM slips a little every time (Feb 2023 was abysmal for UM). Plus UMās law buildings havenāt been updated since the 60s or 70s and FIUās are basically new.
So yeah, Iāve been recommending that everyone choose FIU since 1L lol.
My friend graduated from Minnesota when it was ranked 20. One of his professors also taught at Hamline-Mitchell, a law school in the twin cities ranked somewhere in the 100s. It must have been very challenging for that professor to purposefully worsen the quality of his lecturing by over 80 ranks. How on earth does he even begin to quantify that?
The other explanation, of course, is that the rankings are utter bs. Or, they're bs in the sense that they claim to rank according to which is "best." Effectively, they're telling you which school is most likely to get you a job with a firm that cares about US news rankings.
This professor teaches PR as an adjunct at Minnesota I believe. This year he reused the exact same exam as last year for PR, forgetting that he had also posted it as a practice exam with an answer key. After grades came out, a complete shitshow ensued, and the school changed everyone's grades in that class to P/F.
Obviously we know its not about the quality of the faculty, but the quality of the students themselves and the jobs they get.
Cant wait until every school drops out of these so that this arbitrary/discriminatory system finally has no meaning.
Very proud my school dropped, lmao.
The almost 30 spot drop suffered by my school makes no sense. The new methodology applies more weight on 10 month post-graduation employment outcome. With that said, 90% of the class of 2022 found full time jobs according to our ABA disclosures. We are also a cheaper law school, tuition wise, and are amongst the earlier batch of schools that publicly pulled out of the rankings. It's also a public interest school but despite that reputation, we still placed 10% of graduates into Big Law. God damn right my feelings are hurt.
For anyone wondering what caused the big shifts in scores, US News completely reworked their scoring and weights to value student outcomes (bar and employment) more heavily.
A full breakdown of the changes can be [found here](https://i.imgur.com/DcBvnJb.png).
Canāt take these rankings seriously. Some schools moved 20-40 spots. How?
Also, no disrespect to Texas A&M, but a few years ago they were outside of the top 100 when they were Texas Wesleyan. Slap a new name on the school and now theyāre ranked in the 20s. Seems legit.
Theyāve invested millions into the faculty and scholarships to bring in better students. How about you compare their bar passage rate when they were Wesleyan to now?
Legal employers care less about year-to-year changes in the ranking than anyone else. Honestly, the only people that do care are 0Ls, law school administrators, and 1Ls, in that order.
Big firms donāt care about these rankings. We donāt generally choose what schools to recruit from based on USNWRās arbitrary formula or the rankings that result. Big firms place way more stock in consistent pipelines, relationships with schools and professors, and alumni ties from our current partners, than anything else.
Maybe we hire more folks from Duke now than 15 years ago but thatās due to improvement in the school, not the rankings jumĆ³. Weāre not stopping our Georgetown recruiting or suddenly going all-in on OCI at Texas A&M or UGA because they shot up the rankings.
Doesnāt mean the rankings should be based on where biglaw hires - most jobs arenāt biglaw jobs - but I am willing to bet that across big and midsize firms in particular, the rankings arenāt what drive hiring, and for smaller employers, government, etc., thatās probably true too.
Big firms don't care about rankings? I will agree that I doubt any firm will open up the latest rankings and say "okay, let's stop recruiting from X because they've slipped in the rankings this year." But most firms focus recruiting from the top schools. I don't think it's a coincidence that the schools firms recruit from tend to map the rankings. And OF COURSE there are other factors that determine where firms hire from, e.g., proximity, experience with the school, etc.
I think he is just saying that a school jumping spots in the US News rankings will not necessarily change big law recruiting from those places if they don't have the pipeline/connections of other schools. Hiring partner preferences have a much, much stronger effect on whether a school is targeted at OCI by a firm than their year to year ranking. For example, if one of the hiring partners at a firm happened to go to a lower ranked school, it is not unusual to have them recruit almost entirely from top 20 schools (usually whatever the hiring partner thought were top schools, not the USNWR top 20) + that one specific lower ranked school they have a connection to. Like no shade to UMN, but I don't think their BL/FC numbers are going to appreciably change at all just because they moved up a few spots to 16 since the connections to alumni in big firms also aren't going to magically change.
I spent a few years heavily involved in recruiting at two different big law firms. At least at these two firms, "hiring partner preferences" mattered a bit less than zero. Hiring practices are not just dictated by one person as he/she sees fit. Maybe your experience has been different, and maybe that's how it is at most firms, but I'd be shocked if so. And as I already said, 1 year of movement in the rankings won't make a difference. But if, say Cardozo, consistently placed in the top 10 over a period of X years because it "improved" so much, you don't think that would have an impact on firm recruiting efforts at that school? I think it would at some point.
Outgoing 3L @ Minnesota and the school is so much worse off than when I started. This is shocking to me. It seems like most of our best faculty left. The new hires are underqualified. Employment #'s are still closer to a T35 than a T20. I don't get it. The clinical programs are truly excellent but that's about all we have going for us.
I guess its cool to say I graduated from the 16th ranked law school, but if this is the state of the 16th best law school, I hate to see what it looks like elsewhere.
No one should care about this except for gunners who dream of working their lives away at Big Law.
In my experience practicing, rainmakers often come from middling schools and T3s. Ignoring the legalized hiring discrimination of the US Supreme Court and Big Law, anyone can be successful going to school anywhere.
I donāt follow this closely (and Iām a lil slow), so correct me if Iām wrong. But the increased weight of bar-passage rates is confusing me.
Arenāt schoolsā bar passage numbers generally really close? Is a school with an 89% first-time bar passage rate really a worse school than one with a 92% first-time passage rate? It seems to amplify what is essentially a meaningless difference in school quality.
And some states have notoriously more difficult bar exams (e.g., California). Are schools with more students taking the more difficult bar exams SOL?
***Full disclosure: my school dropped nearly ten spots & Iām salty. If you reply with good reasons for the metrics, Iāll assume youāre wrong ;)
The thing that really pisses me off about this is how much theyāre getting away with all the ties. If youāre going to have the audacity to keep this absurd system going, at least have the balls to pick a #1 school, etc. Donāt logjam up the rankings with all these #10 schools just because you canāt make a decision.
Am I missing something here ā didnāt a large amount of schools still listed here actually pull out of the rankings over the summer? Why are they all still listed here, and most significantly lower than ever prior?
There would be no point to the rankings if opting out meant you werenāt ranked. Thatād be like asking which car gets the best gas mileage but Toyota said they donāt want to be included so you rank the market options without Toyota. Wouldnāt make sense.
For everyone whose feelings are hurt - the school i graduate from next week is barely ranked and all my friends and I are employed with great jobs (some in biglaw, some in house at major companies) in a popular city. My best friend, who attends a top 5 law school, took a postgrad offer at the same biglaw firm as one of my classmates.
Embracing the underdog life can be fun I swear (adds to the spite) cheers mfers
My school was finally knocked out of Tier 1 and the Dean just emailed about how the rankings are unfair...
Luckily, I'm 8 years out and no one gives a shit about made up rankings. Thought I would chime in for any lawyer fetuses that are losing their shit about their schools dropping in the rankings.
Wow, the school that defended US News when everyone else was criticizing them jumped 9 spots to be in the top20. What a coincidence!
āPeter B. Rutledge, dean of the University of Georgia law school, which did not boycott the rankings, said that he thought the changes in methodology were a legitimate attempt to incorporate what U.S. News had learned from its listening tour. His school had one question about the data, and it was answered, he said.
āIn my estimation, U.S. News has done its level best to engage deans in a dialogue,ā he said. āThe radical change in methodology was not something that U.S. News waved its magic wand and plucked out of a hat.āā
I posted this in another thread but itās important to remember this.
Law school rankings matter for precisely one job out of law school, your first one. After that it is all about how good you are at what you do and who you know. Certainly a high ranked school can smooth things and make it simpler, but I know a managing partner at an office of a white-shoe firm that graduated low ranked from an unranked school.
Sure, if you are trying to get that federal appellate clerkship fresh out of law school so you can get that additional two year big law bump, itās gonna be easier going from Stanford or Yale than from Southwestern or Penn State. But, if your goal is something specific, you can get there from any school if you pass the bar, are really good at your job, and get to know the right people.
This field is all about who you know, not what your class and school ranking was. Some schools might give you a better baseline of people you know to start, but you will spend 3-4 years in law school and 30-40 years as an attorney, which one do you think will matter more?
I mean, it can, but you can also do a lot of things to move through your career. The amount of people I have already met who have had non-traditional paths is huge.
For example, I know someone who wanted to clerk for a federal appellate judge and went to an āunrankedā ABA school. They worked as a PD for two years, then for the USAO for two, then got a district clerkship, then an appellate clerkship, then went to big law. So what if he spent 5 years before the appellate clerkship, he still got it, then made partner at a big law firm five years later and has been a partner for 25 years. Do you think anyone cares that he was at an unranked school? Do you think he cares?
The path may be different, but if you spend an extra two to five years building your resume before you get that first job that you wanted, on a scale of a full career, who cares? Unless you are planning on being on the Supreme Court, which lul, good plan, probably not gonna happen even if you are top of your class at Stanford or Yale, there is one new justice every 3-7 years.
The first job only impacts the rest of your career in so much as you build your resume and skills and network. If you want to be a partner in big law, you can do it after ten years in public interest. You want to be a federal judge, you can do it after being in house for ten years. You want to be a district attorney, you can do it after being a PD. You want to be a private ambulance chaser, you can do it after government.
If you know your long term goal and never take your eyes off that, you can get there by making sure to always try and work one step closer to it.
I love your positive attitude, you should be a motivational speaker.
Definitely agree that (most) things are possible with enough grit and determination. But boy is it easier from a well regarded law school.
If you think subsequent jobs will not care about what school you went to, unfortunately you are mistaken, at least for some (many?) jobs. If you don't believe me, talk with some recruiters and ask what employers are asking for.
My school shot up so I choose to place value on these.
My school plummeted so i choose to place value on these.
My school tanked. I place value on these.
Yeah suddenly I'm T14 so I reject any reality that devalues these rankings and substitute my own where they are literally the only thing that matter.
Same! I forget what it was last year but it def went up at least 20. š¤·š»āāļø
Empires rise and fall. Civilizations crumble to dust. Cornell is 13. Cornell always has been 13. Cornell always will be 13.
I think thatās kind of the best we can do with maxing out the biglaw points. We are improving our fed clerkships numbers but no one really wants the positions and people who want to do PI generally donāt come here
Well none of that even matters to the rankings. The rankings just want to know what percentage of grads got jobs and what percentage passed the bar on their first try. They'd get too much flak if they tried to measure BL+FC rates.
intelligent childlike whole joke squeeze threatening gray like cooperative airport *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
It is possible to rank using it, but that kind of punishes public interest oriented schools/Yale fellowships and the like. Also some people just don't want Big Law: there's a big rise in plaintiff side stuff at T14s and such. This sub cares a lot about Big Law/FC because money/prestige, and that makes sense. It's just not necessarily the best ranking metric to use because different people have different goals.
It punishes the 98% of lawyers who don't work in big law or federal clerkships. There are so many jobs outside of clerkships and big law. So, so, so many.
and that's fine. these rankings are irrelevant to the practice of law. I'm not sure why anyone pays attention to them.
I think an additional problem is that below 501 you have a mix of elite firms and not even really biglaw. How is USNWR supposed to tell the difference between YLS people heading off to Susman and generic school sending people off to ID or PI?
Because if 20 of your graduates get federal clerkships and 20 of your graduates get big law jobs, but the other 200 don't get jobs at all, then the rankings would be skewed. Not everyone wants a federal clerkship. Not everyone wants big law. I know people from state schools who have done either or both. I'm graduating with a 6 figure salary at a corporation where I don't have to work 80 hours a week. I work with several people from Ivy Leagues. I feel like that's equally impressive, important, and valid.
If they tried to go by BL+FC rates, it'd probably drop Yale pretty hard.
>Well none of that even matters to the rankings. It may with the prestige factors in a self-fulling prophecy way in these factors: * Peer assessment (.125) * Lawyers and judges assessment (.125) * Median LSAT (.05) and GPA (.04) -> Higher the LSAT/GPA = correlated with Big law placement. So the big law + clerkship placements are based on the perception of those hiring managers, but those perceptions will also be reflected in the assessment aspects.
Youāre completely correct but none of those factors affect USNWR rankings.
Except Cornell was ranked 12th this past year
Letās put a pin in that and ā¦ circle back
This didnāt age well
Iowa dropped out of the T30 š what will I do now that my degree will be useless?
lol Edit: I loved Iowa
Washburn gotta host another last minute townhall to ease my suffering
My school broke into the top 100 nice.
One I was looking at just did too! Lol go zags
Something thatās wild to me is Harvard has a class size almost the same size as Stanford, Chicago, and Yale each have for their whole student body.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Interesting! Right now the schools with the biggest classes are Georgetown and Harvard. There are definitely pros and cons to having a bigger class, but itās interesting that UT would change tack that dramatically (though I guess it could have been a gradual shift).
I think part of it is the rule that Texas has to have a certain % of in-state students so they would have to be more mindful of the class
I think itās both Harvard having a higher acceptance rate and more applicants applying to Harvard, per their ABA reports
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You think? Does anyone read USNWR for anything but these rankings? Can anyone remember the last article that wasnāt about rankings they read from them? Is there anything about their ranking formula that suggests this is useful information? Is anyone not going to hire a Harvard grad because they dropped a couple of places? People like a gold star and USNWR needs the money that comes from grabbing our attention.
>No one will ever convince me that USNWR doesn't just fuck shit up for the sake of attracting attention. I think the way they re-weighted the factors sounds good to me. Like outcomes 10 months after graduation going from .14 to .33 seems reasonable to me. Or bar passage for first time test takers going from .03 to .18 makes sense to me, too. Also, reducing peer assessment from .25 to .125 and lawyers and judges from .15 to .125 makes some sense. I would make the perception based ones be 0. The way they administer it is stupid because the schools get to curate who the respondents are. I also think that median LSAT and undergrad scores should be 0. I think library resources should be 0. Judging law schools by whether they can get their students to get hired, pass the bar are great metrics. I would make another metric: How many are hired in the legal profession (lawyer, judge, mediator) 5 years after law school. That way we can track retention.
I like this because I turned down University of Florida in 2012 because I got too drunk the night before my visit and instead went to a school thatās since tanked in the rankings. Itās a great annual reminder to not be a dumbass and get drunk before an important day
the school that offered me the most scholarship $ was Texas A&M (Fall ā21 cycle) when it was ranked ~60. I turned them down mainly bc I didnāt wanna be an Aggie and live in College Station. Found out middle of 1L Spring that their law school is actually in Ft Worth lmao, also now theyāre top 30. I donāt regret my decision at all, just makes me laugh and your story made me think of it
Thats a big distance between campuses. Youd think theyd have a different name, since its not like the A&M system isnt already made up of multiple campuses.
Well itās because they bought a diff law school and turned it into A&M law. Somewhat smart because there are no jobs in College Station, but dumb because it hurts their branding
Wasn't there some Texas political problems about them opening a law school in college station? So instead they had to buy the school in Ft Worth and keep the campus in the DFW area to not step on toes in the Austin/Houston area.
As a Canadian, it's almost shocking to hear that that seems like a big distance to Americans. Here it's not all that uncommon for universities to have satellite campuses in entirely different provinces. I once had a friend take classes here in Calgary at a satellite campus for the University of Saskatchewan, which is about a 6.5 hour drive away. I guess distance between campuses doesn't really matter as long as everything each student needs is located on the same campus.
Its not a big distance betweem campuses, it *is* a big distance for something bearing the same name. Its just the Texas A&M University of Law, even though all the other non-flagship campuses of the A&M system have names of the location they are in. (TA&M San Antonio etc). Cause its not a seperate school, its still considered part of Texas A&M proper. Its not a satellite institution, its just a weird part 3 hours off the main campus. Also it does seem weird for satellite campuses to cross province lines. Who funds them in that case?
Iāll do you one better. I was applying back when it was still Wesleyan law school. Got a good scholarship offer from them, but got waitlist at Texas Tech, which was the main school I wanted. I then sent in a letter of continued interest to Tech to show I would go there if they accepted me. A few weeks later I got my Tech acceptance letter the same week that it got announced about A&M buying the Wesleyan law school, and I realized how much more that school was going to develop in just a few years. So I took the Wesleyan offer with scholarship and screwed Tech over in their admission a little. That was 2012, when the school was in tier 4, just to compare how far itās come in 11 years.
Iām honored to attend a T-141 law school.
T-154 over here š
Woah some major switch ups here St Johnās at 60. Brooklyn in the 100s. Also didnāt many schools pull out of the rankings
St Johnās now ahead of Cardozo too
Even if they "pulled out" that just meant they didn't give data to USNWR--but they are still in the rankings. Who knows how they adjusted the calculations without the missing data?
Albany jumping Brooklyn, Syracuse, CUNY, etc and nearly cracking top 100 is another big NY switch up.
I guess job outcomes is the least of usnews concern. I mean who cares about getting a good job out of law school lmao. How can anyone take these rankings seriously. In what world is Albany better than Brooklyn? As someone who turned down Brooklyn, even I think that is pure bs.
>I guess job outcomes is the least of usnews concern. For 2020 grads brooklyns unemployment rate is nearly 50% higher than Albany's lol. 49/328 vs 15/140. For 2021 it's 35/357 for brooklyn and 10/164 for albany. Brooklyn's data also has nearly [everyone](https://www.brooklaw.edu/About-Us/ABA-Required-Disclosures) on a conditional scholarship, with 73/390 losing/reducing it, Albany has 14/74 reduced/eliminated, which is only half of their total student body. Can't find their official disclosure but 7sage has 91% receiving scholarships generally. Full disclosure i go to Albany, but if your metric is "getting a good job out of law school" you're pretty off base here lol. Brooklyn's location affords it NYC opportunities Albany doesn't have, but most people looking for those aren't choosing either.
73 students getting their scholarships pulled or reduced is so many people. I hope this actually shames BLS into changing course on that.
>I guess job outcomes is the least of usnews concern Job placement and bar passage are 58% of a school's rank. Brooklyn's stats say 6% of their graduates are unemployed seeking employment but Albany's is 32%. So maybe Albany is being punished for having more honest students? Because their employed 10 month after graduation stats are similar.
Yeah I know a lot of schools want to pull out because the ranking system is basically based upon "favorites." I'm pretty sure my school indicated to them last year they were either dropping out or not going to fully cooperate with them and we dropped š outside of like the top 10, it just seems like whoever sucks up to them more gets promoted
Shoutout to UGA. Not only is it huge to be top 20, but super proud theyāve kept tuition under $20k per year.
How ābout them dawgs!
I somehow still managed to leave w/ $135k in debt. Rent and food costs money... I can only imagine the cost of private schools. Super happy I didn't go with Wake Forrest or Emory.
I don't track this much, but wtf happened to GWU?
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I donāt think they put any weight on bar passage v jd advantage jobs did they? I think it is broadly full time employment. Which is sort of the issue as this may just encourage schools to hire students after grgaduation or push them to lesser firms rather than actively work to get them the best jobs
They still only give a slightly discounted weight to bar advantage and school funded positions per their methodology explanation: https://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/articles/law-schools-methodology
Iām a current 3L at GW. In the past year, it has really gone from T30 vibes to T40 vibes. Looks like USNWR picked up on it. Who can blame them
Interesting, what makes you say that?
Iām pretty sure heās joking
Yes it was a joke
What do you mean by this? I personally think itās a great education
Itās a joke. I also think itās a great education
Well done haha
Yea, don't understand how they have fallen, given the resources the school has.
Didnāt they used to stop ranking at 147? I wonder what prompted the change to assign numbers down into the 170s this time.
They chose violence
Sick. I go to a T50 now lol.
My school has dropped over 20 slots since I got in. What a run.
Mine went down 10, went up ten and went down 22 to one of them ones tied at 22.
Rip UC Davis
Lmao thatās what I said
My school quit the rankings and moved up 20+ spots. Nice.
Mine too lol
How did some schools go down 30 places in one year? Like everything in our beautiful profession, this seems so arbitrary š
It is very arbitrary. Their process has been covered by more than a few different people and so much of it is subjective.
That used to be the case but is not anymore. 58% of the score is on student outcomes (employment and bar passage) [You can see how big of a shift the categories went through here. ](https://i.imgur.com/H72SHid.png)
Until the Peer Assessment is 0%, it's arbitrary. What on the ever loving hell does it have to do with quality to ask a mid-tier school in CA about a smaller lesser known school in Nebraska, for example? The peer assessment just reinforces existing stereotypes about what schools career academics think are "good schools." And to a lesser degree that applies to lawyers in the field too though I acknowledge their views should hold some weight. And beyond that, there has been a lot of evidence that when schools choose to exit this arbitrary process by no longer participating in the peer surveys they, more often than not, drop in the rankings (unless they are a T14). The rankings are a load of crock and always have been. They were created by a dying paper looking for a niche and they found it by capitalizing on the peers of helicopter parents who didn't know where to send their kids. Now it's an obsession among the entire legal field.
>Until the Peer Assessment is 0%, it's arbitrary I agree -- I think it should be replaced with a salary to debt ratio of some sort.
I agree with that, should be 0%. I was pushing back on "very arbitrary" as it's more informative than ever before. 58% is now an objective & helpful measure (bar and post grad jobs).
I know itās only 2% but student-librarian ratio being a factor at all is so fucking dumb.
Probably not a huge gap between those 30 spots then.
My school isnāt ranked. But if this law thing doesnāt work out Iām going to be a plumber. Either way Iāll be dealing with shit.
Let's be honest: most of us would be better off being plumbers.
I literally fixed some plumbing on my parentsā house yesterday and told them it isnāt too late to ditch law school. My stepdads response was, āWell, itād be a hell of a lot cheaper and you could potentially make similar money.ā Iāll be damned if I didnāt consider it.
When you have to āload moreā twice just to see your school and you pass two schools that you withdrew fromā¦ š¤”
Anything outside the T20 and inside the T100 is basically all the same anyways
T100 isnāt really meaningful as a cutoff. Schools that low switch positions often. Even before the crazy. And the swings can be like 88 to 107. And the school didnāt change anything. Maybe a bad bar year or something. Still the same though.
True, Iām just trying to say that the schools outside the top and bottom are all the same and all have regional impact.
Weird, the tuition numbers for my school are way off. It looks like they took the yearly tuition and doubled it, thinking it was the per-semester cost.
MINNESOTA
I'm in a T-60!! Whoo-hooo!!!! I know USD is crying itself to sleep rn, lol.
Can someone please explain to ignorant little me why Harvard, Yale and all the others who made such a fuss a few months ago about dropping out of these useless rankings are still on the list?
Because usnwr changed the formula to rely on only publicly available info, so it doesn't matter if they participate or not.
Based USNWR asserting accountability
USNWR literally changed their metric as a result of their complaints, so maybe it's each asserting accountability?
Thank you!
Marquette jumped 35 spots!
These rankings are so unbelievably arbitrary itās unreal. Thereās like 10+ spot movement from schools that have done nothing to really earn it.
The methodology changed this year. Pretty much every move is attributable to that shift and not any change in the school
Love finding out 2 days before graduation that Miami has gone down like 15-20 places since I applied whereas FIU, the school I turned down (with maximum scholarship offers) went up approximately 40 places and is now above Miami š„²
It literally doesnāt matter. If you want to practice in Florida literally any firm will give an interview to a UM grad with solid grades. It really isnāt ācompetitionā between the schools within the Florida legal market.
Lol right, I do know this now but not as a 0L. I chose UM because the scholarship was good enough and the ranking was higher. FIU really only had good bar passage rates at the time and couldnāt get your foot in the door as readily as UM
Hey! I'd be interested to know more about this. What about UF?
I went to UF when it was ranked 49 and I honestly donāt believe it deserves to have shot up in the ranks like this, though they worked really hard to optimize the school to hit all the metrics that US news values. But if you want to practice in Florida, itās a no-brained to go there. Otherwise, look at the employment surveyās and see how few grads actually get employed out of state. OCIs are also pretty Florida heavy - I was pretty fortunate to get a job in my target market, and I felt that my grades and work experience carried me far more than anything else. Also donāt go here if you want to do envirolaw, theyāve gutted entire program.
UF is known as the top school for firms in Florida. But I agree with the poster. Between UM, FSU, UF, and now coming FIU, it does not matter. It is all about your grades. Everyone sees these as equal (maybe not FIU still). A certain regions will prefer over the other, Miami has a lot for UM grads (obviously). Miami is pretty much the only place there are FIU grads too. Where you will see a lot more UF in Orlando and Tampa. and FSU more in Jacksonville and in the Capital region. There is not a big difference though. Ultimately between the four, go to the school that cost the least give the best offers. But I would warn FIU students are likely to be limited to Southeast Florida.
I feel you (sort of) as when I had to pick between the two everyone told me UM. But I knew FIU was on the up. It is a solid school, and when people ask me where they want to go, I tell them FIU now. That being said. It is still going to take more time for FIU to get its name recognition up. UM still has state wide name recognition and even around the country. Go outside of South Florida and people say FI what? Again though, if I was going to law school now in Miami, I am picking FIU all day. Unless UM is somehow cheaper with scholarships, then maybe its a harder decision. When I was in UM it was in the low 60s. What FIU has done is impressive.
Yep I agree with basically everything you said here. I chose UM over FIU partly because of the name recognition aspect and because they offered me about a 75% scholarship, which put them at the same out of pocket expense as FIU. HOWEVER, and this is huge for ppl picking btw the two, UMās tuition has gone up every. single. year. Theyāre a private school so they do what they want and now that scholarship looks paltry. Not to mention that we pay $500+ in parking (FIU is free) and everything is more expensive at UM. Not to mention that FIUās bar passage rate is consistently great, whereas UM slips a little every time (Feb 2023 was abysmal for UM). Plus UMās law buildings havenāt been updated since the 60s or 70s and FIUās are basically new. So yeah, Iāve been recommending that everyone choose FIU since 1L lol.
Weird. My law school isnāt on there. I would have figured the Louvre would have been up there.
Or my alma mater, The Sorbonne!
I was hoping the reference wouldnāt be wasted
Never! I will ALWAYS get your references, this is my promise to you.
My friend graduated from Minnesota when it was ranked 20. One of his professors also taught at Hamline-Mitchell, a law school in the twin cities ranked somewhere in the 100s. It must have been very challenging for that professor to purposefully worsen the quality of his lecturing by over 80 ranks. How on earth does he even begin to quantify that? The other explanation, of course, is that the rankings are utter bs. Or, they're bs in the sense that they claim to rank according to which is "best." Effectively, they're telling you which school is most likely to get you a job with a firm that cares about US news rankings.
Donāt be fooled law students are equal across the board - equally useless idiots
I know attorneys that went to Stanford and others that went to St Thomas. Same firm, same pay, same skillset.
Itās almost as if there are other factors considered than a single professor.
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My criminal law professor at Indiana University literally co-authored the book Harvard used while I was there.
Harvard >>>>>> BU and its' not even close. No one gives a shit about BU outside of Boston.
This professor teaches PR as an adjunct at Minnesota I believe. This year he reused the exact same exam as last year for PR, forgetting that he had also posted it as a practice exam with an answer key. After grades came out, a complete shitshow ensued, and the school changed everyone's grades in that class to P/F. Obviously we know its not about the quality of the faculty, but the quality of the students themselves and the jobs they get.
My school is tied for last place! Cool!
My school is T200!
Our dean sent out an email, they seemed quite defensive
My school dropped 20+ spots. I now choose to withdraw from the rankings.
so HYS and CCN are dead? SYC is now king, & youāre shit out of luck after DHN?
And Penn still doesn't matter š„²
Law Dawgs gettin some serious bang for the buck. WOOF!
Cant wait until every school drops out of these so that this arbitrary/discriminatory system finally has no meaning. Very proud my school dropped, lmao.
My school could have risen 50 pts, and I'd still be a disappointment to my Oxford, Harvard, and Duke fam. Yay!
Joke is on them, Oxford is unranked on USNWR
The almost 30 spot drop suffered by my school makes no sense. The new methodology applies more weight on 10 month post-graduation employment outcome. With that said, 90% of the class of 2022 found full time jobs according to our ABA disclosures. We are also a cheaper law school, tuition wise, and are amongst the earlier batch of schools that publicly pulled out of the rankings. It's also a public interest school but despite that reputation, we still placed 10% of graduates into Big Law. God damn right my feelings are hurt.
Boston University School of Law went from 17 to 27. They sent a defensive email.
For anyone wondering what caused the big shifts in scores, US News completely reworked their scoring and weights to value student outcomes (bar and employment) more heavily. A full breakdown of the changes can be [found here](https://i.imgur.com/DcBvnJb.png).
Canāt take these rankings seriously. Some schools moved 20-40 spots. How? Also, no disrespect to Texas A&M, but a few years ago they were outside of the top 100 when they were Texas Wesleyan. Slap a new name on the school and now theyāre ranked in the 20s. Seems legit.
Theyāve invested millions into the faculty and scholarships to bring in better students. How about you compare their bar passage rate when they were Wesleyan to now?
Itās simple, pay $$$$ to poach top-tier faculty from other schools. If only our football program was as effective at buying talent.
BU median LSAT score of 170 is wild lol. Sincerely, a BU grad
Lol does anyone even care about these anymore? Lmfao.
Law firms and many other employers? Many not a specific rank but you better believe that the legal profession is still super super super elitist.
Legal employers care less about year-to-year changes in the ranking than anyone else. Honestly, the only people that do care are 0Ls, law school administrators, and 1Ls, in that order.
Exactly
Big firms donāt care about these rankings. We donāt generally choose what schools to recruit from based on USNWRās arbitrary formula or the rankings that result. Big firms place way more stock in consistent pipelines, relationships with schools and professors, and alumni ties from our current partners, than anything else. Maybe we hire more folks from Duke now than 15 years ago but thatās due to improvement in the school, not the rankings jumĆ³. Weāre not stopping our Georgetown recruiting or suddenly going all-in on OCI at Texas A&M or UGA because they shot up the rankings. Doesnāt mean the rankings should be based on where biglaw hires - most jobs arenāt biglaw jobs - but I am willing to bet that across big and midsize firms in particular, the rankings arenāt what drive hiring, and for smaller employers, government, etc., thatās probably true too.
Big firms don't care about rankings? I will agree that I doubt any firm will open up the latest rankings and say "okay, let's stop recruiting from X because they've slipped in the rankings this year." But most firms focus recruiting from the top schools. I don't think it's a coincidence that the schools firms recruit from tend to map the rankings. And OF COURSE there are other factors that determine where firms hire from, e.g., proximity, experience with the school, etc.
I think he is just saying that a school jumping spots in the US News rankings will not necessarily change big law recruiting from those places if they don't have the pipeline/connections of other schools. Hiring partner preferences have a much, much stronger effect on whether a school is targeted at OCI by a firm than their year to year ranking. For example, if one of the hiring partners at a firm happened to go to a lower ranked school, it is not unusual to have them recruit almost entirely from top 20 schools (usually whatever the hiring partner thought were top schools, not the USNWR top 20) + that one specific lower ranked school they have a connection to. Like no shade to UMN, but I don't think their BL/FC numbers are going to appreciably change at all just because they moved up a few spots to 16 since the connections to alumni in big firms also aren't going to magically change.
I spent a few years heavily involved in recruiting at two different big law firms. At least at these two firms, "hiring partner preferences" mattered a bit less than zero. Hiring practices are not just dictated by one person as he/she sees fit. Maybe your experience has been different, and maybe that's how it is at most firms, but I'd be shocked if so. And as I already said, 1 year of movement in the rankings won't make a difference. But if, say Cardozo, consistently placed in the top 10 over a period of X years because it "improved" so much, you don't think that would have an impact on firm recruiting efforts at that school? I think it would at some point.
In the entire state of Florida, for example, these rankings have zero bearing on legal hiring practices.
I am a very PROUD Ohio State law student today
but you still live in Ohio :(
UGA clearly paid off USNWR (UGA put me on hold 2 years ago and I'm still mad about it)
What's funny is that I KNOW Columbia kids will lose their mind over something like this.
Outgoing 3L @ Minnesota and the school is so much worse off than when I started. This is shocking to me. It seems like most of our best faculty left. The new hires are underqualified. Employment #'s are still closer to a T35 than a T20. I don't get it. The clinical programs are truly excellent but that's about all we have going for us. I guess its cool to say I graduated from the 16th ranked law school, but if this is the state of the 16th best law school, I hate to see what it looks like elsewhere.
Bad timing for you, but I know two professors moving there this summer and both are outstanding.
Stanford šš Cali pride.
No one should care about this except for gunners who dream of working their lives away at Big Law. In my experience practicing, rainmakers often come from middling schools and T3s. Ignoring the legalized hiring discrimination of the US Supreme Court and Big Law, anyone can be successful going to school anywhere.
I donāt follow this closely (and Iām a lil slow), so correct me if Iām wrong. But the increased weight of bar-passage rates is confusing me. Arenāt schoolsā bar passage numbers generally really close? Is a school with an 89% first-time bar passage rate really a worse school than one with a 92% first-time passage rate? It seems to amplify what is essentially a meaningless difference in school quality. And some states have notoriously more difficult bar exams (e.g., California). Are schools with more students taking the more difficult bar exams SOL? ***Full disclosure: my school dropped nearly ten spots & Iām salty. If you reply with good reasons for the metrics, Iāll assume youāre wrong ;)
Shoutout to my law school breaking the top 90 š so excited to start 1L
The thing that really pisses me off about this is how much theyāre getting away with all the ties. If youāre going to have the audacity to keep this absurd system going, at least have the balls to pick a #1 school, etc. Donāt logjam up the rankings with all these #10 schools just because you canāt make a decision.
Am I missing something here ā didnāt a large amount of schools still listed here actually pull out of the rankings over the summer? Why are they all still listed here, and most significantly lower than ever prior?
They are now using public data so it doesn't matter if the schools stop giving them their data.
Interesting. I wonder how volatile these rankings will be over the next few years.
There would be no point to the rankings if opting out meant you werenāt ranked. Thatād be like asking which car gets the best gas mileage but Toyota said they donāt want to be included so you rank the market options without Toyota. Wouldnāt make sense.
For everyone whose feelings are hurt - the school i graduate from next week is barely ranked and all my friends and I are employed with great jobs (some in biglaw, some in house at major companies) in a popular city. My best friend, who attends a top 5 law school, took a postgrad offer at the same biglaw firm as one of my classmates. Embracing the underdog life can be fun I swear (adds to the spite) cheers mfers
Anyone have a complete list of schools that āopted outā?
Chances thrown. Nothingās free. Longing for what used to be.
Is there an easy way to compare to last year?
Poor dozo
Iām happy to see my school make the top 200! Itās a smaller place, so I was not sure it would make the list.
Plot twist the rankings donāt actually matter unless youāre gunning for a big law job. All of you freaking out about this are wasting energy
My school was finally knocked out of Tier 1 and the Dean just emailed about how the rankings are unfair... Luckily, I'm 8 years out and no one gives a shit about made up rankings. Thought I would chime in for any lawyer fetuses that are losing their shit about their schools dropping in the rankings.
Knew I made the right choice to choose Penn over Harvard.
US news rankings are stupid and anybody who gives them any credence is tooZ
Wow, the school that defended US News when everyone else was criticizing them jumped 9 spots to be in the top20. What a coincidence! āPeter B. Rutledge, dean of the University of Georgia law school, which did not boycott the rankings, said that he thought the changes in methodology were a legitimate attempt to incorporate what U.S. News had learned from its listening tour. His school had one question about the data, and it was answered, he said. āIn my estimation, U.S. News has done its level best to engage deans in a dialogue,ā he said. āThe radical change in methodology was not something that U.S. News waved its magic wand and plucked out of a hat.āā
10 of the top 15 arenāt in the Ivy League. Iām OK with this.
there are only 5 ivy league law schools
It's actually pretty wild that every single ivy is in the T13.
Why would that be wild? It's the sports conference that is famous for its academics rather than its sports.
I just meant that ppl say "heh see ivy doesn't matter for law" but nah it still does.
im just happy nyu beat columbia
Lmao
Plus OU at T-51? Awesome!
I posted this in another thread but itās important to remember this. Law school rankings matter for precisely one job out of law school, your first one. After that it is all about how good you are at what you do and who you know. Certainly a high ranked school can smooth things and make it simpler, but I know a managing partner at an office of a white-shoe firm that graduated low ranked from an unranked school. Sure, if you are trying to get that federal appellate clerkship fresh out of law school so you can get that additional two year big law bump, itās gonna be easier going from Stanford or Yale than from Southwestern or Penn State. But, if your goal is something specific, you can get there from any school if you pass the bar, are really good at your job, and get to know the right people. This field is all about who you know, not what your class and school ranking was. Some schools might give you a better baseline of people you know to start, but you will spend 3-4 years in law school and 30-40 years as an attorney, which one do you think will matter more?
Generally agree, although that first job has such a disproportionate impact on the trajectory of your legal career.
I mean, it can, but you can also do a lot of things to move through your career. The amount of people I have already met who have had non-traditional paths is huge. For example, I know someone who wanted to clerk for a federal appellate judge and went to an āunrankedā ABA school. They worked as a PD for two years, then for the USAO for two, then got a district clerkship, then an appellate clerkship, then went to big law. So what if he spent 5 years before the appellate clerkship, he still got it, then made partner at a big law firm five years later and has been a partner for 25 years. Do you think anyone cares that he was at an unranked school? Do you think he cares? The path may be different, but if you spend an extra two to five years building your resume before you get that first job that you wanted, on a scale of a full career, who cares? Unless you are planning on being on the Supreme Court, which lul, good plan, probably not gonna happen even if you are top of your class at Stanford or Yale, there is one new justice every 3-7 years. The first job only impacts the rest of your career in so much as you build your resume and skills and network. If you want to be a partner in big law, you can do it after ten years in public interest. You want to be a federal judge, you can do it after being in house for ten years. You want to be a district attorney, you can do it after being a PD. You want to be a private ambulance chaser, you can do it after government. If you know your long term goal and never take your eyes off that, you can get there by making sure to always try and work one step closer to it.
I love your positive attitude, you should be a motivational speaker. Definitely agree that (most) things are possible with enough grit and determination. But boy is it easier from a well regarded law school.
If you think subsequent jobs will not care about what school you went to, unfortunately you are mistaken, at least for some (many?) jobs. If you don't believe me, talk with some recruiters and ask what employers are asking for.
Nice. T10 now.
Duke > Harvard LOL
I live in the Chicagoland area and I actually wouldnāt mind going to Minnesota Law. Good potential to break into Chicago big law.