Law School deans blast 'U.S. News' rankings

Penn Law School Dean Colin Diver added his name to a letter criticizing the high-profile rankings. Imagine receiving a letter from the deans of 92 percent of American law schools warning you, a prospective law student, not to read U.S. News & World Report. That scenario became a reality last Thursday, as 93,000 applicants to the nation's law schools received such a letter in their mailboxes, signed by 164 law school deans. Colin Diver, dean of Penn's Law School, was one of the signatories. Entitled "Law school rankings may be hazardous to your health," the missive is the Association of American Law Schools' latest attack on U.S. News' annual rankings of the nation's top graduate schools. But frustration with the rankings is not confined to law schools. Even at Universities like Penn, which placed three of its professional schools -- Nursing, Wharton and Medicine -- in the top five nationwide, there was widespread dissatisfaction with the rankings among graduate school administrators. The latest rankings were released last Friday. "We're doing lots of things right, but the [U.S. News] algorithm may be a bit suspect," said Dwight Jaggard, graduate dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science, which ranked 32nd nationwide. Diver was also disappointed with the rankings. The Penn Law School ranked eighth this year, up three spots from 1997. "I think we're better than that," Diver said. "There is an appearance of science to these rankings, [but] so many arbitrary components to the formula." But Susan Greenbaum, a spokesperson for the Nursing School -- which ranked second, up one place from the last time nursing programs were rated in 1995 -- said the rankings are fine so long as they are kept in context. "They are reputational surveys," Greenbaum said. "There are many measures of a school's excellence, and reputation is certainly one of them." But Diver questioned the ability of survey participants to rank the reputations of schools they may not be acquainted with. "They ask all of us to rank all 179 law schools, which is preposterous," Diver said. He also criticized the assumption that all law schools can be ranked based on the same criterion. "We're better than Yale in some respects," Diver said. "But I wouldn't stand on top of the mountain and shout out that we're better than Yale Law School." Diver's concerns are not just sour grapes: Witness the signature of the dean of Yale Law School, No. 1 this year, on the letter. Harvard, ranked second, was one of the few schools which didn't sign the letter. Diver said the deans who signed the letter hoped to alert U.S. News that "there are many attributes the the ratings don't cover at all." A statement from the executive director of the Association of American Law Schools, Carl Monk, described the rankings as a "misleading and deceptive, profit-generating commercial enterprise that compromises U.S. News & World Report's journalistic integrity." In response to the protests, U.S. News issued a statement defending the rankings as "an independent assessment, an efficient way to compare schools, and a means for gathering judgments that experts have made about each law school." Still, the weekly news magazine stressed that the "rankings should not be applicants' main source of information." Wharton Graduate Dean Bruce Allen, whose school stayed put at third among business schools, said he feels that the rankings do serve a purpose, but that the difference between No. 1 and No. 3 may be pure fantasy. "You're really going to tell me that that's not within the margin of error?" Allen said of the one point separating Wharton and No. 1 Harvard in the rankings. But Allen said that this ranking, combined with others, present a generally accurate perception of schools' relative strengths. Jaggard, however, said that even general perceptions taken from the ratings may be misleading. He noted that numbers like total research funding, which factors heavily into rankings for engineering schools, can be biased against smaller schools. While Penn's Engineering faculty do well in per capita funding measurements, the faculty's smaller size means its total research funding is lower than that at larger schools. "Because of our relatively modest size, we probably don't get a fair shake in terms of the ratings," Jaggard said. Nevertheless, Diver and other administrators acknowledged that it feels good to rank high. "We're always pleased when we're moving in the right direction," Diver said. Penn's doctoral programs in Economics and Psychology were also ranked in the top 10.