The University of Wisconsin Law School will not participate in this year’s US News & World Report rankings, a decision made in protest of the way the magazine prioritizes metrics the school says conflict with its underlying values.
The school’s decision, announced Thursday, follows dozens of other law schools in a cross-country revolt against the rankings. The withdrawals began last fall when Yale Law School, long ranked No. 1 in the country, said it would not participate because rankings made it difficult for schools to admit and support low-income students.
UW law school dean Dan Tokaji called the US News rankings “problematic” for a variety of reasons. The rankings consider a variety of metrics, with special emphasis on undergraduate mean LSAT and GPAS scores.
“That causes law schools to spend a lot of their money, including scholarship money, trying to hit those numbers,” Tokaji said in an interview. “LSAT and GPA are really useful and important tools. But incentivizing us to focus exclusively on those things is not good for legal education in general.”
Individual evaluations by deans of peer schools are also weighted in the rankings, which Tokaji says has led to publicity dollars directed at other schools to boost their own evaluations.
US News responded to the exodus of schools that opted out by changing some of its methodology earlier this month.
“US News & World Report and its journalists have an important job: to inform the public, hold powerful institutions to account, and foster a free and fair exchange of ideas,” said Kim Castro, US News editor and chief content officer.
But Tokaji said the changes didn’t fix the flawed methodology, and in some ways made it worse.
The new methodology eliminated a metric on student debt. As a public institution, Tokaji said it is UW’s responsibility to keep student debt at a manageable level. Excluding it entirely does not help students in their search process, which, for many, is heavily burdened by financial cost.
Tokaji also took issue with a “dark shift” in methodology last year that caused the school’s bar admission metric to drop from no. #6 to no. years, he said.
The UW Law School told US News at a meeting in late November that the change penalizes schools in states that allow law school graduates to receive their licenses without taking the bar exam. Wisconsin’s “diploma privilege” lowers barriers to entry, especially for people from underrepresented backgrounds, but disadvantages the school in rankings.
The UW School of Law tied for 43rd in the 2022-23 rankings. Tokaji said he is open to participating in future rankings if “substantial and significant” improvements are made to the journal’s methodology.
The dean of the Marquette University School of Law, ranked 105th, was not immediately available for comment Thursday.
This story will be updated.
Contact Kelly Meyerhofer at kmeyerhofer@gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @KellyMeyerhofer.
