US News and a Change in the Formula for Law School Rankings: Part time v. Full Time Students: What's a Law School to Do? (Part 5)

We occasionally examine issues associated with law school rankings (for a paper on the impact of law blogging and rankings can be found here). We are examining the impact of a proposal put out by US News to alter the formula for determining the median LSAT and GPA (which provide 22.5% of a law school's ranking). The magazine proposes that medians be calculated based not on full time students but all students, including part time.

We note a few caveats.  First, the medians are the average of the 25th and 75th percentiles, so they may not actually be the median.  Second, this analysis did not look at GPA.  It is possible that in some cases the combination of the part time and full time class will result in a drop in the median LSAT but an increase in the median GPA, offsetting the effect.  The GPA counts for 10%, the LSAT 12.5%.  Third, the likelihood that some schools will fall out of the top 100 in part depends upon the stats of the schools in the third tier that are waiting to rise.  We did not examine this data either.   

The question becomes, assuming US News makes the change and combines full and part time for purposes of median LSAT/GPA, is there anything a law school can and should do?  There are several answers to the question.  Foremost, a law school can do nothing, either out of indifference to the rankings or out of hope that US News will not implement the change.

Assuming a school wants to eschew this approach, it is late in the admissions season to do much to change the class.  Nonetheless, the goals are obvious.  Either shrink the differential in the median between full and part time or reduce the size of the part time division.  Both strategies will reduce the downward pressure on the median LSAT.  Whether there is time to do so depends upon the situation at each law school. 

Whatever a law school does in the short term, it is clear that this change will result in continued homogenization of entering classes, with law schools having an incentive to ensure that the part time and full time divisions have comparable numbers.  In other words, while some law schools may game the numbers by throwing weaker students into the part time division, other law schools likely take a more untraditional student body in the part time division, perhaps those working (in other words likely to be older) and, particularly with schools in urban areas, perhaps more diverse.  Lumping the two programs together will make it harder for the untraditional student to find a spot in law school.

Of course there's always the long term strategy of increasing rankings by improving reputation.  The best, cost effective way to do it?  Blogging.  See Of Empires, Independents, and Captives: Law Blogging, Law Scholarship, and Law School Rankings.