UC Law SF Opts Out of U.S. News Rankings

Statement of Chancellor & Dean David Faigman:

The new rankings methodology announced earlier this week by U.S. News & World Report (“US News”) in a recent email to law school deans fails to address many of the most fundamental flaws with its ranking system and, in many ways, compounds them. As a result, UC Law SF (formerly UC Hastings Law) will no longer provide institutional data to US News for use in its law school rankings, at least until such time as US News truly addresses the concerns that we and other law schools have long shared with them.

The new methodology US News sketched will not reflect the true excellence of a school like UC Law SF. That is because US News apparently plans to continue to apply a single cookie-cutter formula to the nation’s wide variety of law schools, without actually measuring the degree to which law schools achieve their core mission elements and without properly standardizing to account for variations in student populations, geographic regions, or law schools’ success in placement in specific law job markets.

Also, by continuing to emphasize entering metrics, the method US News announced doubles down on the rankings penalty imposed on schools that prioritize diversity and access. Finally, by continuing to assign precise numeric rankings, US News continues to suggest, incorrectly in our view, that meaningful distinctions can be made between schools that earn a few more or less points based on the limited factors US News now includes in its formula. Simply reducing the number of data points the rankings consider and varying how they are weighted does nothing to address these fundamental problems.

Read more here.