Another Worthless Ranking

A few days ago Rose linked to an article that ran on Philly.com that talks about some survey that apparently showed Philadelphia's law schools outproduce their peers in terms of BigLaw placement:
The study counted the graduates from the last 25 years who are now partners in one of the nation's top 100 law firms.

The results, which the study claims are the first ever to measure such a statistic, rank Temple Law 26th in the nation, with 160 partners placed in law firms over the last quarter-century.
...
In contrast, Temple Law ranks 61st in the controversial U.S. News and World Report's graduate-school rankings, which weigh everything from a school's student-teacher ratio to its LSAT scores.
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In top-law-firm placement, Villanova Law ranked 35th in the nation. It placed 84th overall in the U.S. News list.

Widener Law, which has campuses in Wilmington and Harrisburg, is unranked in the U.S. News standings, but 70th in law-firm placement.

The article later notes that UPenn somehow did worse than its U.S. News placement.

I bring this ridiculous study up only to show the intellectual vapidity at work in research/propaganda about the legal field.

And here it is:

The study ignores that some schools have larger student bodies than others, Seto wrote.

"If employers cared solely about per-capita outcomes, they would all interview at Yale. They don't. For employers attempting to allocate scarce recruiting resources, aggregate numbers matter."

This should raise a question: who, exactly, is the professor doing this for? Employers trying to allocate those resources, or - you know - objective truth? As a so-called legal scholar, he doesn't exist to serve as a free consultant to his old buddies in BigLaw, does he?

But I digress again. The real problem I see here is that this ranking is even more useless than the U.S. News rankings, and yes, I think those are fairly useless.

Who the hell cares what school produced the most BigLaw partners from the last 25 years? For one, partnership is generally something attained like 7 years down the road, so you're looking at who made partner from the group of people who graduated law school between 1986 and 2004 or so.

Since we're not factoring in enrollment sizes, we're basically rewarding schools for cranking out the most students between said years. And obviously, schools located in large metro areas are going to be at an advantage, as they would have a better chance at their mid-level graduates later lateralling into BigLaw partnerships. (You can see the list here and see the schools that out-perform their "other" ranks are almost all in large urban areas).

How the hell such a limited and non-proportional study is supposed to show anything of relevance for prospective students now is beyond me. Temple Law enrolls 1000. Many "better" law schools enroll far less.

This is the same type of screwy, illogical accounting error that allows Cooley to rank itself second in the country. And there it is being published by a law professor and appearing on a major newspaper's website.

Never mind the fact that population shifts and the fortunes of large law firms affect these sorts of things. And never mind that becoming a partner almost always features variables that have little to do with one's legal education aside from the prestige of the name on the degree.

This list would lead one to believe John Marshall and NYLS are better options that Alabama or Colorado, or that Georgetown is a superior school to U. of Chicago or Yale by virtue of its size.

In other words, AWAC (as worthless as Cooley's). Of course, Elie Mystal calls them "rankings worth paying attention to."