David E. Van Zandt (Dean, Northwestern), Rankings Are Valuable (And Here to Stay); So Let’s Focus on Making Them Better:

The debates about the merits of the U.S. News & World Reports annual law school rankings undoubtedly will escalate with the imminent release of the new rankings. The rankings indeed are far from perfect. (I myself think there should be a different weighting of variables.) And we, as legal educators and practitioners, should continue to share our concerns about the methodology and weightings used by U.S. News.

That said, my unpopular position on law school rankings essentially remains unchanged for the past decade. I strongly believe in them. Rankings offer prospective law students an important source of consumer information with which to evaluate law schools.

Frankly, I believe we need more rankings. I especially would welcome additional rankings that would focus on employer perspectives and employment outcomes. Business Week’s rankings of MBA programs, for example, do a much better job of focusing on employers and allowing them to rank graduates of schools based on specific desired qualities and outcomes. However, just having more independent publications (as occurs in the business school world) rank law schools in different ways would help…

In the meantime, U.S. News offers a useful ranking for prospective law students. As I have argued for many years, the rankings help applicants make more informed decisions by supplying information about a school’s objective performance and perceived reputation, rather than relying so heavily, as in the past, on the advice of friends and relatives, which can be less reliable.