The Impact of the Rankings Scandal at Illinois

Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette, Admissions-Scandal Effects Muted So Far at UI Law School:

As roughly 200 first-year students gathered at the UI College of Law for orientation last week — reciting a Pledge of Professionalism that
includes a commitment to integrity — legal observers said it’s difficult to gauge the effect of last year’s events on the law school’s reputation.

The UI experienced a drop in applications this fall, college officials said, but so did other law schools across the country, part of a longer-term downward trend.

Some say the U.S. News rankings slide is temporary, blaming it on a drop in the UI’s reputational score by competing law schools peeved at
the university for fixing the numbers. Others say the rankings don’t reflect true quality but could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The short-term impact won’t be clear for another few months, when the official numbers on 2012 applicants and job-placement data are released by the ABA. Even then it will be hard to tease out the effect of the UI’s recent troubles, experts say. … UI law school officials remain confident the scandal won’t hurt the school’s recruiting or standing in the profession.

Dean Bruce Smith said the law school continued to see a strong contingent of firms interviewing second-year law students on campus this August, despite the tough job market. No faculty left as a result of the events of the last year, and the school recently hired Jason Mazzone, a “rising star” in copyright and constitutional law, Smith said. …

The ABA last month levied an unprecedented
$250,000 fine and public censure against the UI law school for intentionally falsifying academic data for the entering classes of 2005
and 2007-2011 (graduating in 2008 and 2010-2014). …

Smith said the UI’s applicant numbers dropped this year along with other law schools, but he declined to release numbers. The ABA has asked all accredited law schools to provide an official count as of Oct. 5, and the numbers won’t be certified until then, he said. The “transparency plan” the UI law school developed last December also pledges to publish only independently certified admissions data.

The incoming class is approximately 200 students, up from last year’s 184, Smith said. Since 2005, the first-year class has fluctuated
between 172 and 239. The number of applicants has also varied, from 2,418 to 4,680.

The UI fell from 23rd to 35th in the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings this past spring, a precipitous drop on a list where
annual changes are usually incremental. Villanova’s law school, which also admitted to reporting inaccurate data, dropped from 84th to 101st.

Brian Leiter, a University of Chicago law professor who blogs about law schools, attributes it to payback. Most striking was the academic
reputation score, which fell from 3.5 to 3.1 — an “unheard of” four-tenths of a point, Leiter said. “The reputation scores at most drop a tenth of a point in one direction or another, often for no discernible reason. I’ve never seen this before,” Leiter said. “That is clearly the professoriate at large, deans of other law schools, punishing Illinois for cheating on the U.S. News submissions.”

It’s a warning to other schools that might have been tweaking their numbers, Leiter said. But he also thinks the score is unfair, as professors who rate schools for U.S. News are asked to evaluate the faculty, the alumni and the academic quality of the school. “The fact that there was an admissions dean, with or without encouragement from the higher-ups … fudging the numbers didn’t really change the core features of the school,” said Leiter, who called the UI a top-20 law school.

Other legal professionals agree the scandal, while serious, didn’t reflect on the quality of the faculty or the education at the law
school. They argue that law firms are more likely to look at the track record of UI alumni they’ve hired in the past. …

The danger, Leiter said, is that rankings can become self-fulfilling. If a school ranks low one year, that feeds into its reputational score the next year, which makes up 25 percent of its overall score, he said.

State-funded schools are already at a disadvantage compared with private schools, as one measure in the rankings is the amount spent per
student, Leiter and others said. Both the University of Wisconsin and the University of California-Hastings, which were considered “top 20-ish” schools a generation ago, have slipped in the U.S. News rankings, Leiter said. “It starts to affect what students do. Faculty start to think twice about places,” he said.

“Employers, contrary to what students think, don’t really spend their days waiting for the U.S. News rankings. Employers go on past
experience. The firms that have recruited at the University of Illinois and have a good experience will continue to recruit from the University of Illinois,” Leiter said. On the other hand, “If the quality of the student body goes down noticeably, and it stays down for a couple of years, employers may decide to rethink,” he said.