New York Law Journal: Law Schools, April 27 2009

The Rankings

What Frims Want

your offer. If they are likely to get into higher-ranked schools, you could make them jump over an extra hurdle or even put them on a waiting list to test their commitment before you’ll make them an offer.

Of course, there are direct and possibly substantial costs to these kinds of decisions, but since they’re aimed specifically at the proportion-of-applicants-accepted ranking crite-

rion, and since they will have little if any effect on the quality of an entering class, they’re worth it from a rankings perspective.

Now what about the selection criteria themselves? Since the LSAT and GPA medians are the major criteria involved in assessing student selectivity, your focus will trend toward them. You will certainly deemphasize factors like work experi-

ence, graduate school, grade trends and letters of recommendation. Soft factors, like leadership or people skills, are very likely to go since they are the hardest and most time-intensive to tease out of an application anyway.

To raise medians you might decide to trade off high LSATs with low GPAs and vice versa. You might also decide to look at undergraduate GPAs in a vacuum, (i.e., ignore contextual factors like where it was earned, relevance or difficulty of the major, etc.). You might reduce the size of your entering class, but make up for it with part-time, transfer, or graduate students who are not counted for rankings purposes.

There are no direct costs to these approach-es. In fact, if a school were to focus only on numerical credentials in assess-

ing academic potential, it would actually reduce the costs associated with judging “soft,” more subjective criteria. These costs savings, in turn, could help pay for the relatively expensive steps that have been taken to increase application volume and decrease offers. But, in the fully rankings-assimilated school, you would not stop there.

Ranking-focused strategic behavior would also

cal profile of your entering class.

In a rankings driven process, need-based financial aid would definitely take a back seat, because it involves a high cost for very little direct, rankings-related return. Merit-based aid, particularly with merit defined as high test scores and GPAs, would become the preferred allocation method. Carefully targeted merit aid can both lower the number of

Soft factors, like leadership or people skills,

Does all of this sound like pure conjecture? Think again. The things I have been talking about are “rational” behavior in response to a powerful set of incentives, and they are happening in law schools across the country today.

This is not to say that every school engages in all these behaviors, but the trends are real, and because the rankings culture is now so ingrained, schools sometimes no longer have the institutional memory to recall that it hasn’t always been this way.