New law school ratings are out (pdf). Well, not exactly out, but leaked from U.S. News & World Report. Good on NYU for tying with Columbia for #4. And for Stanford for displacing Harvard as #2. I suspect Harvard’s decline has something to do with their admittance of Ben “vaginas and brown people (and brown people with vaginas!) really scare me” Shapiro, but that’s strictly speculative.
Otherwise, I think law school rankings are pretty silly. Law school is hard wherever you go. The professors are a mix of good and bad wherever you go. You’re learning the same basic things wherever you go. The difference, of course, is that if you get into one of the top schools, you’re pretty much set for a job after graduation. We hear that a lot here: “Don’t stress. Everyone who graduates from NYU gets a job, and it’ll be a very good job.” Which is kind of nice, because it makes the whole atmosphere less competitive — you don’t feel like the person sitting next to you is trying to “beat” you grade-wise — and everyone is fairly hard-working anyway, so it doesn’t become an excuse for sloth.
The bad thing, of course, is that “elite” schools still generally serve the more elite in society. I can afford to go to law school because my parents paid for my undergraduate education, and so I didn’t have any outstanding loans when I applied to grad school. I could, of course, have gone on to law school even if I had acrued undergraduate loans — but I’ll be graduating from NYU Law nearly $200,000 in debt. I can’t imagine taking that on if I already had an additional $200,000 in outstanding loans from undergrad.
Elite law schools also tend to get most of their students from elite undergraduate institutions — the people I know here come almost exclusively from highly-regarded private undergraduate institutions, or top state schools. And those top undergraduate institutions, in turn, get most of their students from highly-regarded private and public high schools. That isn’t to say that kids from not-so-great schools never get in to college, but it’s a lot harder from a kid coming from, say, inner-city Kansas City where some of the schools are so bad that many out-of-state colleges won’t even recognize them, than it is for someone coming from, say, Andover Academy, where most of the graduates go on to college — and mostly elite colleges, at that. And while places like Andover offer lots of scholarships, that hardly evens the playing field.
We like to think that all is created equal in education, and if you just work hard enough you can achieve anything. But that just isn’t the case. I look around the room in law school — I’m in class right now — and I see three African-American people. I see that the vast majority of the room is white. I see that when we go on interviews with law firms, it’s a lot easier to find common ground with someone who looks like you and who shares your experience, and you’re more likely to get hired and promoted by someone who feels that they “connect” with you and can relate to you — one reason why it’s a little tougher, I think, for women breaking into firms, and much tougher for people of color.
The cards are really stacked against low-income people trying to go to law school. And we’re blind if we ignore the fact that race and income are strongly correlated. The problems start early in education, and don’t stop even after graduate school has been completed. And as a fairly privileged white girl, I don’t see the half of it.
Anyway, this all has very little to do with the ratings themselves. Point is, it confers a lot of benefit on me to go to an elite school that is congratulated by a magazine written expressly for the elite classes that go to these schools. This benefit is recycled through generations of wealth, and continues to marginalize those who have been historically oppressed and underrepresented. It doesn’t take much more than a cursory glance around a law school classroom, or a law firm, to see how this plays out.