…even though everyone who knows anything knows the magazine’s ranking method is without merit. But journalists, of course, don’t know anything, and they stick together. Witness this from a San Francisco paper:

“Once ranked by its peers as a top-five law school, [Berkeley’s] Boalt Hall has slipped. In this year’s annual rankings by U.S. News & World Report magazine, Boalt Hall tumbled to 13th place from 10th last year. Two years ago, it was ranked No. 7.”

Put aside that Berkeley was never ranked in the top five by U.S. News, or anyone else, what’s spooky here is the tacit assumption that a change in U.S. News rank means something, i.e., that it reflects some actual change in academic quality or value, and that it also deserves credence. (Notice the opposite way of reading this: that U.S. News ranks Berkeley 13th (behind, e.g., Duke!) shows that their ranking system is unreliable.) In the last two years, Boalt lost two leading faculty (Mark Lemley to Stanford, Robert Post to Yale), but that has nothing to do with its change in rank in U.S. News. (Consider: while NYU improved its faculty during the 1990s, its academic reputation score in US News actually declined!) Boalt is quite plainly a stronger faculty now than it was ten years ago (additions of Farber, Frickey, Edlin, Choi, and on and on), when U.S. News regularly ranked it in the top ten. Yet that fact has in no way been recorded by the U.S. News rankings; indeed, that magazine has left its readers with the opposite, and thus false, impression.

This, together with the fact that the less well-informed students take the magazine’s rankings rather seriously (for example), explains, of course, why schools devote so much effort to manipulating their showing in that magazine.

Surely some journalists could educate themselves about how U.S. News ranks law schools, and draw the obvious conclusion: changes in rank in U.S. News are arbitrary, and bear no relationship to the quality of an academic institution. They could then stop referencing U.S. News as though it was a relevant measure of institutional quality, and start educating their readers on how to extract the useful information, and discard the irrelevant, from that magazine’s ranking scheme.