Last week, a website, USNews.com, released its annual rankings of law and other professional schools. (Since I was off-line last week, my comments had to wait.) Commentary, predictably, focused on the overall rank assigned by the website–what is known to “insiders” as the “nonsense number,” since it is the upshot of an inexplicable weighting of 12 different factors, many self-reported and so of dubious accuracy anyway, but the amalgamation basically stipulative. Fortunately for USNews.com, many superficial journalists report the nonsense number, and changes in the nonsense number, as though they meant something….
The most interest was in the nonsense number for UC Irvine, ranked for the first time this year. UCI came in at #30, the highest nonsense number debut I’ve ever seen in USNews.com. In USNews.com land, this puts UCI third in the UC system–behind Berkeley and UCLA, and ahead of UC Davis (31st) and UC Hastings (59th). (Hastings has probably been the most dramatic victim, over many years, of the small, private school bias in the USNews.com rankings.) Interestingly, UCI got this result despite weaker reputational scores: 29th in reputation among lawyers/judges (a rather good result, though, for a new school), and only 42nd among academics. Almost every school with a nonsense number around UCI had a higher academic reputation score, and my guess is UCI’s will now improve accordingly. (The evidence for the echo chamber effect of the “overall rank” on the reputation scores in subsequent yeras is even greater now than in the past.) My guess is all those annoyed by the UC system starting a new law school penalized UCI in the reputational survey–if USNews.com published the median and mode, we’d have some idea, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the distribution was skewed in that way. Counting against UCI is that it is still very small, and will presumably have to grow, which may affect other metrics.
My earlier thoughts on the rankings of UCI Law are here.