Disparity between a T3 school and its #1-ranked program

[OnionKnight]

So I'm considering Vermont Law for its environmental law program. Vermont Law being a T3-regional is a somewhat daunting prospect, but its environmental law program is absolutely sterling.

Let's say I attend, take the environmental law track, and graduate top of my class. Is my marketability diminished by the fact that I graduated from a T3, or enhanced resulting from the prestigious program?

Makes my head hurt.

[Ludo!]

The program is not prestigious. Specialty rankings don't mean anything

[superbloom]

Specialty rankings are less than worthless.

[Lord Randolph McDuff]

Only go to Vermont if you want to practice up there and you can afford to attend the law school. Maybe if you went there and hit it off with their environmental professors (which, surely, many annoying gunners try to do) then their vaunted #1 ranking could slightly help you obtain a really low paying academic job. Very, very low chance of this happening though.

If you are thinking D.C. or big firms are going to care about Vermont's environmental ranking you are incorrect. They won't even know about it; you wouldn't even have the chance to awkwardly bring it up because you would never get a interview in the first place. It is that meaningless. Sry.

[luckyme]

This is simple. You already know what you want to do! you're far ahead of your peers. Most people choose to go to schools like HYS (all of which have TTT environmental programs compared to Vermont) because they don't know what they want to do! If you're at, say, Yale and eventually decide you want to be an environmental lawyer, say, as a 2L, you'll be kicking yourself for not going to Vermont. And don't think it's easy to transfer from a TTT program--maybe if you finished top of your class at Yale after 1L you would have a shot, but if you have already been admitted to the #1 program for your chosen profession, why would you go anywhere else?

[fatduck]

So I'm considering Vermont Law for its environmental law program. Vermont Law being a T3-regional is a somewhat daunting prospect, but its environmental law program is absolutely sterling.

Let's say I attend, take the environmental law track, and graduate top of my class. Is my marketability diminished by the fact that I graduated from a T3, or enhanced resulting from the prestigious program?

Makes my head hurt.

this is a common mistake, and honestly i don't blame you. see, usnews gives you the prestige rankings of schools, but leaves out a crucial piece of information: the prestige modifier. see, the environmental law rankings only have a prestige modifier of 1.8, compared to 3.3 for the intellectual property law rankings, and a whopping 98.8 for the overall "best law schools" rankings. so the overall prestige of vermont law can be computed as such:

(1 / 119) * (98.8) + (1 / 1) * 1.8 = 2.6

compared to, say, 13th ranked georgetown's prestige:

(1 / 13) * (98.8) = 7.6, almost three times more prestige even without considering georgetown's specialty rankings.

so really, it pays to do your homework in situations like this.

[TheThriller]

So I'm considering Vermont Law for its environmental law program. Vermont Law being a T3-regional is a somewhat daunting prospect, but its environmental law program is absolutely sterling.

Let's say I attend, take the environmental law track, and graduate top of my class. Is my marketability diminished by the fact that I graduated from a T3, or enhanced resulting from the prestigious program?

Makes my head hurt.

this is a common mistake, and honestly i don't blame you. see, usnews gives you the prestige rankings of schools, but leaves out a crucial piece of information: the prestige modifier. see, the environmental law rankings only have a prestige modifier of 1.8, compared to 3.3 for the intellectual property law rankings, and a whopping 98.8 for the overall "best law schools" rankings. so the overall prestige of vermont law can be computed as such:

(1 / 119) * (98. + (1 / 1) * 1.8 = 2.6

compared to, say, 13th ranked georgetown's prestige:

(1 / 13) * (98. = 7.6, almost three times more prestige even without considering georgetown's specialty rankings.

so really, it pays to do your homework in situations like this.

Why get 1 prestige when you could get 2 for the same price

[timbs4339]

Read the fine print. Those "specialty rankings" are determined as follows:

"Specialty rankings are based solely on nominations by legal educators at peer institutions."

So these rankings are based on what other professors think are important, not what employers think are important. You think professors give a shit about how valuable their program is to you? Nope. You think this means you'll have better training? No. What this means is that Vermont's environmental professors have written slightly more articles that have been placed in slightly higher ranking law journals than environmental professors at other schools.