. Forum

[jdMission]

I hope that you don't spend too much time thinking about rankings and ratings. Rankings are arbitrary and that their purpose is to simplify what truly is a complex and personal decision. Rankings cannot determine whether you would prefer the hustle and bustle of New York City’s West Village, where New York University School of Law is located, or the relative quiescence of Ithaca, where Cornell University Law School is located.

Rankings should be taken with more than a grain of salt—a bucket, perhaps?—and you should take time to determine the factors that are most important to you (e.g., academic/professional specializations, location, class size) in a JD program, and then do your research to identify the schools that best meet your needs by fulfilling these factors. Further, rankings are released each year and thus place emphasis on the short term. However, your relationship with your school and your classmates will endure long after you graduate, regardless of how your school is ranked in two years, five years, ten years—even 50 years!

We hope that if you choose to consult the various law school rankings, you will do so with a sense of humor and an open mind.

Sunitha Ramaiah
Co-Founder and Consultant to Nerf, Inc.; Scuba Diver Instructor
Liberty Law '06

[Flips88]

I like to spam TLS

Sunitha Ramaiah
Co-Founder and Consultant jdMission

Also, Jesus Christ, you charge kids $4,500 to advise them on things they could all get done for free by people on TLS?

[ahduth]

I like to spam TLS

Sunitha Ramaiah
Co-Founder and Consultant jdMission

Also, Jesus Christ, you charge kids $4,500 to advise them on things they could all get done for free by people on TLS?

Meh, don't hate, these people are probably going to make bank. They just need to learn not to advertise here, because they'll be called out for being a waste of money.

I need to figure out how to gather up some of this business. Check out some of this stuff:

http://www.jdmission.com/services.php?package=2

500 bucks for something that takes probably 15 minutes? Don't mind if I do...

[Flips88]

I like to spam TLS

Sunitha Ramaiah
Co-Founder and Consultant jdMission

Also, Jesus Christ, you charge kids $4,500 to advise them on things they could all get done for free by people on TLS?

Meh, don't hate, these people are probably going to make bank. They just need to learn not to advertise here, because they'll be called out for being a waste of money.

I need to figure out how to gather up some of this business. Check out some of this stuff:

http://www.jdmission.com/services.php?package=2

500 bucks for something that takes probably 15 minutes? Don't mind if I do...

Lol. They'll also look at your app if you get dinged. for $500.

[09042014]

I should run a service like that. "I'M ALSO MY OWN CUSTOMER. I TURNED MY 2.8 into a TTT14 acceptance AND SO CAN YOU!"

[ahduth]

I should run a service like that. "I'M ALSO MY OWN CUSTOMER. I TURNED MY 2.8 into a TTT14 acceptance AND SO CAN YOU!"

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this forum IS a service like that. PS review, recommendations on schools to apply to/attend, procedural advice.

These guys seem like they'll do well - the website is very polished, perfect to soothe the fears of paranoid tiger children and their even more paranoid parents. TLS is more like some sort of retarded version of the Thunderdome, except everyone is sunlight-deprived and out of shape.

[CanadianWolf]

"10 years from now, will Yale Law still be #1 ?" Not if magazine sales are down.

[Flips88]

I should run a service like that. "I'M ALSO MY OWN CUSTOMER. I TURNED MY 2.8 into a TTT14 acceptance AND SO CAN YOU!"

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this forum IS a service like that. PS review, recommendations on schools to apply to/attend, procedural advice.

These guys seem like they'll do well - the website is very polished, perfect to soothe the fears of paranoid tiger children and their even more paranoid parents. TLS is more like some sort of retarded version of the Thunderdome, except everyone is sunlight-deprived and out of shape.

The part I think is most worthless is the pre-law counseling crap. You don't need to turn yourself into someone you are not by joining a bunch of clubs you don't care about to get into good schools. You don't need help with picking courses. That's what an academic advisor is for at school.

Also, I'm guessing the people that use jdMission aren't kids gunning for HYS because those kids aren't dumb enough to think these services are worthwhile. I feel bad for the kids that spend $5k to get help to get into a TTTT

[JamMasterJ]

I like to spam TLS

Sunitha Ramaiah
Co-Founder and Consultant jdMission

Also, Jesus Christ, you charge kids $4,500 to advise them on things they could all get done for free by people on TLS?

Once, somebody posted a list of all the LR questions by type. She then proceded to post a link to the exact same thing, but her list was less comprehensive

[Flips88]

I like to spam TLS

Sunitha Ramaiah
Co-Founder and Consultant jdMission

Also, Jesus Christ, you charge kids $4,500 to advise them on things they could all get done for free by people on TLS?

Once, somebody posted a list of all the LR questions by type. She then proceded to post a link to the exact same thing, but her list was less comprehensive

Sunitha Ramaiah
Appalachian State '91
NYLS '95
Co-Founder jdMission

Somebody clearly couldn't find a jerb as a lawyer

[ahduth]

I like to spam TLS

Sunitha Ramaiah
Co-Founder and Consultant jdMission

Also, Jesus Christ, you charge kids $4,500 to advise them on things they could all get done for free by people on TLS?

Once, somebody posted a list of all the LR questions by type. She then proceded to post a link to the exact same thing, but her list was less comprehensive

Sunitha Ramaiah
Appalachian State '91
NYLS '95
Co-Founder jdMission

Somebody clearly couldn't find a jerb as a lawyer

Again, don't hate... someone's going to be making bank after this whole thing.

Just make sure it's you and not DesertFox.

[Flips88]

Also I see by searching posts that the mods had some fun with her signature line:

Sunitha Ramaiah
Board of Directors, PepsiCo

Sunitha Ramaiah
Model Car Enthusiast

Sunitha Ramaiah
Former Campaign Manager, Newt Gingrich for President

Sunitha Ramaiah
Co-Founder of New York Law School

Sunitha Ramaiah
Beatles Enthusiast

Sunitha Ramaiah
Wichita Community College '91
Barry Law '95
Co-Founder jdMission

Sunitha Ramaiah
Princeton University '91
Columbia Law School '95
Co-Founder jdMission

[bjsesq]

Again, don't hate... someone's going to be making bank after this whole thing.

Just make sure it's you and not DesertFox.

I ain't havin no caveat emptor, brah. Calling them on it != hating.

[09042014]

Nah, admissions consultant is TTT. I'm going to work on a start up co. that uses Google Scholar to write memos for people. Then sell it to google.

[Flips88]

Lol, on further inspection, she apparently went to Princeton and Columbia Law.

The rest of the website staff:

-UVA mba and former speech writer for Israeli ambassador to the US
-Cornell and Harvard Law
-Harvard Business
-UC Berkeley Mba
-Masters in IR from London School of Economics, JD from Toronto

They're just trolling a bunch of vulnerable college kids for thousands of dollars.

[ahduth]

Lol, on further inspection, she apparently went to Princeton and Columbia Law.

The rest of the website staff:

-UVA mba and former speech writer for Israeli ambassador to the US
-Cornell and Harvard Law
-Harvard Business
-UC Berkeley Mba
-Masters in IR from London School of Economics, JD from Toronto

They're just trolling a bunch of vulnerable college kids for thousands of dollars.

Why the hell do we troll them for free then?

[rayiner]

This is idiotic. The rankings are important, but slight movements don't matter. Yale will always be in the top tier of law schools, NYU will always be in the tier immediately below YHS, etc.

"always" is a strong word. Stanford wasn't part of the top 3 until the 1990 USNWR. Going back further NYU wasn't a top school. Before that, before the rise of L&E, Northwestern was considered superior to U Chicago.

[09042014]

This is idiotic. The rankings are important, but slight movements don't matter. Yale will always be in the top tier of law schools, NYU will always be in the tier immediately below YHS, etc.

"always" is a strong word. Stanford wasn't part of the top 3 until the 1990 USNWR. Going back further NYU wasn't a top school. Before that, before the rise of L&E, Northwestern was considered superior to U Chicago.

All it would take is a really incompetent Dean. Increase the student size, make questionable academic hires and then all the sudden it's a Columbia peer.

[rayiner]

I hope that you don't spend too much time thinking about rankings and ratings. Rankings are arbitrary and that their purpose is to simplify what truly is a complex and personal decision. Rankings cannot determine whether you would prefer the hustle and bustle of New York City’s West Village, where New York University School of Law is located, or the relative quiescence of Ithaca, where Cornell University Law School is located.

Rankings should be taken with more than a grain of salt—a bucket, perhaps?—and you should take time to determine the factors that are most important to you (e.g., academic/professional specializations, location, class size) in a JD program, and then do your research to identify the schools that best meet your needs by fulfilling these factors. Further, rankings are released each year and thus place emphasis on the short term. However, your relationship with your school and your classmates will endure long after you graduate, regardless of how your school is ranked in two years, five years, ten years—even 50 years!

We hope that if you choose to consult the various law school rankings, you will do so with a sense of humor and an open mind.

Sunitha Ramaiah
Co-Founder and Consultant jdMission

The rankings are in fact not arbitrary. They clearly measure real world things. Whether those things are useful to you are another matter. In a similar vein, I don't think "quiescent" means what you thing it means.

[071816]

Sunitha Ramaiah
Co-Founder and Consultant jdMission

[bgdddymtty]

USNews doesn't give law schools prestige it is a poor attempt to measure their prestige. Yale is no 1 no matter what USNews says.

Also stop viewing the ranking as a list. It's more of a pyramid.

This.

Also, Yale is number one in the USNWR rankings because they outspend every other school by a large margin. Harvard and Stanford trade places because they spend about the same. It then becomes a giant clusterfuck at the bottom of the T14 with schools switching places because the differences in the amount each school spends is not very large.

The two bolded statements basically contradict one another, yet your "this" seems to indicate that you find them compatible. DF is dreaming if he doesn't think that a significant portion of the "Yale is #1" reputation (probably the majority) is based upon its USN ranking. Yale is #1 because the publication with the recognized monopoly on credibility in law school rankings says so.

DF is also conflating quality and prestige. The USN rubric is a poor attempt to measure the quality of each law school, and the rankings that result therefrom endows the schools that score highly with a lot of prestige. Of course, it's a self-perpetuating cycle. Law schools do well on USN, thereby becoming more sought-after by students and employers. These schools then increase their admissions standards accordingly, and so on and so forth.

The fatal flaw in the system is that what USN measures is crap. Most of it has little if anything to do with the actual quality of legal education rendered by a given institution. Here is a breakdown of the USN methodology:
Peer assessment (25%): The single biggest factor in the rankings (by almost 2:1!) involves asking deans and faculty members which law schools they think are the best. How the #$%^ should they know? Also, is it any shock that the law school most geared toward producing new members of legal academia does best in this measure?
Lawyer/judge assessment (15%)
Percentage of grads employed 9 months after graduation (14%): Any job, temp or perm, part-time or full-, legal or not. Whether a JD program leads to jobs is an important measure; it would be hard to come up with a worse way of measuring it than this.
Median LSAT (12.5%)
Expenditures per student (11.25%): While at some level spending on students is beneficial, there are problems aplenty with this measure, one of the worst being that it incentivizes schools to keep tuition prices high. It also penalizes larger law schools, since the diminishing marginal returns associated with this kind of spending suggest that schools with larger classes don't need to spend as much money per student in order to give students the same level of benefit that a smaller school does.
Median UGPA (10%): Good in theory, but UGPA is so variable between institutions, majors, and course choices that it renders any comparison using a single raw number almost entirely obsolete.
Percentage of grads employed at graduation (4%): See above.
Student/faculty ratio (3%): I doubt there's any evidence out there that shows any correlation between small class sizes and course material mastery at the law school level.
Acceptance rate (2.5%): YP, anyone?
Bar passage rate (2%): Probably fine, although this varies a good deal between states based on the difficulty of the several bar exams.
Library resources (0.75%): Lolwut? In 2011? Seriously?

By my count, over 70% of the USN score is based on seriously flawed metrics. GIGO. This is without even getting into matters like the fact that the score for each component is based around deviation from the mean, meaning that excellence in areas where there are wide discrepancies between schools (e.g., money) gives a school a big boost, whereas leadership in a category where schools are clustered together (e.g., LSAT/UGPA) doesn't give a school much of a score boost at all.

It's. A. Crock.

[Gecko of Doom]

Sunitha Ramaiah
Former Campaign Manager, Newt Gingrich for President

That one made me lol.

[bk1]

The two bolded statements basically contradict one another, yet your "this" seems to indicate that you find them compatible. DF is dreaming if he doesn't think that a significant portion of the "Yale is #1" reputation (probably the majority) is based upon its USN ranking. Yale is #1 because the publication with the recognized monopoly on credibility in law school rankings says so.

You're trolling, right?

[bgdddymtty]

The two bolded statements basically contradict one another, yet your "this" seems to indicate that you find them compatible. DF is dreaming if he doesn't think that a significant portion of the "Yale is #1" reputation (probably the majority) is based upon its USN ranking. Yale is #1 because the publication with the recognized monopoly on credibility in law school rankings says so.

You're trolling, right?

Not even a little bit. I'm not saying that Yale hasn't been a top law school for a long time. I'm not saying that they weren't recognized as the top law school in the country before USN started doling out rankings. I am saying, however, that the consensus opinion that Yale is the best law school in the country now is based in very large part on the fact that USN says so.

Also, as I stated before, the question of which is the best law school in the country depends greatly on the question of what makes a law school good. Given that a JD is a professional degree, I submit that a significant factor in that analysis ought to be how well the school prepares its students to practice law.

In that vein, consider the Princeton Review rankings. PR interviews students rather than faculty, and asks them various questions about the quality of their law school experience. How does Yale do in those? Poorly. In fact, aggregating the PR scores for academic experience, admissions selectivity, career preparation, and quality of professors, Yalies ranked their school 39th, tied with Cardozo.

Before you go tearing into the methodology of the above study, realize that I'm not saying that Yale is the 39th-best law school in the country. But it isn't necessarily the best, either, and the fact that "everyone" believes that it is is due mostly to the fact that a supposed authority on the subject keeps saying so over and over again.

[JamMasterJ]

The two bolded statements basically contradict one another, yet your "this" seems to indicate that you find them compatible. DF is dreaming if he doesn't think that a significant portion of the "Yale is #1" reputation (probably the majority) is based upon its USN ranking. Yale is #1 because the publication with the recognized monopoly on credibility in law school rankings says so.

You're trolling, right?

Not even a little bit. I'm not saying that Yale hasn't been a top law school for a long time. I'm not saying that they weren't recognized as the top law school in the country before USN started doling out rankings. I am saying, however, that the consensus opinion that Yale is the best law school in the country now is based in very large part on the fact that USN says so.

Also, as I stated before, the question of which is the best law school in the country depends greatly on the question of what makes a law school good. Given that a JD is a professional degree, I submit that a significant factor in that analysis ought to be how well the school prepares its students to practice law.

In that vein, consider the Princeton Review rankings. PR interviews students rather than faculty, and asks them various questions about the quality of their law school experience. How does Yale do in those? Poorly. In fact, aggregating the PR scores for academic experience, admissions selectivity, career preparation, and quality of professors, Yalies ranked their school 39th, tied with Cardozo.

Before you go tearing into the methodology of the above study, realize that I'm not saying that Yale is the 39th-best law school in the country. But it isn't necessarily the best, either, and the fact that "everyone" believes that it is is due mostly to the fact that a supposed authority on the subject keeps saying so over and over again.

you mad?