GW Law Students Know Why Drop in Rankings? Forum

[desperate4lawschool]

Am a GW Law alum and when I attended the school, it was ranked #20 nationally and #2 in the part-time program. Now, schools like the University of Iowa and the University of Minnesota rank higher. Can a current student tell me if this issue has been raised internally and/or whether students are concerned with this downward spiral? Has that affected recruiting and judicial placements? What's going on?

[cavalier1138]

I don't go there, but maybe it has something to do with their employment numbers dropping precipitously after 2011. If I were a student, I'd be very concerned that almost a third of my class will not have a job as a lawyer after graduation.

Also, I'm guessing you went there in 2010/2011. If you look at the historical USNWR rankings, GW jumped up 8 places in 2010, and after a few years, they're now falling back down to where they were. So you were attending during an outlier year, not the other way around.

[FSK]

Just graduated from there this spring (I ended up with bigfed honors, so I'm only normal-level-bitter).

They just admit too many kids, and the patent market has slowed down. The top 75 or so kids do well, but that is a smaller relative percentage as they ratchet up the transfer class each year.

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that 2010/2011 was 1) a valley for the legal market generally, 2) a hot time for cell-phone wars, and 3) GW has and still has a bench of Prof's who do make a ton of calls for patent kids.

[desperate4lawschool]

They just admit too many kids, and the patent market has slowed down.

This is what I actually feared when I attended there. I always felt like GW Law was a lawyer mill, outputting lawyers left and right. Right now, GW has an amazing faculty, well-recognized around the world for their respective field. I am afraid that with the drops in rankings, those faculties will start to leave and that will really be the time when GW will start sliding down. It is the most expensive school in the DMV area, in hindsight, I should have saved some money and gone to Mason. The outcome would have been the same.

[FSK]

They just admit too many kids, and the patent market has slowed down.

This is what I actually feared when I attended there. I always felt like GW Law was a lawyer mill, outputting lawyers left and right. Right now, GW has an amazing faculty, well-recognized around the world for their respective field. I am afraid that with the drops in rankings, those faculties will start to leave and that will really be the time when GW will start sliding down. It is the most expensive school in the DMV area, in hindsight, I should have saved some money and gone to Mason. The outcome would have been the same.

Yeah, this. It attracts folks like Orin Kerr and Alan Morrison, but they can only make so many calls per year.

[A. Nony Mouse]

I don't think profs are going to leave due to dropping out of the top 20; that doesn't change anything about their job. And it's pretty hard to move around in academia. If they don't want to be in DC then they'd be likely to try to move, or if they get a call from a really top school (though even for amazing profs, that doesn't happen that much/easily), but I don't think USNWR is going to have any effect.

[WhiskeyAndCupcakes]

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[TheSpanishMain]

Just curious, does anyone care what USNWR says about anything anymore, aside from 0Ls looking at law school rankings? It seems like a pretty irrelevant grocery checkout line fare otherwise.

[longtimelurker123]

Can't tell you how true this is but according to GW friends, GW Professors are precisely the reason for the drop.

Apparently, back in 2012ish, GW hired a dean that had an awesome plan to raise the school's rankings. It basically involved reducing the student body significantly.

however, professors started getting worried that there wasn't enough tuition money and they actually staged a coupe and basically pushed the dean out. Since then, the subsequent deans have been wary about reducing student base and have actualyl expanded enrollment. This is in the face of decreasing applications and decreasing student populations at other peer schools.

Thus, rankings drop.

[TLSModBot]

Just curious, does anyone care what USNWR says about anything anymore, aside from 0Ls looking at law school rankings? It seems like a pretty irrelevant grocery checkout line fare otherwise.

(protesteth the GULC grad whose school just got DEVASTATED by the rankings probably forever omg)

[dbalkaran]

I just posted this in the Brooklyn thread, but at least in NY they have not placed well compared to strong regionals like Fordham, Cardozo, Brooklyn and St. John's in the last few years. No reason to pay substantially more to go to GW when the outcome is better from a strong regional where you're likely to get more money (maybe not at Fordham) and have more alumni connections in the city you want to practice. They seem to have developed a rep as a trap school around here. High ranking, poor placement for NYC.

You can see the breakdown in the link below but Brooklyn has 68 current associates in V10 firms in NYC compared to 21 from GW which is supposedly 58 spots better than Brooklyn. I have no idea why someone who wants to work in New York would consider GW over the the schools I mentioned unless it was substantially cheaper. The numbers for Fordham would be even better than those for Brooklyn.

http://imgur.com/a/BpSkU

[SemiReverseSplinter]

Just curious, does anyone care what USNWR says about anything anymore, aside from 0Ls looking at law school rankings? It seems like a pretty irrelevant grocery checkout line fare otherwise.

0Ls are a very important demographic for law schools, so the school itself has to care. And alum should care because quality 0Ls improve the strength of each class, and ultimately, the school. So it's somewhat circular logic, but anything that will attract a 0L to a specific school does matter.

[foregetaboutdre]

I just posted this in the Brooklyn thread, but at least in NY they have not placed well compared to strong regionals like Fordham, Cardozo, Brooklyn and St. John's in the last few years. No reason to pay substantially more to go to GW when the outcome is better from a strong regional where you're likely to get more money (maybe not at Fordham) and have more alumni connections in the city you want to practice. They seem to have developed a rep as a trap school around here. High ranking, poor placement for NYC.

You can see the breakdown in the link below but Brooklyn has 68 current associates in V10 firms in NYC compared to 21 from GW which is supposedly 58 spots better than Brooklyn. I have no idea why someone who wants to work in New York would consider GW over the the schools I mentioned unless it was substantially cheaper. The numbers for Fordham would be even better than those for Brooklyn.

http://imgur.com/a/BpSkU

I don't necessarily think this is a fair comparison. Sure it may have something to do with it, but GW students from my experience are like 85% DC gunners.

[gaddockteeg]

I just posted this in the Brooklyn thread, but at least in NY they have not placed well compared to strong regionals like Fordham, Cardozo, Brooklyn and St. John's in the last few years. No reason to pay substantially more to go to GW when the outcome is better from a strong regional where you're likely to get more money (maybe not at Fordham) and have more alumni connections in the city you want to practice. They seem to have developed a rep as a trap school around here. High ranking, poor placement for NYC.

You can see the breakdown in the link below but Brooklyn has 68 current associates in V10 firms in NYC compared to 21 from GW which is supposedly 58 spots better than Brooklyn. I have no idea why someone who wants to work in New York would consider GW over the the schools I mentioned unless it was substantially cheaper. The numbers for Fordham would be even better than those for Brooklyn.

http://imgur.com/a/BpSkU

I don't necessarily think this is a fair comparison. Sure it may have something to do with it, but GW students from my experience are like 85% DC gunners.

Yeah, the top kids at GW and most other DC schools are trying to stay in DC. I'm at a v20 in DC and it goes without saying that GW has more grads here than Brooklyn + Fordham + St. Johns + Cardozo + NYLS all put together.

[Serett]

Just curious, does anyone care what USNWR says about anything anymore, aside from 0Ls looking at law school rankings? It seems like a pretty irrelevant grocery checkout line fare otherwise.

(protesteth the GULC grad whose school just got DEVASTATED by the rankings probably forever omg)

When Cronus University Law Center fell, he did not fall alone. gg GW

[RCinDNA]

Just graduated from there this spring (I ended up with bigfed honors, so I'm only normal-level-bitter).

They just admit too many kids, and the patent market has slowed down. The top 75 or so kids do well, but that is a smaller relative percentage as they ratchet up the transfer class each year.

This is pretty much what happened. There are also some employment issues coming down the pipeline with the students who wanted to work for the government and do the public service track. GWU usually sends quite a few grads into the government but the agencies have generally not been hiring.

Just curious, does anyone care what USNWR says about anything anymore, aside from 0Ls looking at law school rankings? It seems like a pretty irrelevant grocery checkout line fare otherwise.

Law school ranking can be mentioned as part of employment decisions as a rough indicator of what a gpa compares to, such as a student in the top 20% of Univ. of Chicago vs. a student top 5% of Tulane, but I really don't know - I've seen it both ways: the relative ranks were discussed during the summer associate program meeting at a stuff firm I used to work at and in another firm, they noted it but focused on grades and the person's overall resume. I was not in the room during the final decisions as to whom to make an offer to so I don't know if that was just chitchat and my own firm had a summer class consisting of regional school students and higher ranked schools. Probably just grocery checkout line fare.