LOS ANGELES — The University of California, Berkeley Law School announced Thursday it would withdraw from U.S. News & World Report's closely watched evaluations of higher education institutions, saying the ratings' methodology penalizes schools that encourage public service and low costs.
The decision by Berkeley, one of the nation's top law schools, marks another blow to the influential ratings service after Harvard and Yale took similar action on Wednesday citing U.S. News' methodology.
"Although rankings are inevitable and inevitably have some arbitrary features, there are aspects of the U.S. News rankings that are profoundly inconsistent with our values and public mission," UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said in a statement.
"Now is a moment when law schools need to express to U.S. News that they have created undesirable incentives for legal education," he said.
Eric Gertler, executive chairman and chief executive of U.S. News, said his organization would continue with its mission to hold law schools accountable.
"The U.S. News Best Law Schools rankings are for students seeking the best decision for their law education. We will continue to fulfill our journalistic mission of ensuring that students can rely on the best and most accurate information in making that decision," he said in a statement. "As part of our mission, we must continue to ensure that law schools are held accountable for the education they will provide to these students and that mission does not change with these recent announcements."
Chemerinsky said the ranking service's methodology had raised specific issues that Berkeley had "struggled with for years," but discussions about them with U.S. News have been fruitless. He said the rankings penalize schools that help students launch careers in public service law, discount those with low tuition and disregard Berkeley's favorable loan repayment program.
Berkeley Law, for instance, provides students a fellowship for a year after graduation to work in a public interest organization. Students receive a salary comparable to an entry-level position in public service or public interest and a stipend during study for the bar examination. Nine of 10 students who receive a fellowship remain in public service law, he said.
But U.S. News does not count these students as fully employed, creating a "perverse incentive for schools to eliminate these positions, despite their success and despite the training they provide for future public service attorneys," Chemerinsky said.
He also called the ranking service's measure of per student expenditures "one of the most pernicious" issues because law schools that spend more get a ratings boost despite a lack of evidence that it correlates with a higher quality education. He said that metric disadvantages schools with lower tuition.
Chemerinsky also said the ranking service created incentives for law schools to admit affluent applicants who do not need to take on student loan debt and encourages them to eliminate need-based aid. Yet Berkeley retains need-based aid to help draw diverse applicants, including those from low-income and marginalized communities.
He acknowledged rankings have meaning and would continue with or without Berkeley's participation. But he said they do not adequately reflect the values of his public institution, which is deeply committed to "increasing access to justice, training attorneys who will work to improve society in a variety of ways, and to empowering the next generation of leaders and thinkers, many of whom will come from communities who historically were not part of the legal profession."
"Nothing about Berkeley Law is fundamentally changed by this decision," Chemerinsky said. "We will be the law school we've always been, and we will strive to improve — in accordance with our values."
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