Dean Paul Caron Quoted in New York Times Article on U.S. News Law School Rankings

Dean Paul Caron is quoted in a New York Times article on the U.S. News rankings. The article, titled "Elite Law Schools Boycotted the U.S. News Rankings. Now, They May Be Paying a Price," considers objections to the new rankings by schools that decided to not participate this year.

Excerpt from "Elite Law Schools Boycotted the U.S. News Rankings. Now, They May Be Paying a Price"

Schools invest time and money in enhancing the metrics that U.S. News values — for instance, admissions test scores, faculty-to-student ratios, class size and post-graduation employment.

Now it appears that the changes in some of those metrics have had unanticipated consequences for some of the elite schools that demanded them.

“When you think about everything else going on in the world, there’s a side of it that sort of looks like a tempest in a teapot,” Mr. Rutledge, the Georgia dean, said. “Then you realize that this is an industry where the incumbents have for 30 years built their model around a relatively predictable and unchanged regimen for how to produce a highly ranked law school.”

Paul Caron, dean of the Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law, which ranked 52nd last year, suggested that the word “boycott” in this context is a kind of gaslighting. In a recent headline on his blog, he noted that U.S. News had again delayed the release of its rankings because of inquiries, “including from schools that are ostensibly boycotting the rankings.”

The complete article may be found at New York Times (subscription required) and at USA Times