The students at the law schools that are calling for their deans to get fired due to changes in their USNWR ranks (see here) are exhibiting misplaced anger. Most of the variables that go into the rankings are out of a school's control. It's the faculty, not the dean, that will affect the reputational ranking, but the reputational score is based on such a flawed process (and small n) that it's ludicrous to blame the faculty for any reputational ranking problems, either. Admissions? Selectivity? Schools pick from a pool of applicants. They can't control the inputs. If they have scholarship funds to lure folks away from other schools, great, but scholarship funds aren't infinite. Bar passage? Some of it's "us"--how and what we teach--but some of it isn't (whether someone studies). Same with placement. Some of it's "us"--are we sending well-trained, well-advised students into the job market?--but some of it isn't. If students are calling for deans' heads because the deans lied about things like bar passage and employment statistics, I can understand their anger and frustration, and I share it. If students are calling for deans' heads because they're sorry that they fell from x to x-10, then I'm not that sympathetic. The USNWR numbers aren't an absolute value, they're relative, and relatively inaccurate, at that. So law students who are gathering signatures to get their deans fired, you might want to think twice.
UPDATED 3/15/13:
And, for those law students scrambling for signatures on petitions, here's an extra thought: take a look at this article by Professor Robert Jones. He's done a very good job of discussing just how those academic reputation scores change--or don't--over time, and he suggests four interesting changes that might make those scores slightly less easy to "game." Of those four suggestions, my favorite one's the last one, where he echoes Brian Leiter's call for an online survey that includes objective data about each school.
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