Law School Ranking Debate

Do law school rankings still matter in 2025? Ask a dean, and you’ll hear the usual spin about prestige. Ask a student drowning in debt, and you’ll get the truth: they can be like a rigged casino designed to keep U.S. News in business while turning students into debt-slaves dressed in academic gowns..

But law school rankings remain. They’re read and they’re studied by all and sundry – and we report about them constantly.

Why Rankings Refuse to Die

Every spring, U.S. News spits out its league tables. Law schools either boast or sulk, alumni newsletters crow or go silent, and deans practice the ritual of explaining away bad numbers.

But the metric is absurd: rewarding schools for employment at big firms while penalising those sending graduates into public interest jobs.

So the law schools that actually help society look worse on paper than the ones minting Wall Street associates at $200K a year.

Debt Factories Disguised as Ivy

Let’s be blunt: law schools aren’t just ivory towers but can be debt factories with a Latin motto. The average graduate leaves with six figures of debt that would make a payday lender blush. Yet rankings pretend this is a “feature” of elite education rather than a systemic flaw.

As LawFuel has covered, the ROI question in legal education is no longer hypothetical—it’s the only question worth asking.

Students Are Fighting Back

Protests have mounted, and schools from Yale downwards have staged boycotts of U.S. News’ methodology used – such as discouraging public interest programs and manipulating the LSAT score figures in their methodology.

All-in-all, not a great look.

Yet the rankings persist, zombie-like, because applicants still crave the illusion of certainty.

Even as Times Higher Education suggests broader metrics such as teaching quality, accessibility, innovation, U.S. News clings to a model that rewards exclusion and punishes affordability.