Continuously opining, intermittently publishing.
8
March

PageRanking Law Schools

Posted by oshane | Leave a comment at the end of this post.

It seems obvious to me that the US News & World Report ranking system creates an elastic quasi- virtuous cycle, where top schools are ranked such by the magazine, so that the schools cater their programs to US News’ ranking standards, so that they proactively work to improve their rank, causing them to cater to US News. US News rewards them for their efforts. Meanwhile, students trust the magazine for its rankings and apply to schools accordingly. Colleges continue catering to the magazine, because they believe students trust it. It’s a perfect type of market for anyone who can get into the business — a virtuous cycle, that is.

I propose ranking law schools by a well-known “new” method: Google PageRank. That is, run a simple query to see which law school websites are more or less relatively popular. PageRank is about as unfiltered by bias as we could expect, given the distributive machine-oriented nature of the relative evaluation. There’s no need to rely on paying a third-party (US News) for its self-serving preparation of the material. Instead, just perform a Google query, such as [law school].

There may be a question as to whether the popularity of a website is a good proxy for the measure of a school, but linkurls will link to those websites for a myriad of reasons important to the information generator or provider who linked to the website. Google incorporates the legion reasons people find certain websites more popular than others, and it is not terribly necessary (I believe) to examine our collective, distributed navels to find out whether it is a “good” proxy, since it is, facially, more objective than a human-filtered system like US News.*

Now, the results will be somewhat tailored to your locale and to other attributes, presumably to give you, the searcher, the information in a form most useful to you. That is, your relative rankings may vary somewhat from the ones I list below, but wouldn’t that be much more useful to you anyway — to have search results that tend toward your own needs? Imagine that. Here they are, relatively ordered, through the 10th search result page (that does not mean there are 100 listed, since other websites related to law schools appeared in the results interspaced, but are not included here):

Harvard
Yale
Georgetown
Columbia
NYU
Stanford
Texas
Michigan
U. Chicago
UCLA
PENN
Cornell
Suffolk
Minnesota
North Dakota
Wisconsin
Washington
Vanderbilt
George Washington
Berkeley
Indiana U.
Vermont Law School
Duke
Fordham
Brooklyn
Loyola (Los Angeles)
USC
Southwestern
Wayne State
Emory
Rutgers
Notre Dame
New York Law School
Tulane
UVA
Chicago Law School
Northwestern
UC Davis
Pace
Georgia
Baylor
Drake
Boston College
Maryland
Colorado
Cardozo
George Mason
Lewis & Clark
Washington U. in St. Louis
Hofstra
Thomas M. Cooley
SUNY Buffalo
CUNY
Penn State
UNC
U of Oregon
Boston University
John Marshall
Northeastern
Seton Hall
Case Western
Albany Law School
Temple
Valparaiso
USD
Santa Clara
UNLV
Seattle U.
Marquette
BYU
U. Miami
Widenr
Duquesne
U of Missouri

I bet Duke, Northwestern and Cardozo will find this ranking system to be unreliable. =)


*This is not entirely independent from US News, since US News’ own linkurls will point to these law schools and be crawled by Googlebot. Vice versa, some of these websites may link to US News’ website, strengthening the PageRank of US News in a way that makes Google find certain law schools more popular, even if it is likely negligent. At least that is what we will assume: that the linking to or from US News negligently affects the overall PageRank of a law school.

2 Responses to “PageRanking Law Schools”

  1. Where does this leave Wyoming? Would this system encourage the administrations to require faculty to blog about their school? Encourage faculty to require online, public discussion in forums regarding the class topics? All of this would generate more relevancy hits for the page rank, wouldn’t it?

    • oshane says:

      Austin, Wyoming seems to be left about where it was before. Some might think PageRank encourages administrations to require faculty blogging or online activity of some sort. However, must law schools (colleges in general) are run by the faculty, so it would be up to them to decide how to approach online ranking. Furthermore, Google does not overly weight the links that a website internally propagates to itself. Rather, the content would have to be interesting enough to others so that they link back to the law school websites for the law schools to see an appreciable increase in PageRank. Good questions.

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