How much should law school rankings weigh on your decision of where to go? Dean Z breaks down how rankings can be helpful and when they should be less of a factor in your decision.
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- Hey everybody, it is Dean Z speaking to you not from my basement, but from a beautiful classroom in Hutchins Hall at the University of Michigan Law School. As you know, if you've been watching the videos, I was planning on taking a short hiatus and it turned into a really long one, partially because my basement flooded and I had nowhere to record these, but partially because everything changed. I went back to work. I was traveling, doing recruiting in person, and I thought maybe not any need for me to do these videos anymore. People can go to events and talk to admissions officers. People can come to Michigan Law School and talk to me, but then I heard a lot over the course of the year from people who'd been watching the videos who found them useful. So, I thought, let's start again. One year, what's that? Nothing. We'll just start again. And I do think that this admission season is gonna be quite different from the last two years. So, I'm thinking that maybe there will make some advice that is new and fresh and helpful to people who will be applying this season. So, let's get started without further ado. The first subject I wanna talk to you about is rankings, law school rankings. And mostly thinking about US news and World Report, but there's a lot of different rankings out there that I think, you know, have some information that might be valuable to applicants, but I wanna talk about rankings overall and how to use them and what their worth is. Admissions people sort of love to hate on rankings, and I am not a stranger to this. We spend much of our career talking about what is different about our law school in nuanced ways, in, you know, ways that are specific to a particular candidate, that take into account, you know, pros and cons and all kinds of things, and then all of that gets reduced by the makers of rankings to a number. And that's frustrating when you're used to thinking about your institution in much bigger ways. It would be as if my worth were determined by the number I see on the scale in the morning, or on my average Wordle score, and I am just so much better than any of those numbers. I really, really believe that. So, you know, that's why we don't like rankings, but they are not wholly unimportant. They are not something that has no relationship to reality, but let's break it down. The first thing you need to do if you're thinking about rankings is start by having a foundation of what is most important to you in the law school search? It will be different for every person. So, for example, let's say there's a University of Alaska Law School, there isn't, but let's say there is, and let's say ranked number one, and you are living in Florida applying to law schools and you get admitted to the University of Alaska, and you're like, that's great. Number one, law school I got in. But what if your goal is to be in Miami? Maybe it's because you have family in Miami, or maybe it's 'cause you really love heat and humidity, which will be quite absent in Alaska, or maybe it's because you love Cuban sandwiches. I love Cuban sandwiches. I think I would go to law school in Miami for Cuban sandwiches. You're not gonna find any of that in Alaska. And let's say further that you wanna practice in Florida. You know, maybe the University of Alaska never sends anybody to south Florida. So, going to the number one law school may not make sense for you if those are your goals. You need to think about what schools can serve your both immediate goals for being content and happy in law school, as well as your long term goals for being content and happy in your career. Speaking of career, that is actually one of the things I think rankings can be good for 'cause many of them contain information about outcomes at schools. That's often a large part of a ranking, but, again, you have to look at that. Like suppose a school sends, makes, you know, has great employment numbers, but never sends anybody to the kind of job that you are interested in. That might be a mistake to go there. Maybe they don't have, send people to those kinds of jobs because nobody there wants those kinds of jobs, or maybe they don't send people to those kinds of jobs because they can't send people to those kinds of jobs. You need to think about that and investigate it. Maybe you want certain kinds of jobs though, where highly ranked schools tend to send more people. That's something that's worth considering because if you want a certain kind of job and only certain kinds of schools send people to those jobs, then maybe it won't make you happy to be a lawyer if you're not in one of those jobs, and you need to take that into account, but you also need to think about all the things that are rankings that you don't really care about. For example, to talk again about US news, the big factor at the foundation, the heart of the rankings in US news is the dollars per pupil an institution spends. You never even see that. That information is not shown in the rankings anywhere, and it's very hard to uncover. Having an institution that has a lot of money to spend on its students is not unimportant. It means schools can take initiatives that they might not otherwise be able to take. It means they can hire more faculty. It means they can hire, you know, particular staff and, you know, for supporting students and so on and so forth. But it may not be, you know, the weight for you that it is for US news. So, you need to think about that. One of the factors in dollars per pupil, that isn't included, is how much a school spends on financial aid. That's probably important to most applicants, and it isn't a factor in the ranking at all. It's just taken out entirely. So, a school that spends a lot on financial aid, that actually lowers their ranking in some sense, and that might actually be something that is very important to you. So, you need to take it all with a grain of salt, view it critically, and in all cases be thinking about what is important to you and in that light, assessing a given school's ranking. Okay, I think that's all I have to say about rankings. So, now let's turn to what used to be the grammar portion of this video. I wanna branch out a little bit, not just grammar, but language generally. Specifically, I wanna talk about phrases that when I have said them to people who are in the general age range of people applying to law school, they look at me blankly and accuse me of making things up, that I'm just making up weird phrases. The one I wanna start with is venting one's spleen. This is a phrase I actually use a lot, which might say something about my disposition because what venting one spleen means is expressing your anger. In the middle ages, when I grew up, doctors believed the spleen held one of the four humors, specifically black bile, and so if you were venting one's, your spleen, you are letting out all that black bile, which is to say anger. So, if you're splenetic, means you're full of spleen, means you're an angry person. I'm not an angry person, but I do, kind of, like to complain, so I like to vent my spleen. So, anyway, so that's a great phrase, right? Venting your spleen. Try and work that into your personal statement, definitely will notice it if you're applying to Michigan Law School, and, you know, just use it in everyday conversation. I think it's very useful. Okay, that's all I have to say about that. So, my plan here is to be back every other week, maybe more, we don't know, but I really wanna hear your suggestions, comments, questions, concerns. I obviously have some ideas of things I wanna talk about, but I really wanna address the things that are on your mind. So, please leave any comments in the comments below, or send an email to us at law.jd.admissions@umich.edu, and put vlog in the subject line. I find those incredibly helpful. Otherwise, all I wanna do is say thank you, thank you, thank you to Dustin, who has been incredibly great to work with and given me lots of inspiration for getting back on the vlog train, as it were. And last, but certainly least, wherever you go, go blue.