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Law School Rankings: Off, Off Broadway?
No offense to the author, but here is one play unlikely to be produced on the Great White Way. Jeff Sovern, professor at St. John's University School of Law and co-author of the Consumer Law & Policy Blog, has just published his one-act play, Rankings: A Dramatization of the Incentives Created by Ranking Law Schools. Its intended audience, as he explains on his blog, is that subset of consumers known as law students. His belief, as he writes in the play's introduction, is that "law school rankings encourage schools to shift resources away from improving the quality of the education they provide in favor of investing in improving their standings in the rankings."
The play attempts to dramatize these issues and make them more vivid. Sovern's villain is fictional law school dean "Leslie," who woos potential students with the school's secure spot high in the rankings, then confides to "Lee," a professor, that the school cannot afford to spend more on educating the students who are already there.
Let me spell it out for you. Nobody cares about what the students learn here. OK? We care about them before they get here because the rankings look at their LSATs and undergraduate grades and how we do in attracting
them. We care about them after they leave because the
rankings take account of how many of them get jobs and
whether they pass the bar, but that's pretty much it. OK?
Tragically, the school's rankings falter after all, and both Leslie and Lee head off into the sunset -- but only one does so voluntarily.
Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on February 27, 2008 at 01:19 PM | Permalink
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