Please please please people, STOP COMPLAINING ABOUT RANKINGS!!
As a corollary to that, Please please please stop saying stuff like "X is a very underrated law school" followed by some stupid justification of something good about your law school clearly makes it underrated because "rankings don't day Y into account."
Now to address each of these in turn. As for rankings. Sit down, shut up, and get over it. I am not saying rankings are the be all end all. I am not saying rankings should be the primary factor in a person's decision about where to attend law school, however some people find them to be a useful tool, and many many people (myself included) find them to be a good starting point for looking at law schools, so GET OVER IT. Some people find the rankings have value, so they use them. If you do not feel they have value, then don't read them. If somebody comes up to you and says "my school is better than your school because it is ranked 80 and your school is 82, feel free to slap them in the face and call them an idiot, but don't make it your lives work to constantly bash on rankings as useless and problematic. Rankings are great for getting a general sense of the "pecking order" among colleges. As long as you understand that small differences between schools in the rankings does not represent a small difference between schools in reality, there isn't really a problem. Where problems occur is when people do not get this idea and decide to move across the country because X law school is ranked higher than Y law school. When it comes to these people I have one thought: You are an idiot that cannot read a composite score. If somebody is foolish enough to do this, let them. That said, I do not think the rankings are a perfect representation of the quality of each school, in fact, I see big flaws in the most common rankings (US News), but these flaws don't change the fact that it has value as a starting point.
I am from the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago. Growing up whenever I was tell people I wanted to go to law school I would be met with, I have X relative that went to John Marshall (pride smile) and tales of how great (insert random city school) is and how it is a top school. I carried these ideas with me (generally) until I got older and decided to look at some facts. Gee, turns out that John Marshall and Depaul, schools that I had been led to believe were top class law schools are actually the middle\bottom of the pack. Isn't it better that I find this out now, rather than later? At least with rankings I was able to find this out quickly and easily, as well as see just how large the different between them and other local schools (say U of I or Loyola) was. Similarly, growing up I never really had a concept of how school stacked up. Growing up in the Midwest there is very much a feel of "you go to a Big Ten school, wow," so when I finally got to high school and was exposed to (get this) the fact that other areas of the country had equally good and even better schools, my viewpoint changed. If there wasn't some central source for data (some sort of rankings) I would likely still believe (or at least have to do extensive research to disprove the idea) that say.... Penn State, a Big Ten school is better than George Washington (a far away school in a minor basketball conference). So why does any of this matter? Well basically because picking a law school is hard, and when you are first starting to look at schools it is nice to have some jumping off point to work from. And if you are going to reply by arguing that "you could still look at things like starting salary, quality of the applicant pool, or overall prestige," then I have a reply for you: Salary is skewed by location and the other factors are a part of the rankings and are often the most controversial elements.
If you want to complain, complain that students are a problem because they misuse the rankings, but don't take away one of the easiest starting points for prospective students to use in selecting a law school.
As for people who like to say "our school is good at X which the rankings don't consider," get over it. EVERY school has some strengths that students there see that others don't. At the end of the day, let your heart be warmed by the fact that you feel this factor is important.
Finally, to the people who like to talk about how your school is underrated, get over it. Are there underrated schools? Sure. In Chicago I see that because of faculty prestige Kent is typically seen and "better rated" than Loyola, when in reality Loyola probably places its students as well if not better. I am certain there are countless situations like this, but in general I have yet to see a situation where it really really seems to me that a school is completely misplaced. I haven't seen every school or gone through any legal education, but in general whenever I listen to arguments for why a school is underrated they seem weak to me.
Here's the facts: there may not be an objective standard, but there is certainly some general hierarchy that can be seen among schools. If nothing else, look at where employees choose to go for their students. There are better schools and there are worse schools. For every Harvard there is a Cooley and generally arguments that a school is underrated cite some random aspect of the school that really doesn't have much to do with anything. "We are attached to a federal courthouse." Really? How do your school's students place relative to other schools in your area? How are the starting salaries? Do you attract a top notch applicant pool? No? Ah who cares, you are next to a courthouse, your school is clearly important! I just don't get it.
Even better is the argument that "at the end of the day you all have a J.D." True. I fully agree, we are all lawyers and if we want to hang out our own shingle, we will all be on essentially equal footing, however for those of us who want to find jobs working for somebody else, at the end of the day, going to Harvard is better than going to Michigan State, which is better than going to Cooley. Also, why is it you never here people saying "A B.S. is a B.S. so just because my son went to Princeton doesn't make his degree any better than your son that went to Southern Illinois University. I don't know anybody who would buy into that statement, so why is it when it comes to law school we like to pretend like everybody is equal? This is just silly.
As a final comment, people like to argue that "just because a school gets students with a higher LSAT or GPA doesn't make it better. It is true that the LSAT and GPA are not really related to the legal education a school gives. That said, high LSAT\GPA applicants have the "first crack" in selecting which schools they go to, so if a student is looking for the "most desirable" school, it would make sense to say "well of the people that could go anywhere, where have they chosen to go" and look from there. Essentially students are in many ways looking at what schools the students with choices tend to go to. I don't see how this is a bad thing. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Michigan were good schools and still recruited the best students in the Nation before the rankings started to be published. All rankings did was show that there really is a quantifiable difference in the quality (quality as measured by the factors admissions committees have chosen to focus on, gpa and lsat) of applicants at those schools. If different factors were considered important, I would be willing to guess that these schools would still be filled with applicants possessing the highest caliber of whatever qualification was believed to be most important.
In touchy-feely American, people always want to feel that everybody is equal and often ignore that different people really are more or less qualified sometimes. We aren't all equal in merit. Get over it and stop distorting reality to make yourself feel better.
I'm going to have more on this rant at a later date.
