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"Why am I paying so much to attend a school that's in decline!!" "In another year, we'll be BOTTOM TIER!!!" "My diploma ain't gonna be worth sh** now!" In March, you could hear these cries and others rising from the anguished throats of law students at T.C. Williams Law School. While the U.S. News & World Report only publishes the rankings of the Top 50 (a.k.a. "The Top Tier") Law Schools, students quickly knew that Richmond's numerical ranking had fallen from #69 to #76 (out of 180 law schools) during the past year. After a couple of years of rising in the ranks, Richmond fell seven slots. The rumors of a tumble into the 80s are false, as the report sent to Dean Pagan by U.S. News indicates. Dean Pagan is more than willing to meet with any student or group who wishes to discuss the hard numbers. I sat down with him so that he could explain to me what the numbers meant, what they didn't mean, and how it all related to the Top Tier Initiative (hereinafter "the Initiative"). The following discussion is the result of that conversation. Academic reputation has been weighted more heavily than in years past, and it hurt Richmond. There is a strong correlation to the academic reputation score and the overall ranking. The academic reputation score is made up of two scores for an overall weight of 40% of a school's ranking score. The first score comes from the ratings of law school deans and three faculty members from each school. This counts for 25% of the overall ranking score. The other 15% of the "academic reputation score" comes from the rating given by lawyers, hiring partners, and senior judges. The law school faculty and deans had a 64% response rate, but only 38% of the lawyers and judges responded. Richmond's Academic Reputation rank over the last three years has fallen from #77 in 1998 to #86 in 1999 to #90 this year. The good news is that the skid seems to be slowing down, but it needs to be reversed. Dean Pagan is quite blunt in his assessment of why Richmond's academic reputation is higher. "It is a lack of faculty publication," Dean Pagan blames for Richmond's lack of scholarly reputation. Our faculty does publish, but in order to raise our academic profile, Richmond Law professors need to be prolific publishers like Constitutional Law professor Rodney Smolla. The good news is that Richmond's ranking among lawyers and judges is rising. The three-year ranking trend from lawyers is #75 in 1998, #60 in 1999, and #65 in 2000. For judges, Richmond's ranking went from #72 in 1998 to #93 in 1999 to #79 now. With a low response rate from practicing lawyers and judges, it is vitally important to get Richmond alumni who receive the survey to fill it out and give Richmond high ratings. The next largest chunk of the overall ranking score at 25% is student selectivity. This is a combination of the median LSAT scores (12.5 % of overall ranking), median undergraduate GPA (10% overall), and proportion of applicants accepted for the fall of 1999 (2.5% overall). Richmond is slowly trying to raise its level of selectivity by requiring higher LSAT scores. Over the three years, the median LSAT score has raised each year. With the Class of 2003, the score has risen another point. Each class's GPA has risen as well and should continue to rise. As the selectivity gets higher, this portion of Richmond's ranking will also rise. There is strong evidence that the LSAT score correlates strongly to bar passage rate, which is another aspect of the ranking (2% overall). For Richmond, Dean Pagan only had the February 2000 bar passage rate and the bar passage rates for the July exams of 1997-1999. On February's exam (which is known to be harder than the July exam), the Richmond passage rate was 59.1%, which is 5.1% below the average for other law schools in Virginia. When considering other law schools in Virginia, remember this group includes UVA (#8), Washington & Lee (#20), William & Mary (#29), George Mason, and Regent University. These are tough schools to compare to, but Richmond wants to be compared to these schools, according to Dean Pagan. For the July exams, the passage rate in 1997 was 78.7%, which was 3.6% higher than the state average. In 1998, the passage rate was 77.8%, which was 9.8% higher than the state average. In 1999, the passage rate fell to 74.7%, which was still 2.8% higher than the state average. The Class of 2000's bar passage rate will not be available until October. Placement Success is worth another 20% of a law school's overall ranking score. This score is made up of the percentage of graduates who have a job at graduation (6% overall), the percentage of graduates who have a job nine months after graduation (12% overall), and the above mentioned bar passage rate. Richmond was devastated by its job placement rate at graduation. Only 48% of the graduates in 1998 had a job at graduation. Over the last three years, Richmond's placement ranking has gone from #95 in 1998 to #62 in 1999 with a slide back to #91 this year. Unfortunately, that sentiment is not entirely to blame. Yes, most of us feel that career services really mean, "Get your own dang job!" However, we also need to recognize that we are ultimately responsible for finding our own employment. The number of employers interviewing at Richmond is up 15% in the last year. Dean Pagan also has another hypothesis to explain the low job rate at graduation. "Our law school students seem to have a culture of not looking for a job until they pass the bar," Pagan said. The time to start looking for a job is the summer after your 2L year, certainly no later than the fall of the 3L year. Dual degree student Emily Greenstreet claims this reasoning is bogus. "My boyfriend just graduated, and he wants to work for the Commonwealth's Attorney. They really liked him, but they have a policy to not even look at an applicant until the results of the bar are in. A lot of people at Richmond seem to go into prosecution, and if prosecutors won't look at an applicant until at least October, that is not their fault," she said. That claim does not pan out in the numbers made available by Career Services. For the class of 1997, only 4 people (2.8% of the class) became prosecutors within 9 months of graduation. For the class of 1998, whose 48% job placement at graduation hurt this year's ranking, only 7 people (4.9% of the class) became prosecutors. The class of 1999 had one prosecutor (0.7%) as of February 2000. The only conclusion is that the Commonwealth's Attorney's office is not to blame for the poor at-graduation job rate. A vast majority of each class ends up in private practice, most of whom will hire law school graduates with continued employment contingent on passing the bar. Larger firms will pay for a bar review course, so you would not have to borrow more money. This means that we should be aggressively seeking employment before we pass the bar. Another employment route virtually ignored by Richmond students is judicial clerkships. Most of those placements do not require bar passage and would allow you to study for the bar before starting. Almost 50% of the Virginia judiciary are graduates of this law school and probably would welcome taking a young Richmond grad under their wing. Most federal clerkships are decided in the 2nd year of law school, so it would be worthwhile for 2Ls to apply for clerkships while also looking for summer employment. Being hired by a judge is a good way to get the best law firms seeking your services once your clerkship ends. At Washington & Lee and William & Mary, the at-graduation job placement was 72%. At George Mason, their reported at-graduation job placement rate was a whopping 90%. This managed to push George Mason from the middle of the third tier to the upper end of the second tier. Dean Pagan, however, smells a rat. "George Mason has a significant number of part time law students, who often have jobs throughout law school. They should not be counting those folks, but this year, I bet they did." While we cannot cheat like George Mason, current students can help Richmond's placement by aggressively pursuing employment throughout the 3rd year (no matter what your class rank) and using what few tools Career Services can provide. The last portion of the overall ranking score is Faculty Resources (15%). This score is made up of the average expenditure for instruction, library, and support services (9.75% overall), student/teacher ratio (3% overall), average per-student spending that includes financial aid (1.5% overall), and the total number of volumes and titles in the library (0.75% overall). Richmond's ranking for Faculty Resources went from #96 in 1998 to #69 in 1999 before falling to #75 this year. However, Dean Pagan has committed vast resources to increasing the library's holdings in the last two years. Over 22,000 books have been added, but Richmond still only has 279,402 volumes in the library, which earns Richmond a ranking of #138 out of 180. The U.S. average for volumes in a law school library is 444,038, so we are barely halfway to average. The silver lining to this news is that our ranking of #138 is four places higher than last year. What does all this mean for the Initiative? Dean Pagan is not worried. "This is a very small bump in the road," he said as he listed three areas that will receive aggressive action in the near future. 1. Raise the bar of student credentials. Richmond needs more scholarships to attract better-qualified students who not only have a high undergraduate GPA but also have high LSAT scores. Richmond costs more than any law school in the state, but it offers the lowest amount of financial aid. 2. Increase the number of faculty publications. The days of giving tenure to a faculty member because he/she is a swell person is over. Faculty will held to a "publish or perish" standard that must be strictly enforced for Richmond's academic reputation to increase nationally. We need faculty to push early and publish often in their fields of interest. Sources (i.e. not Dean Pagan) have told the Juris Publici that in the last year, the recommendation of fellow faculty for tenure of a certain professor was vetoed by Dean Pagan for lack of scholarly publication. 3. Hire more people of the caliber of Rodney Smolla. For those lucky students who have had the pleasure of having Professor Smolla in class, the prospect of hiring more faculty in other fields of his caliber is promising.
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