Yea that seems on point. I don't think Touro is some awful place my mentoring attorney at my summer job went there and he was AWESOME! If you finish in the top 10% with minimal debt I would say you are in a pretty good spot. Take into account the considerable debt you will take on by not being able to live with your parents and paying full tuition to go to Brooklyn Law School right? Not sure if you mean Boston Law School or Brooklyn Law School by your post, but the same logic applies to either one. Boston Law School is far from the best school in it's own market their is a school you might have heard of called Harvard in the area. In Boston I believe there is Boston College, NorthEastern, Suffolk, which are comparable schools and Harvard takes the cake in your own market so you can pay 100k more to be in fourth in your own market.
If Brooklyn Law School is what you are considering the same logic applies. I believe Brooklyn Law School has the highest tuition of any law school and it is in Bedstuy, which is ghetto I lived one subway stop from it and the facilities area not impressive. You will be in competition with NYU, Colombia, Fordham, Cardozo, then I guess Brooklyn woudl be fifth and NYLS, Pace, are in the discussion as well.
Read the below articles directly from the LSAC website condeming the rankings. Don't pay 100K plus more to go to the 5th best school in a market. If you wanted to be in Idaho then University of Idaho regardless of ranking is great, but going to a school that is fifth in it's own market is not going to open many more doors. At least in my opinion and it is certainly is not worth paying living expenses for two years and a highly increased tuition.
The View of Administrators Directly from the LSAC website. http://www.lsac.org/LsacResources/Research/GR/GR-07-02.pdf page this text is on page 7. The first 7 pages explain the incomprehensible formula U.S. News uses, but read the below few paragraphs and I think you will get an understanding of how irrelavnt these rankings are. Before reporting our findings, we briefly describe the range of opinions people express about rankings. The vast
majority of administrators we interviewed held negative views of rankings: Most believed that rankings were more
harmful than beneficial to their particular schools as well as to legal education generally. This result was not surprising
considering that for each of the past 10 years nearly every law school dean (173 of 181 deans of accredited law schools
in 2005—a typical proportion in the 4 years we have kept track of these numbers) signed a letter publicly condemning
the rankings. This letter, sent to every student who registers to take the LSAT, questions the quality of information
provided by USN, alleging that the rankings cannot take each student’s “special needs and circumstances into account”
and fail to measure many factors that students claim are most important in their choice of law school. These omissions
include measures of the quality and accessibility of teachers, faculty scholarship, racial and gender diversity within the
faculty and student body, the size of first-year classes, the strength of alumni networks, student satisfaction with their
8
education, and cost.11 This letter summarizes one common criticism of ranking methodology: that USN fails to measure
many important attributes that constitute a quality law school.A second common methodological criticism is that the measures used by USN to estimate law school quality are bad
proxies for the actual quality of the schools. Klein and Hamilton (1998) conclude, for example, that 90% of the overall
differences in ranks among schools can be explained by the median LSAT score of their entering classes; this finding
suggests that despite their stated weights, the numerous other factors that comprise the rankings have small effects.12
Many deans criticize the quality of USN measures. To take one example, many suggest that respondents to the
reputational surveys are ill-informed about the schools they evaluate and that their evaluations are strategic responses. As
one dean put it:
The data on the reputational survey are so bad … I don’t understand how you get anything other than some
consensus… There is clear consensus of the 10 or 12 schools that should get a five [where five is “outstanding”
and one is “marginal”]. How is there any difference between Chicago and Yale based on reputation? Anyone
who doesn’t put Yale, Harvard, Chicago, Michigan, NU, or Berkeley as a five, is either being instrumental or is
an idiot.
Lempert (2001) characterizes the USN rankings as “pseudoscience” and, examining each component, characterizes every
factor used by USN as flawed.
Early public assessments of the rankings were very critical, and often expressed a sense of disbelief that the
rankings—produced by journalists and statisticians with no expertise in legal education—were being taken seriously. For
example, after USN published its first ranking issue in 1990, Guido Calabresi dean of Yale Law School (ranked number
1) called the rankings “an idiot poll,” while Dean Robert Clark of Harvard (ranked number 5) pronounced them “Mickey
Mouse,” “just plain wacky,” and “totally bonkers” (cited in Parloff, 1998; Webster, 1992). As one administrator
described his and his colleagues’ reaction to the initial rankings:
The survey came and we sort of looked at it and said, “Isn’t this interesting, somebody’s doing a survey.” And
then we probably filled it out and that was about it. And then all of the sudden some rankings came out and we
were in the top 25 which was a good thing for [our school]. It looked so crazy and arbitrary that we started
laughing.
The opinion of many deans and other administrators has remained critical. In 1997, Judith Wegner, then dean of the
University of North Carolina’s law school said, “U.S. News’ methodology is so seriously flawed that it makes any
thinking person despair of journalistic ethics” (Rovella, 1997). Carl Monk, executive director of the Association of
American Law Schools, called them “dangerous and misleading” (Cotts, 1998). Of the administrators we interviewed, a
majority shared these criticisms—some vehemently:
The reification of this stuff to the decimal point that makes it into “science” is what makes [rankings] so
destructive.
We hate [rankings]. And we hate the [guide] book. And it comes out at the wrong time, and it has the wrong
information.
I wish Al Qaeda would make USN their next target.
It is important to note, however, that a minority of administrators believe that rankings have had a positive
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