T14: What's the Point?

I know that this hasn't been big news since last year, but I didn't have a blog last year so you're getting my hot take now: T14 is a meaningless, arbitrary marker.

For those of you that don't know, T14 means the top 14 law schools in the country, as determined by US News rankings. They traditionally were as follows:

1. Yale
2. Harvard
3. Stanford
4. Columbia
5. Chicago
6. NYU
7. U Penn
8. UVA
9. Berkeley
10. Duke
11. Michigan
12. Northwestern
13. Cornell
14. Georgetown

Now, they'd move around a little bit; one year Stanford might be #2 and Harvard #3, but these schools were traditionally the only schools that ever made it to the top 14 of the list. Until 2017.

In a knockout move, University of Texas rose up from #15, and struck Georgetown down!!! It's ridiculously unprecedented!!! The world of law schools will never be the same!!!!!!

But... Why?

Georgetown is still #15 out of the 205 ABA accredited law schools; it was a very good school when it was a T14, and it's still a very good school now.  Texas University was a good school when it was #15, and still is a good school at #14. 

I don't understand why 14 was ever the cut off. I've tried to do research into the topic, and I've found some varying answers. The two most popular are that because #15 was always in flux, it was easier to have a set 14, which might change position from #1-#14, but were still the same schools; or that the schools that comprised T14 were the only 14 schools that had ever been within the top 10, and that that's why they were the top. So, by that logic, even though Texas might be ranked #14, it's still not a T14 school.

Personally, I think that the former explanation makes more sense than the latter, but you're free to draw your own conclusions. My main take-away from this is that no one actually has a reason to consider T14 the end-all, be-all on whether or not a school is 'good'.

That's not to say that rankings don't matter. School rankings are certainly important in helping students narrow down their choices. Higher-ranked schools with more prestige likely have more money for grants, scholarships, and expensive clinical programs that lower-ranked schools can't afford. They can hire the best professors. And a diploma from a higher-ranked school tends to look more impressive to employers. Yeah, when you step into court, the judge won't ask you to announce your alma mater to the jury, but it makes a difference.

However, the idea that being ranked #14 leaves you miles ahead of #15 just isn't true in this case. That much is clear by the abundance of ties you'll see in the rankings every year; it's always such a close race, particularly near the top. There are times where the gaps between rankings are huge. This isn't one of them.

Ultimately, my point is that choosing 14 as the cut off was a strange decision, and one that I do not support. It was an arbitrary number, and while rankings are important, a difference of one number doesn't change much more than just that one number.