Elite Law Schools boycott the US News Rankings. Now they may be paying a price.

It may be a matter of being careful what you wish for.

Seven months ago, dozens of leading law schools and medical schools announced they were boycotting the US News & World Report rankings and refused to provide data to the publication. The rankings, they said, were unreliable and skewed education priorities.

Last week, US News previewed its first ranking since the boycott — for the top twelve or so law And medical only schools – and now, it seems, many of those same schools care deeply about their representation in the publication’s pecking order.

In fact, their complaints about the methodology were so strong that US News announced on Wednesday that it was valid indefinitely postponed the official publication of the ranking.

“The interest in our rankings, including from the schools that refuse to participate in our survey, exceeds anything we’ve experienced in the past,” US News wrote on its website, explaining why it delayed the release.

Yale Law School, the instigator of the boycott, is among those who view the rankings as incorrigible. “What we see happening with U.S. News every week is exactly why so many schools are no longer participating,” said Debra Kroszner, an associate dean and chief of staff at the law school. “It’s a very flawed system.”

This latest skirmish — which ensues when students dedicate themselves to schools, often with US News as their lead — shows that even a boycott shrouded in the ivy of Yale and Harvard may be no match for the influence of the US News ranking system.

Yale dropped out in November, followed shortly afterwards by Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown, Columbia and the University of California, Berkeley, among others. Harvard was the first medical school to leave, followed by schools such as Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania.

Faced with an uprising, US News went on a listening tour of more than 100 schools, conducting what it claims is the most significant revision of its methodology ever. To fill in the missing data on boycotting schools, it used public figures from sources such as the American Bar Association.

When the leaderboard preview was released, not much changed. Yale Law School was still No. 1 (though now tied with Stanford). UCLA’s law school knocked Georgetown out of the “Top 14.” Harvard Medical School dropped from No. 1 to No. 3 in the research rankings, replaced in first place by Johns Hopkins.

But schools that were boycotted were still angry about some of the data, especially the way U.S. News counted jobs after graduation.

U.S. News had said it would change its methodology and count students on scholarships as working, with the caveat that the scholarships were long-term and required passing the bar exam (or at least that a law degree conferred an advantage to the stock exchanges).

Taking into account the stock market, Yale expected the employment rate to rise from nearly 90 percent to nearly 100 percent. Instead, it dropped to 80 percent, at least based on what Yale said it learned of the data through media reports. (Yale said it had not purchased access to the data or contacted US News.)

“If this is the employment metric they’re using for Yale Law School, it’s completely false and flat out inconsistent with the methodologies outlined on their website,” said Ms. Kroszner.

The University of California, Berkeley, had similar complaints, saying students in their joint law and Ph.D. program, who take longer to graduate, were counted as unemployed. Law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky said he had filed a complaint with US News but had not heard back yet.

However, Mr. Chemerinsky brushed off any notion that he cared about the ratings.

The problem isn’t that schools have suddenly come to believe in the value of rankings, he said. Rather, they believe that if US News is going to produce rankings, regardless of a school’s cooperation, the data should at least be accurate.

“I hope that by making this choice we have undermined the credibility of US News because it has far too much influence on education,” Chemerinsky said. “But I am a realist. I know they do rankings. I want to make sure whatever the data is, it’s done accurately.”

For some university officials, the metabolism reveals the hypocrisy of the high schools.

Peter B. Rutledge, dean of the University of Georgia law school, who has not boycotted the rankings, said he thought the changes in methodology were a legitimate attempt to include what US News learned from its listening tour. His school had one question about the data and it was answered, he said.

“In my opinion, US News has gone out of its way to engage deans in dialogue,” he said. “The radical change in methodology was not something that US News waved its magic wand and plucked out of a hat.”

Mr Rutledge said he respected the embargo and would not say whether Georgia, which finished 29th last year, rose or fell in the rankings.

To other observers, however, the haggling reveals the randomness of the data that can be distorted by a simple change in statistics.

Michael Thaddeus, a math professor at Columbia who has criticized the rankings for being too easily manipulated by the schools, said it did not inspire confidence that US News was renegotiating rankings ahead of their release.

“It’s kind of like the Wizard of Oz saying, ‘Don’t mind the man behind the curtain,'” said Dr. Thaddeus.

While many organizations rank colleges and universities, US News is probably the most prominent. Students across the country use the rankings as a guide to the most prestigious schools and as a tool for deciding where to enroll. The rankings also affect how potential employers rate graduates.

Schools invest time and money in improving the metrics that US News values, such as admissions test scores, teacher-to-student ratios, class size, and employment after graduation.

Now it seems that the changes in some of those stats have had unexpected consequences for some of the elite schools that demanded them.

“If you think about everything else that’s going on in the world, there’s a side that’s like a storm in a teapot,” said Mr. Rutledge, the dean of Georgia. “Then you realize this is an industry where the incumbents have built their model for 30 years around a relatively predictable and unchanged regimen for producing a highly regarded law school.”

Paul Karon, dean of the Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law, ranked 52nd last year, suggested that the word “boycott” in this context is a kind of gaslighting. In a recent headline on his blog, he noted that US News had again delayed publication of its rankings due to questions, “including from schools ostensibly boycotting the rankings.”