The Legal Beat

Recent T14 Graduate Spent Extra Six Figures On Law School Because Of U.S. News Rankings
Posted on Tuesday May 21, 2019

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I felt like I needed to go to the best school in order to give myself the best job opportunities coming out. For me, it was a toss-up between Penn and Temple. Temple is ranked lower than Penn. Temple is lot cheaper than Penn. Temple has a part-time program, where it would have been a lot less stressful on my life. At the end of the day, I would have been the same Chris going to Temple as the Chris at Penn. But I was willing to fork out an extra $100,000 and crush my body for three years, probably because of the rankings. If it weren’t for the rankings, I would have gone to Temple. It would have been a no brainer.

— Christopher Iacono, a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, commenting on how the U.S. News law school rankings affected his law school decision. Iacono is a nontraditional student who attended Penn Law by day while working full-time as a Philadelphia police officer by night. Iacono is the author of Legally Unhappy: How U.S. News and Law Schools Have Failed and How This Can Be Fixed, and hopes the paper will be selected for publication in a law review

Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.