WSJ on Closius and UB Law’s rank
August 26, 2008
For those of you who missed it, the University of Baltimore School of Law was featured prominently today in a Wall Street Journal story about the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings. The magazine is thinking of revamping its ranking criteria to address the widespread practice of admitting inferior applicants as part-timers, since part-time students’ LSAT scores and undergraduate grades don’t count in the rankings.
Amir Efrati writes:
One of the top beneficiaries of the current U.S. News criteria is Phillip Closius, former dean of the University of Toledo’s law school. He led the school’s rise from the list’s fourth tier to its second tier within a few years. After he took the helm of the University of Baltimore law school last year, that school also quickly climbed the rankings, to 125 this year from 170 last year, he says. (Schools in the third and fourth tiers aren’t publicly ranked — instead they are grouped together — but deans can find out where they placed.)
Mr. Closius’s winning strategy in both places: Cut the number of full-time students accepted into the program to boost the median LSAT scores and GPAs, which together account for more than 20% of a school’s ranking. In their place, the schools add more part-time students, who can transfer to full-time the second year.
Closius says the strategy is good for weaker students because it lets them ease into law school. He also tied the improved rank to subsequent “multimillion-dollar grants and donations for a new building.”
The story also has a small chart showing how some schools’ ranks this year would have been different had part-timers been counted. According to that chart, the University of Maryland School of Law, which placed 42nd, would have been ranked a bit lower, in the mid- or high 40s.
Ron Miller over at the Maryland Injury Lawyer Blog posts about this story, too.
CARYN TAMBER, Legal Affairs Writer
Sphere: Related ContentWhy the B-more biotech bigwigs should vote Dem in November
April 10, 2008
This week, at an event related to the release of the Johns Hopkins Carey School of Business’s annual “Trend Watch” report, attorney Ray Truitt of Ballad Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll made some interesting remarks about development, public housing and the relevance of the upcoming presidential election.
If a Democrat is elected president come November, he said, it is likely that HOPE-VI, the public housing improvement program spearheaded by Sen. Mikulski in 1993, will be resuscitated, “and that may be critical for the development of low-income and affordable housing.”
HOPE-VI is a program meant to help convert “severely distressed” public housing into more livable space. Since George W. Bush became president, however, the federal government has been cutting funding for the program every year.
To some, HOPE-VI is an invaluable lifeline of public money to improve public housing stock. To others, it is a way of tearing down poor people’s homes in order to replace them with mixed-income developments that are privately-owned, and generally more profitable for developers. The most recent issue of The Economist has an interesting article about the possible renewal of HOPE-VI in the next few months or years.
So what’s biotech got to do with it?
For one, the success of the new University of Maryland BioPark on Baltimore’s west side is inextricably tied to a corresponding neighborhood redevelopment effort in the surrounding communities, and it probably would not have moved forward if the city hadn’t cleaned up the public Read more
Sphere: Related ContentUMB Law School grads/politicians present at groundbreaking
April 1, 2008
At Monday’s opening/groundbreaking ceremony for Buildings II and III at the University of Maryland, Baltimore, BioPark in West Baltimore, three of the politicians on stage were UMB Law School graduates.
Governor Martin O’Malley (’88), Congressman Elijah Cummings (’76), and Senator Ben Cardin (’67) are all big supporters of UMB’s West Side development.
We found this interesting because it shows a sort of institutional loyalty to the University of Maryland, Baltimore, that many graduate students don’t have. Sure, you stay true to your law school, but does that mean you give back to the geeks in the labs over at the biophysics building? What about the med students or the social scientists? Are they all bound together by Terrapin Pride?
We caught up with Sen. Cardin briefly after the ceremony and the symbolic first shovelful of dirt, to ask him about this phenomenon.
“I owe a lot to [the University of Maryland], and my law school days were formative in giving me the tools to be analytical and persuasive,” he said. “It was life changing for me. It was there more than anywhere that everyone talked about and intended to solve the problems of the world.”
The Senator said that in his day, med students and law students would get together and talk idealistically about how to get things done.
“The medical students used our library, and we used theirs,” he said. “But we also had a bit of competition over who had the better campus coffee place.”
And in the end, are you wondering who won?
The Senator shrugged.
“Neither of us,” he said. “Lexington Market had the best coffee.”
ROBBIE WHELAN, Business Writer
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