A national magazine that has consistently ranked SIU’s School of Law as a third-tier school will run an open letter this week in an effort to refute public criticism of its rankings.

Written by Fred Drasner, chief executive officer of U.S. News & World Report, the letter was featured in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times business section Monday and will be printed in more than 200 college newspapers this week.

In the letter, Drasner tells prospective students that they should consider other information in conjunction with rankings when selecting a law school.

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The magazine ranks the top-25 law schools and groups the remaining schools in second, third and fourth tiers. It also ranks graduate programs in other fields of study.

Drasner also encourages students to purchase a copy of U.S. News & World Report Best Graduate Schools, the book that 164 law school deans would prefer you not to see at a discounted price.

The advertising campaign comes after the American Association of American Law Schools challenged the validity of U.S. News’ rankings.

Thomas Guernsey, dean of SIU’s School of Law, said he believes the statistical model U.S. News uses is invalid.

I also find it humorous that they would tie that letter to essentially an advertising campaign because what the deans know is really at the heart of this:the rankings sell magazines, he said.

Bruce Zanca, director of communication for U.S. News, said that the magazine is filling a market need by providing information to prospective students.

Certainly we are in business to sell our publication, but I should point out that we produce this publication each year to provide contextual information to prospective graduate students.

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Carl Monk, executive director of the AALS, said he is pleased with the latest move by U.S. News.

I was very pleased to see that the letter that 164 deans signed has had such a strong impact that they’ve had to take out an ad to help them sell their magazine, he said.

That demonstrates that the letters had the kind of impact that we wanted, and we were very glad to see that.

Zanca said he believes the deans are critical of the rankings because law school admissions are at a 10-year low.

So the law school deans are faced with increased competition for a shrinking pool of students, and, consequently, there’s much more scrutiny by the students to what school they might go to, he said.

That’s absolutely absurd, Monk said, adding that in 1991 the AALS and other organizations issued a joint statement to U.S. News noting that the rankings serve the issues of publishers more than consumers.

The people at U.S. News are well aware that we took that position when applications to law schools were increasing.

Officials from U.S. News and the AALS have met to discuss the rankings, but each organization feels the other is being inflexible.

U.S. News does not rank any discipline other than law from top to bottom, so we did ask them to treat law just like they treat the other disciplines and limit the rankings to the top so many. They refused to do so, Monk said.

Zanca responded:What the law school deans think is interesting to us, but in the end it’s inconsequential. Our motivation is to provide information for the students.

Zanca said that U.S. News has been considering alternative methods for ranking the schools in an effort to serve its customers better.

There may be changes in the future on how we do this, he said.