In perhaps the biggest challenge yet to the school rankings industry, both Yale and Harvard announced on Wednesday that they were withdrawing from the influential US News & World Report rankings of the nation’s best law schools.

Colleges and universities have been critical of the US News ranking system for decades, saying that it was unreliable and skewed educational priorities, but they had rarely taken action to thwart it, and every year almost always submitted their data for judgment on their various undergraduate and graduate programs.

Now both Yale and Harvard law schools have announced that they will no longer cooperate. In two separate letters posted on their websites, the law school deans excoriated US News for using a methodology that they said devalued the efforts of schools like their own to recruit poor and working-class students, provide financial aid based on need and encourage students to go into low-paid public service law after graduation.

“It has become impossible to reconcile our principles and commitments with the methodology and incentives the US News rankings reflect,” John F. Manning, the dean of Harvard Law, said in his statement. The two deans said they had decided to withdraw only after they and “a number” of other schools had taken their concerns directly to US News and been rebuffed.

The news was unveiled in dramatic fashion, beginning Wednesday morning with Yale Law’s dean, Heather K. Gerken, posting a statement. Later, Harvard joined in. US News reacted somewhat blandly to Yale, saying it stood by its “mission” to “ensure that law schools are held accountable for the education they will provide”.

Asked whether US News would continue to rank Yale, Eric Gertler, chief executive of US News, said that the organisation was reviewing options. After Harvard’s announcement, the tone became more conciliatory. “We agree that test scores don’t tell the full story of an applicant, and law schools make their own decisions on the applicant pool based on the mission of the school,” US News said in an email.

But the statement said the American Bar Association still requires standardized tests for almost all law schools.

“The rankings are a start, not an answer,” US News said. “Our mission is, and has always been, to provide data on schools for prospective students and their families.” “It is unlikely that Yale Law’s action will change the(profit-seeking) behavior of US News leaders unless a significant number of other name-brand institutions follow suit,” Robert Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, an anti-testing group, said on Wednesday.

(New York Times News Service)