[dontbenebby]

I think they're useful-ish, but it's important not to get too focused on specifics.

For example I did a stint in policy and I'm reminded of how everyone insisted for a long time that "top" law schools are the "top 14" or T14 for short. This is historically the measure used since Georgetown was in DC, and the children of the elite must be "top tier" regardless of if their school ranked outside top ten on every official metric such as incoming LSATs, publications, etc :D

[barry-cotter]

That’s not where T14 comes from.

> There exists an informal category known as the "Top Fourteen" or "T14," which refers to the fourteen institutions that regularly claim the top spots in the yearly U.S. News & World Report ranking of American law schools.[8] Furthermore, only these fourteen schools have ever placed within the top ten spots in those rankings.[9] Although "T14" is not a designation used by U.S News itself, the term is "widely known in the legal community."[10] While these schools have seen their position within the top fourteen spots shift frequently, they have generally not placed outside of the top fourteen spots since the inception of the rankings.[11] There have been rare exceptions to this, however, such as UCLA School of Law appearing in the top fourteen instead of Cornell and Northwestern in 1987 and University of Texas School of Law displacing Georgetown in 2018, although the significance of these changes has been debated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_school_rankings_in_the_Uni...

[dontbenebby]

>> That’s not where T14 comes from.

>There have been rare exceptions to this, however, such as UCLA School of Law appearing in the top fourteen instead of Cornell and Northwestern in 1987 and University of Texas School of Law displacing Georgetown in 2018, although the significance of these changes has been debated.

People select measures for a number of reasons. It's perfectly possible the single and only reason T14 is used is for the reasons you lay out.

OTOH I have personally had conversations with people who argued that the T14 is a measure of merit when Georgetown was in the T14 then "debated the significance" of the measure when Georgetown dropped out of the top 14 in 2018.

It was not clever or endearing.