TaxProf Blog

Law School Rankings By Student Quality (LSAT And UGPA)

Christopher J. Ryan Jr. (Vanderbilt) & Brian L. Frye (Kentucky), A Revealed-Preferences Ranking of Law Schools,  69 Ala. L. Rev. 495 (2017):

The U.S. News & World Report “Best Law Schools Rankings” define the market for legal education. Law schools compete to improve their standing in the rankings and fear any decline. But the U.S. News rankings incite contention, because they rely on factors that are poor proxies for quality like peer reputation and expenditures per student. While many alternative law school rankings exist, none have challenged the market dominance of the U.S. News rankings. Presumably the U.S. News rankings benefit from a first-mover advantage, other rankings fail to provide a clearly superior alternative, or some combination of the two.

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Morriss: Legal Education Through The Lens Of The U.S. News Law School Rankings

Andrew P. Morriss (Dean, Texas A&M), Legal Education Through the Blurry Lens of US News Law School Rankings, 20 Green Bag 2d 253 (2017):

The Chinese Characters in the title of this piece are the closest thing to the apocryphal “Chinese curse” of “may you live in interesting times.” The closest actual proverb is “Better to be a dog in a peaceful time, than to be a human in a chaotic period. This seems a fitting metaphor for what has been going on in legal education since 2008, when things began to get “interesting.” That the attribution of the English version of the curse is apocryphal and that I’ve taken the “true” meaning from Wikipedia (although I did check with a native Chinese-speaking friend, who assures me that Wikipedia is accurate on this point) is a good metaphor for rankings and their impact on legal education. Applicants, law review editors, alumni, and many more people rely on US News’s law school rankings to evaluate law schools, as secure in their knowledge that these are a valid source of information on relative merit as are those people who confidently attribute the “may you live in interesting times” version of the curse to a non-existent Chinese language source are in theirs.

Just as the apocryphal curse bears a resemblance to an actual proverb about dogs and peaceful times, so the US News rankings reflect — if through rather blurry glass — where legal education is. With the caveats that there are many bad things that have come from rankings, and from the illusory precision of US News rankings in particular, and that a great deal of what the rankings reflect is a fairly stable pecking order, as well as having tortured this metaphor as far as I can, let’s look at the data that US News uses and see what it reveals about where legal education is headed.

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Eight Of The Twelve Law Schools With The Highest Unemployment Rates Are In California

Law.com, Where the Law Jobs Are: The 2016 Edition:

We’ve delved into the ABA’s trove of jobs data to determine which schools had ... the highest unemployment rates. ... The charts are based on data submitted to the ABA by the law schools.

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Caron Presents Faculty Scholarship Assessment: A (Very) New Dean's Perspective Today At Texas A&M

Paul L. Caron (Dean, Pepperdine) presents Faculty Scholarship Assessment: A (Very) New Dean's Perspective at Texas A&M today as part of its Conference for Associate Deans:

I describe how existing measures of faculty scholarly output (publications) and influence (law review citations, Google Scholar citations (H-Index and M-Index), and SSRN downloads) can be used to (1) compare a law school faculty's scholarly productivity to its peers and to assess individual faculty contributions in these areas; and (2) value scholarly productivity of both junior and senior faculty.  I then offer some thoughts on what these existing ranking metrics leave out in quantifying faculty contributions to law school success, especially at faith-based schools.

My co-panelists are:

• John August (Dean of Faculties and Associate Provost, Texas A&M)
• Gary Lucas (Professor of Law and Associate Dean for Assessment, Strategic Analysis, and Reporting, Texas A&M)
• Gregory Sisk (Laghi Distinguished Chair in Law, University of St. Thomas (Minnesota))

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New York Times College Rankings

New York Times Sunday Review, Top Colleges Doing the Most for the American Dream:

Welcome to the third annual College Access Index. It's a New York Times ranking of colleges — those with a five-year graduation rate of at least 75 percent — based on their commitment to economic diversity. The ranking is based on a combination of the number of lower-and middle-income students that a college enrolls and the price it charges these students. The top of the ranking is dominated by campuses in the University of California system, while the most diverse private colleges include Amherst, Pomona, Harvard and Vassar. Notably, a college's endowment does not determine its commitment to economic diversity. There are wealthy colleges and much less wealthy ones at both the top and bottom of the ranking.

New York Times Sunday Review, The Assault on Colleges — and the American Dream:

The country’s most powerful engine of upward mobility is under assault.

Public colleges have an unmatched record of lofting their students into the middle class and beyond. For decades, they have enrolled teenagers and adults from modest backgrounds, people who are often the first member of their family to attend college, and changed their trajectories.

Over the last several years, however, most states have cut their spending on higher education, some drastically. Many public universities have responded by enrolling fewer poor and middle-class students — and replacing them with affluent students who can afford the tuition. ...

The decline of economic diversity at top public colleges is the clearest pattern in The Times’s third annual ranking of leading colleges — the roughly 170 nationwide with a five-year graduation rate of at least 75 percent. (Yes, you can be disappointed that so few colleges clear that bar.)

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2016-17 Moot Court Rankings

2016-17 Moot Court Rankings:

1.   South Texas
2.   Oklahoma
3.   St. Mary's
4.   Stetson
5.   Georgetown
6.   SMU
7.   Chicago-Kent
8.   Texas Tech
9.   Michigan State
10. UC-Hastings
11. Pepperdine
12. McGeorge
12. Wake Forest
14. Ohio State
15. Mississippi College

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Law School Rankings By Federal Judicial Clerkships

Derek Muller (Pepperdine), Visualizing Law School Federal Judicial Clerkship Placement, 2014-2016:

The release of the latest ABA employment data offers an opportunity to update the three-year federal judicial clerkship placement rates. Here is the clerkship placement rate for the Classes of 2014, 2015, and 2016. Methodology and observations below the interactive visualization. The "placement" is the three-year total placement; the "percentage" is the three-year placement divided by the three-year graduating class total.

Here are the California Law School rankings:

Here are the Top 10 law schools nationally:

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Non-Elite B-Schools Urge 'Just Say No' Approach To Rankings

Wall Street Journal, Business Schools Take a Stand Against Academic Rankings:

Business-school deans and research faculty at more than 20 universities are taking a stand against the academic rankings published by media outlets such as Bloomberg Businessweek, Nikkei Inc.’s Financial Times and the Economist Group.

Rather than “acquiesce to methods of comparison we know to be fundamentally misleading,” the administrators are urging their peers at other schools to stop participating in a process they say rates programs on an overly narrow set of criteria.

The plea, issued by deans and faculty from institutions including University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business and the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, comes in the form of a research paper to be published in the May edition of the Decision Sciences Journal [On Academic Rankings, Unacceptable Methods, and the Social Obligations of Business Schools].

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Law School Rankings By Full-Time, Long-Term Bar-Passage Required (Excluding School-Funded) Jobs (CORRECTED)

Following up on my previous posts:

• ABA Releases Class of 2016 Employment Data: 7% Drop In Law Grads Lead To Placement Rate Increase, Numerical Decrease In Long-Term J.D.-Required/Advantage Jobs (May 11, 2017)
• Comparing Class Of 2016 Employment Outcomes With Class Of 2015 And Class of 2014 (May 12, 2017)

Matt Leichter, Class of 2016 Employment Report (CORRECTED):

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Alum Donates $1.5m To University Of Florida To Fuel Law School's Rise In U.S. News Rankings From 48 To 35

Following up on my previous posts:

• After Topping Florida State Law School Again With #48 U.S. News Ranking, University Of Florida's New Dean Sets Sights On #35 Ranking Within 3-5 Years (Mar. 21, 2016)
• Laura Rosenbury Stakes Her Deanship On Raising Florida's Ranking To #35 (Oct. 12, 2016)
• Florida Law School Rankings War Intensifies: UF Marches Toward Top 35, FSU Says It Is Best Law School In State And Aims For Top 4 National Public Law School (With Michigan, UC-Berkeley & Virginia) (Mar. 15, 2017)

Daily Business Review, Hugh Culverhouse Jr. Pledges $1.5M to UF Levin College of Law:

University of Florida Levin College of Law alumnus Hugh Culverhouse Jr. has pledged $1.5 million to be used by the school for incoming student scholarships if the law school's community raises an additional $1.5 million by Aug. 14, the first day of classes.

Culverhouse, a Coral Gables-based lawyer who graduated from the law school in 1974, said he was inspired to create the Culverhouse Challenge by the school's leap from 48 to 41 in the most recent U.S. News national rankings of law schools. It was the highest ranked law school in Florida, followed by the law schools at Florida State University (48), University of Miami (77), Stetson (96) and Florida International University (100). Six more Florida law schools were not ranked.

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2017 Princeton Review's Best 381 Colleges

The Princeton Review has released The Best 381 Colleges — 2017 Edition.  According to the press release, the book contains 62 rankings based on surveys completed by 143,000 students at the 381 schools (375 per school) (methodology here), including these categories:

• Best (Sarah Lawrence) classroom experience
• Best (Wellesley), worst (New Jersey Institute of Technology) professors
• Most (U.S. Military Academy), least U.S. Merchant Marine Academy) accessible professors
• Best (Virginia Tech) quality of life
• Most (Rice), least (Montana Tech) happy students
• Students love (Virginia Tech) their school
• Most (Rhodes), least (University of Dallas) beautiful campus
• Best (Elon), worst (Hanover) run school
• Most liberal (Sarah Lawrence), most conservative (BYU) students
• Most (Thomas Aquinas),  least (Reed) religious
• Students study the most (U.S. Military Academy), least (Trinity College Dublin)
• Most (Vassar), least (SUNY-Purchase) financial aid

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Henderson: U.S. News Eliminates The Rankings Advantage Of The GRE, But Harvard Has Started A 'Quant' Arms Race For Diverse Students Who Will Thrive In A Transformed, Tech-Driven, Disrupted Legal Profession

The Legal Whiteboard: The GRE and the Revised US News Ranking Methodology, by William Henderson (Indiana):

When I initially learned that Harvard Law would start accepting the GRE as an alternative to the LSAT, I viewed it through the prism of the US News & World Report ranking and concluded that it was a very good thing for Harvard and all of legal education. Aggressive rankings management has led to tremendous over-reliance on the LSAT. By using on the GRE, I reasoned, Harvard would have sufficient test score information to assess a candidate's intellectual capacity while also obtaining the freedom to use other admissions methods to explore the larger and more diverse universe of candidates who are destined to become great leaders and lawyers.  

My thinking is crudely sketched out in the diagram below.

If Harvard Law was trying to get around U.S. News rankings formula, the USN chief strategy officer, Bob Morse, saw it coming.  ...

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2017 Religious Law School Rankings

The Most Devout Law Schools, preLaw, Spring 2017, at 42:

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2018 U.S News Law School Rankings: Average Student Debt

Following up on my posts (links below) on the 2018 U.S. News Law School Rankings:  Matt Leichter, Only 13 Law Schools Didn't Report 2016 Graduate Debt to U.S. News:

Each year U.S. News & World Report lists law schools by the average indebtedness of their graduates. Importantly, the figures exclude accrued interest, which can be quite considerable. However, these numbers are probably the best estimate of the cost of attendance at a particular law school presented in a comparable form. The ABA does not publicize graduate debt in the 509 information reports, making U.S. News an unfortunately necessary source.

Here are the 25 law schools with the highest amount of average law school debt (among those students with law school debt).

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Muller: Law Professors Are Tough Graders (Of Other Law Schools)

Derek Muller (Pepperdine), Do Law Professors Generally Think Most Other Law Schools Are Pretty Awful?:

The U.S. News & World Report ("USNWR") law school rankings include a number of illuminating bits of information and some weaknesses, as I displayed yesterday. But a cursory look at Paul Caron's display of the peer reputation scores displays, perhaps, a startling truth: law professors generally think most other law schools are pretty awful. (I qualify that with "other" because I think most law professors generally think their own schools are probably pretty good.) ...

One might expect to see a fairly ordinary distribution between 5 and 1, perhaps a bell curve with a bulk of schools in the range of 3 in the middle. But it turns out law professors think little of other schools.

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March Madness Law School Bracket

Here is the March Madness Law School Bracket, with outcomes determined by the 2018 U.S. News Law School Rankings (using academic peer reputation and student quality as tiebreakers). The Final Four are Michigan (8), Virginia (8), Northwestern (10), and UCLA (15), with Virginia beating Michigan in the championship game, based on student quality.

Law School Rankings By Student Quality (LSAT And UGPA)

Christopher J. Ryan Jr. (Vanderbilt) & Brian L. Frye (Kentucky), A De Gustibus Approach to Ranking Law Schools:

The U.S. News & World Report “Best Law Schools Rankings” define the market for legal education. Law schools compete to improve their standing in the rankings and fear any decline. But the U.S. News rankings incite contention, because they rely on factors that are poor proxies for quality like peer reputation and expenditures per student. While many alternative law school rankings exist, none have challenged the market dominance of the U.S. News rankings. Presumably the U.S. News rankings benefit from a first-mover advantage, other rankings fail to provide a clearly superior alternative, or some combination of the two.

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2018 U.S. News Tax Rankings

Here are the new 2018 U.S. News Tax Rankings, along with last year's rankings:

2018 Rank	Tax Program	2017 Rank
1	NYU	1
2	Georgetown	2
3	Florida	3
4	Northwestern	4
5	Virginia.	6
6	Loyola-L.A.	5
7	UCLA	9
8	Boston University	8
8	Harvard	7
10	Columbia	9
11	San Diego	12
12	Miami	12
12	Texas	15
14	Michigan	9
15	USC	12
16	Duke	18
16	Pennsylvania	18
18	Yale	20
19	Chicago	22
20	Boston College	17
20	Villanova	24
20	U. Washington	16
23	Indiana	20
23	Stanford	24
25	Denver	n/r
26	Washington U.	n/r

The biggest upward moves:

• +4:  Villanova (#20)
• +3   Texas (#12), Chicago (#19)
• +2:  UCLA (#7), Duke (#16), Pennsylvania (#16), Yale (#18)
• Denver (#25) and U. Washington (#26) were unranked last year

The biggest downward moves:

• -5:  Michigan (#14)
• -4:  U. Washington (#20)
• -3:  USC (#12), Boston College (#20), Indiana (#23)
• Florida State (#23 last year) is unranked this year

Here are the rankings of the graduate tax programs, along with last year's rankings.

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Florida Law School Rankings War Intensifies: UF Marches Toward Top 35, FSU Says It Is Best Law School In State And Aims For Top 4 National Public Law School (With Michigan, UC-Berkeley & Virginia)

Following up on last year's post, Laura Rosenbury Stakes Her Deanship On Raising Florida's Ranking To #35; Amidst Claims Of Sexism, Her Regime Comes Under Fire, With The Graduate Tax Program Its Flashpoint:  Florida Dean Laura Rosenbury is already halfway toward her goal of being a Top 35 law school with a 7-point improvement in its U.S. News ranking, to #41.

University of Florida Press Release, UF Law Jumps Seven Spots in U.S. News Rankings:

The University of Florida Levin College of Law climbed seven spots in the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings of the nation’s best law schools, placing at No. 41 overall. This rise is the largest year-to-year increase in over 20 years and is the second largest improvement of any law school ranked in the top 50. The Graduate Tax Program held its spot as the No. 1 program among public law schools and No. 3 overall. ...

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Pepperdine Is #1 In ADR, #5 In Practical Training

For the twelfth time in thirteen years, Pepperdine Law School's Straus Institute has been ranked the #1 dispute resolution program in the country by U.S. News & World Report. Congratulations to Tom Stipanowich and his faculty and staff colleagues for this well deserved recognition of the amazing academic programs and training and conferences they offer.

In addition, Pepperdine has been named the fifth best law school for practical training by The National Jurist (Spring 2017):

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