U.S. News Law School Efficiency Rankings

Robert Morse (Director of Data Research, U.S. News & World Report), Which Highly Ranked Law Schools Operate Most Efficiently?:

U.S. News has developed a new, exclusive list showing which law schools are able to produce the highest educational quality, as determined by their place in our Best Law Schools rankings, but spend relatively less money to achieve that quality. ...

U.S. News measures financial resources in part by taking into account how much a law school spends per student on instruction, including faculty and staff salaries, library, supporting services and other expenditures, such as financial aid. The financial resources ranking factor is a direct measure of the size of each law school's yearly budget expenditures per student compared with other law schools, and it has an 11.25 percent weight in the Best Law Schools rankings methodology.

The new list is based on the concept of operating efficiency, defined as a law school's total budget expenditures per student divided by its overall score – which U.S. News uses to determine its overall numerical rank – in the 2014 Best Law Schools rankings. This calculation reveals how much each law school is spending for each point in its overall score and thus, its position in the rankings.

The less a law school spends relative to other schools as correlated to its overall U.S. News rank, the more efficient it is in producing a quality education compared with other schools. ...

Only schools that were numerically ranked in the top 100 in the Best Law Schools 2014 rankings were included in this analysis. The table below shows the 25 law schools that scored the highest on the operating efficiency measure, sorted by those that spent less per student to achieve a relatively high rank.

Law School	US News Rank	Spending per Student	Spending per Student for Each Point in US News Overall Score
Louisville	68	$28,151	$654.67
Rutgers-C.	91	$26,858	$688.67
G. Mason	41	$38,684	$703.35
Wisconsin	33	$42,415	$731.29
Rutgers-N.	86	$30,236	$755.90
Wm. & Mary	33	$44,104	$760.41
N. Carolina	31	$45,232	$766.64
Tennessee	61	$34,792	$773.16
Nebraska	61	$35,228	$782.84
Kentucky	58	$36,407	$791.46
Georgia St.	54	$38,099	$793.73
Houston	48	$39,761	$795.22
Hawaii	80	$33,025	$805.49
Alabama	21	$53,469	$810.14
G. Wash.	21	$53,495	$810.53
Arkansas	68	$35,041	$814.91
Missouri	76	$34,437	$819.93
Virginia	7	$69,704	$820.05
LSU	76	$34,909	$831.17
Utah	41	$46,512	$845.67
Florida	46	$45,654	$861.40
Georgetown	14	$64,734	$863.12
Wake Forest	36	$49,318	$865.23
Emory	23	$57,323	$881.89
Ohio State	36	$50,269	$881.91

(Hat Tip: Francine Lipman.)