Paul L. Caron
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Tuesday, May 16, 2023

Projected 2025 U.S. News Law School Rankings: The Biggest Winners And Losers

Derek Muller (Iowa; Google Scholar), Projecting the 2024-2025 USNWR Law School Rankings (To Be Released March 2024 Or So):

US News (2023)Fifty-eight percent of the new USNWR law school rankings turn on three highly-volatile categories: employment 10 months after graduation, first-time bar passage, and ultimate bar passage.

Because USNWR releases its rankings in the spring, at the same time the ABA releases new data on these categories, the USNWR law school rankings are always a year behind. This year’s data include the ultimate bar passage rate for the Class of 2019, the first-time bar passage rate for the Class of 2021, and the employment outcomes of the Class of 2021.

We can quickly update all that data with this year’s data—Class of 2020 ultimate bar passage rate, Class of 2022 first-time bar passage, and Class of 2022 employment outcomes (which we have to estimate and reverse engineer, so there’s some guesswork). Those three categories are 58% of next year’s rankings.

Derek projects the Top 100 schools in next year's 2025 rankings. Here are the largest projected increases among those schools:

Rank School Projected 2025 Rank Actual 2024 Rank Difference
1 Maine 83 146 +63
2 Missouri-Kansas City 93 135 +42
3 Penn State-Dickinson 51 89 +38
4 Catholic 86 122 +36
5 Regent 93 125 +32
6 UNLV 60 89 +29
7 Connecticut 46 71 +25
8 Penn State Law 56 80 +24
9 San Diego 56 78 +22
10 Florida State 36 56 +20
11 New Hampshire 86 105 +19
12 Colorado 40 56 +16
12 William & Mary 29 45 +16
12 Wisconsin 24 40 +16
15 Belmont 90 105 +15
15 Marquette 56 71 +15
15 Nebraska 74 89 +15

Here are the the largest projected decreases among those schools:

Rank School Projected 2025 Rank Actual 2024 Rank Difference
1 Miami 97 71 -26
1 Texas Tech 97 71 -26
3 SMU 68 45 -23
3 UC-San Francisco 83 60 -23
5 Florida Int'l 79 60 -19
5 Houston 79 60 -19
5 South Carolina 79 60 -19
8 BYU 40 22 -18
9 Case Western 97 80 -17
9 Maryland 68 51 -17
11 Oregon 93 78 -15

TaxProf Blog coverage of the 2024 U.S. News Law School Rankings:

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2023/05/projected-2025-us-news-law-school-rankings-biggest-winners-and-losers.html

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