Muller: Employment Outcomes Overwhelm Every Other U.S. News Law School Rankings Metric

Derek Muller (Notre Dame; Google Scholar), Perhaps the Most Valuable Legal Education Job in the New USNWR Rankings Landscape? Career Development:

After the USNWR law school rankings shakeup earlier this year, I pointed out that spending money on law professors would have less influence than in years past. So, where might there be incentives to spend more money?

Undoubtedly, career services and career development offices. ...

[A]s the methodology has changed, tiny changes in employment outcomes can yield dramatically different law school rankings. Employment outcomes overwhelm every other category. Indeed, admissions is less important and outcomes like employment are dramatically more important, so much so that one might rethink admissions in light of employment more than median LSAT and UGPA scores (with lots of promise and lots of peril).

So let’s take a look at what to expect in the next USNWR law school rankings as it relates to employment outcomes. Here are the ten schools (in alphabetical order) I project to be in or near the top 10 in employment outcomes. I show three categories of jobs: “full weight jobs,” all other jobs, and unemployed/unknown. ...

... [T]o get to the “top ten” of “full weight” jobs, schools have taken wildly divergent approaches in achieving results. Career development offices have significantly different strategies for the school, the region, the student body, whatever one wants to think about it.