Rankings
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The “peer” (academic) reputation score in USNews.com’s new ranking
The Blog Emperor compiles the data. One could quibble with some of these results (e.g., Stanford isn't #1, except maybe in California!), but for the top 20 or so it's a lot less misleading than the "overall" ranking.
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Non-JD enrollment at “top 20ish” law schools
My former Texas colleague John Dzienkowski calls my attention to this astonishing chart showing non-JD enrollment (mostly LLM and SJD enrollment) at some leading law schools. LLM students are usually paying tuition, and are invisible to USNews.com rankings. Penn, which is half the size of Harvard, has as many non-JD students, which is extraordinary. So…
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San Francisco City Attorney subpoenas USNews.com over its hospital rankings…
…suspecting conflicts of interest, and USNews.com sues claiming violation of its First Amendment right to mislead consumers (OK, they left out the "mislead consumers" part). As we've noted before, prevailing in a lawsuit against USNews.com would be difficult.
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Texas A&M grads have highest bar pass rate in Texas
That's quite an achievement; the Texas Wesleyan school, which A&M took over and transformed starting only a decade ago, was regularly in the bottom half of Texas schools for bar passage rate.
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USNew.com changed its meaningless formula for the college rankings significantly this year…
…and lawprof Derek Muller (Notre Dame) speculates about whether this portends further changes to the law school rankings. I'll just note that in the 1990s, US News (back when they were still an actual magazine, not a website) used to include average starting salaries of graduates, but then dropped that since it had more to…
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Which law school has the strongest scholarly faculty?
It's that time of year for another amusing Internet poll: pairwise comparisons of the "top 40" law faculties. More than 60 choices. Have fun!
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14 lateral moves that made law professors “take notice” during 2022-23
Based on my in-box and conversations with others, these were 14 moves that transpired this past year that were thought to be the biggest hiring coups (I usually list only ten, but this was another big year for lateral moves): *Derek Bambauer (intellectual property, law & technology) from the University of Arizona to the…
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Given the new (inexplicable) USNews.com ranking stew…
…Derek Muller (Iowa) predicts what next year's ranking will look like. There is always the possibility that the reputational scores will fluctuate (arbitrarily), but my guess is this won't be far off what the 2024 rankings look like! Note some of the dramatic changes predicted!
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Why did Yale’s academic reputation score plunge from (tied for) 3rd to (tied for) 6th this year?
Was it because Yale led the charge on the boycott of USNews.com? Was it the accumulated effect of various embarrassing events, from judges boycotting Yale over free expression issues to the Amy Chua melodrama? Was it a reflection of a widely perceived decline in the strength of Yale's younger faculty compared to their elders? Was…
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More on the new USNews.com ranking stew
Prof. Derek Muller (Iowa) breaks it down. Basically, the editors chose to downgrade the importance of "input" metrics (like LSAT and GPA), and dramatically increase the weight for output measures (like bar passage and employment), which now count for more than 50% of the overall score. In a way, this is salutary, since it will…
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USNews.com has outdone itself: it has made its law school rankings even more absurd than before!
There's not much to say about what is essentially a random ordering of law schools within tier groups. Any student who made a decision on the basis of small (and, in some cases, even large) ordinal differences in this year's travesty really should have a cause of action against USNews.com. (Some of the swings in…
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Did USNews.com miscalculate employment rates or did the schools misinterpret the data reported?
Derek Muller argues, plausibly, it was the latter.
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Will the USNews.com law school rankings for this year ever appear?
Hopefully not! It appears that without the free labor supplied by law schools of reporting data, the thinly staffed USNews.com operation has been having trouble transcribing data from the ABA into its ranking formula. Among the problems: the ABA corrected some of its initial data, but that may have been missed; and USNews.com may not…
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CEO of company that makes its $$$ by peddling consumer misinformation to students…
…is morally indignant that schools won't cooperate with his enterprise. This is some real chutzpah! They don't provide information, they collect data, don't audit it for accuracy, and then throw it into a nonsensical and inexplicable formula to produce an illusion of precision regarding supposed "qualitative" differences. It's precisely because they are not providing information…
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More on gaming the USNews.com rankings via “median” LSAT and GPA
UPDATED: A reader sent along the site to which my colleague, below, is referring. A colleague at a proverbial "top ten" law school writes with some interesting observations a propos yesterday's topic (esp. the issue raised in the "Update"): Because US News ranks schools based on *median* GPA and LSAT, many schools game admissions to…
Then my question is how many of ordinary mathematicians also qualify as artists of their profession…