Last spring, I critiqued the methodology used in the latest USNWR rankings that added a new indebtedness metric. USNWR chose two categories, one which it gave slightly greater weight than another: the size of the average loan incurred among law students who incurred law school debt (3%); and the percentage of law students who incurred debt (2%).

In my judgment, it is nonsensical to separate those categories, as it disproportionately favored $0 in loans to $1 in loans.

But an additional category to consider is debt-to-income ratio. This is admittedly an imperfect measure, like all measures. But I make the case for it here.

This post, then, is an effort to look at alternative measures of indebtedness and what might have been.

(This post may be best viewed on a desktop or on a phone sideways.)

First, I’ll offer a few snapshots of these alternative rankings. One is to compare the way USNWR does the ranking (separating indebtedness from percent incurring debt) with one metric that combines them. Among the ten schools that would perform the best in this new metric (based on scaled score) - that is, the schools that do better with my averaging of everything rather than two distinct categories. (By “rank,” I mean the rank among the indebtedness score.)

And among the ten schools that would perform the worst - that is, that do better in the USNWR weighing than an overall average:

Now, these “score deltas” really mean little unless one sees how the fit in with the remainder of the USNWR scoring. Most schools would be affected by no more than 0.02. But for the schools at the outer ranges, it can have a material effect.

Note, too, that the worst-performing schools all get a little worse—these schools are ranked between 168 and 183, near the bottom of the metric in the first place. The top schools, however, range from 7th to 89th in the original metric, suggesting some greater penalty for affordable public schools across the range who do not have a lot of people graduating with zero debt.

One more thought. What about comparing the schools’ rankings on a third metric, the debt-to-income ranking I’ve used before? To do that, I’ll include both the USNWR debt rank and the average debt rank, so you get a sense of ordinal place. I’ll then sort by debt-to-income ratio, with another rank to compare how schools compare against one another. Absolute debt matters, true. But debt is also relative, and what comes after the J.D. matters a lot to students, too. That entire list is below. (There’s also some lag by a year, but it should still be a useful point of comparison.)