Breaking down my many posts on USNWR metrics
I’ve blogged plenty about various facets of the USNWR rankings over the years. Here’s an aggregation of the most significant posts.
Peer score
Do law professors generally think most other law schools are pretty awful? (2017)
Will Goodhart's Law come to USNWR's Hein-based citation metrics? (2019)
Gaming out Hein citation metrics in a USNWR rankings system (2019)
Significant one-year peer USNWR survey score drops, their apparent causes, and their longevity (2019)
USNWR law school voters sank Yale Law and Harvard Law for the first time in rankings history. (2022)
Admissions (LSAT, GPA, acceptance rate)
Solving law school admissions; or, how U.S. News distorts student quality (2013)
Some more evidence of the scope of GRE admissions in legal education (2020)
For the second year in a row, Alabama's admissions standards (partially) trump Yale's (2021)
Non-LSAT standardized test scores in admissions remain concentrated at a handful of schools (2022)
Indebtedness
Indebtedness metrics and USNWR rankings (2021)
New USNWR metric favors $0 loans over $1 loans for graduating law students (2021)
Rethinking the best debt metrics for evaluating law schools (2021)
Employment
How state court clerkship opportunities affect legal employment (2014)
Law school-funded positions dry up with U.S. News methodology change (2016)
How should we think about law school-funded jobs? (2017)
At graduation employment figures for law school graduates in 2018 (2021)
Bar exam
Some dramatic swings as USWNR introduces new bar exam metric (2022)
Expenditures
Trying (unsuccessfully) to account for law school expenditures under the USNWR rankings formula (2022)
Overall
If U.S. News rankings were a cake, you wouldn't want to follow the recipe (2014)
When U.S. News rankings aren't news, but just 15 months late (2014)
Visualizing the 2018 U.S. News law school rankings--the way they should be presented (2017)
The new arms race for USNWR law specialty rankings (2019)
The absurd volatility of USNWR specialty law rankings (2020)
The tension in measuring law school quality and graduating first generation law students (2020)
Law school inputs, outputs, and rankings: a guide for prospective law students (2021)