Projecting the 2024-2025 USNWR law school rankings (to be released March 2024 or so)

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.

And given that the other 42% of the rankings are much less volatile, we can simply assume this year’s data for next year’s and have, within a couple of ranking slots or so, a very good idea of where law schools will be. (Of course, USNWR is free to, and perhaps likely to (!), tweak its methodology once again next year. Some volatility makes sense, because it reflects responsiveness to new data and changed conditions; too much volatility tends to undermine the credibility of the rankings as it would point toward arbitrary criteria and weights that do not meaningfully reflect changes at schools year over year.) Some schools, of course, will see significant changes to LSAT medians, UGPA medians, student-faculty ratios, and so on relative to peers. And the peer scores may be slightly more volatile than years past if schools change their behavior yet again.

But, again, this is a first, rough cut of what the new (and very volatile) methodology may yield. (It’s also likely to be more accurate than my projections for this year, which involved significant guessing about methodology.) High volatility and compression mean bigger swings in any given year. Additionally, it means that smaller classes are more susceptible to larger swings (e.g., a couple of graduates whose bar or employment outcomes change are more likely to change the school’s position than larger schools).

Here’s the early projections. (Where there are ties, they are sorted by score, which is not reported here.)

School	Projected Rank	This Year's Rank
Stanford	1	1
Yale	2	1
Chicago	3	3
Harvard	4	5
Virginia	4	8
Penn	6	4
Duke	6	5
Michigan	8	10
Columbia	8	8
Northwestern	10	10
Berkeley	10	10
NYU	10	5
UCLA	13	14
Georgetown	14	15
Washington Univ.	14	20
Texas	16	16
North Carolina	16	22
Cornell	18	13
Minnesota	19	16
Vanderbilt	19	16
Notre Dame	19	27
USC	22	16
Georgia	23	20
Boston Univ.	24	27
Wake Forest	24	22
Florida	24	22
Texas A&M	27	29
Utah	28	32
Alabama	28	35
William & Mary	28	45
Boston College	31	29
Ohio State	31	22
Washington & Lee	31	40
Iowa	34	35
George Mason	35	32
Indiana-Bloomington	35	45
Florida State	35	56
Fordham	35	29
BYU	39	22
Arizona State	39	32
Baylor	39	49
Colorado	39	56
George Washington	39	35
SMU	39	45
Irvine	45	35
Davis	46	60
Illinois	46	43
Emory	46	35
Connecticut	46	71
Washington	50	49
Wisconsin	50	40
Tennessee	52	51
Penn State-Dickinson	52	89
Villanova	52	43
Temple	52	54
Kansas	52	40
Penn State Law	57	80
San Diego	57	78
Pepperdine	57	45
Cardozo	60	69
Missouri	60	71
UNLV	60	89
Kentucky	60	60
Oklahoma	60	51
Loyola-Los Angeles	65	60
Wayne State	65	56
Northeastern	65	71
Arizona	68	54
Drexel	68	80
Richmond	68	60
Maryland	68	51
Seton Hall	72	56
St. John's	72	60
Cincinnati	72	84
Tulane	72	71
Nebraska	72	89
Loyola-Chicago	77	84
Georgia State	77	69
South Carolina	77	60
Houston	77	60
Florida International	77	60
UC Law-SF	82	60
Drake	82	88
Maine	82	146
Marquette	85	71
Catholic	85	122
LSU	85	99
Pitt	85	89
New Hampshire	85	105
Denver	90	80
Belmont	90	105
Lewis & Clark	90	84
New Mexico	93	96
UMKC	93	106
Regent	93	125
Oregon	93	78
Texas Tech	97	71
Case Western	97	80
Dayton	97	111

UPDATE July 2023: Due to an error on my part, some data among schools with “S” beginning in their name was transposed in some places. Additionally, some other small data figures have been corrected and cleaned up. The data has been corrected, and the chart has been updated.