There's not much to change with the USNWR rankings to disrupt the status quo
Last year’s dramatic overhaul of the USNWR law school rankings saw the potential for increased volatility in the new metrics. But not much at the top, and much more beneath. And USNWR can only use publicly-available data.
I worked on creating an alternative set of metrics to try to stress test the rankings and see what might change. I reduced the 10-month employment score from 33% to 30%, and I subdivided that further in 20% for last year’s graduating class and 10% for the year before, a two-year weighted average. I reduced the bar passage stats a bit. I added a couple of other statistics at a percentage point or two per metrics: median debt among recent graduates; median income among recent graduates; a scholarly citation metric derived from Hein; conditional scholarships revoked; academic dismissals. That’s six new factors and changing of weights.
The result? Not much change. In fact, not much worth even listing in a chart below.
Virtually all factors highly correlate with each other. The top schools have the best admissions metrics and the best employment outcomes and the most citations and the highest bar passage rates and dismiss very few. When you add more factors, you just keep measuring mostly the same things. This isn’t true for all things, of course. You can isolate some schools that have uniquely strong scholarly profiles; stronger employment outcomes or bar passage metrics; low debt. But these can be isolated factors, and it is hard to move unless you’re moving all of them.
In short, it’s quite possible that changes, once again, to the USNWR metrics are coming. But more important than whether schools move, I think, is the incentives the metrics create. They certainly affect school behavior. Schools are less inclined, I think, to “chase” LSAT and UGPA medians this cycle, for instance, because they are weighed less, and because employability as a proxy for later employment rates matters more. But it’s just to note that many efforts to rank schools suffer from the issue that most of these factors so closely relate to one another. The more material effect may be how schools alter their behavior in an effort to retain their current position in the USNWR hierarchy.