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. USNWR has tried to smooth these out by using a two-year average of these scores. (Next year, it might well use a three-year average or three-year weighted average.)

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 Classes of 2019 and 2020, the first-time bar passage rate for the Classes of 2021 and 2022, and the employment outcomes of the Classes of 2021 and 2022

We can quickly update all that data with this year’s data (as I made an effort to do, with some modest success, early last year). 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 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. Some schools have significantly increased school-funded positions after the change in USNWR methodology. And the peer scores may be slightly more volatile than years. Likewise, lawyer and judge scoring of law schools appears to be more significantly adversely affecting the most elite law schools, and that trend may continue.

But, again, this is a first, rough cut of what the new (and volatile) methodology may yield. 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).

If you are inclined to ask, “How could school X move up/down so much?” the answer is, bar and employment, bar and employment, bar and employment.

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

UPDATE: I continue to have difficulty assessing Wisconsin’s two law schools due to diploma privilege and how USNWR purports to measure bar passage statistics, so their rankings may be lower than would be expected.

(Any mistakes are my own. One data collection note. I often transpose some schools due to inconsistencies in how the ABA reports school names. Schools beginning with Chicago, Saint, South, or Widener are most susceptible to these inconsistencies.)