2014 Rankings Released Forum

[20141023]

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[gaud]

ASU's placement rate would take a DIVE if they didn't count those.

(also in the 'i think the schools would manage to get it still counted' club)

[20141023]

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[fatduck]

what a fucking ponzi scheme

[JCougar]

Anyone see this yet? Or am I late to the party.....

"In less than a month, on March 12, 2013, U.S. News will publish the 2014 edition of the Best Graduate Schools rankings on usnews.com....In the 2014 edition, we made a change in the law school rankings methodology used to compute placement rates for 2011 J.D. graduates employed at graduation and nine months after graduation. We also changed how we computed admissions selectivity in the full-time and part-time MBA rankings.

All the other rankings methodologies remain unchanged from the 2013 edition. Detailed explanations of all the methodologies will be available online on March 12.
"

Looks like they are going to change how they facor in school-funded rates. I cant think of another change in computing placement rates...

That doesn't say anything to suggest they're not counting school-funded employment. They were planning on changing the job computation a while back. Under the old rule, unemployed students that were "not seeking full-time employment" were not counted as unemployed, as were students who went back to school for an LLM. As far as I know, the revised strategy still counts as "employed" anyone who has any job. So all the non-JD-required jobs still count. I'm assuming the school-funded fellowships fall into this category.

In other words, the formula is still extremely problematic, only slightly less so.

[JCougar]

Honestly, the job outcomes are probably the most important part of the rankings. There's no reason for them to be so poorly measured. US News needs to come up with a formula that rewards some jobs over others. The "employment" part of the rankings should count at least as much as the reputational rankings, e.g. 40%. Each job should get assigned a certain point value depending on the type of job. For example:

1.0 - Art III clerkship/V100 firm/law professor
0.8 - NLJ350 firm, some jobs from the "business" category that fall into consulting
0.5 - other long-term + full time JD required (minus school-funded "fellowships"), or white-collar, professional "business" jobs
0.4 - JD preferred
0.25 - other legal (part time, temp, school fellowship, administrative academia)

You can adjust this formula any way you like, and maybe there can be exceptions made (some JD preferred may actually be highly desirable). But make granting any "exceptions" contingent on the school releasing a report of each individual job by each student (minus the student's name, but listing the firm/employer, city, starting salary, and position).

[ManOfTheMinute]

Honestly, the job outcomes are probably the most important part of the rankings. There's no reason for them to be so poorly measured. US News needs to come up with a formula that rewards some jobs over others. The "employment" part of the rankings should count at least as much as the reputational rankings, e.g. 40%. Each job should get assigned a certain point value depending on the type of job. For example:

1.0 - Art III clerkship/V100 firm/law professor
0.8 - NLJ350 firm, some jobs from the "business" category that fall into consulting
0.5 - other long-term + full time JD required (minus school-funded "fellowships"), or white-collar, professional "business" jobs
0.4 - JD preferred
0.25 - other legal (part time, temp, school fellowship, administrative academia)

You can adjust this formula any way you like, and maybe there can be exceptions made (some JD preferred may actually be highly desirable). But make granting any "exceptions" contingent on the school releasing a report of each individual job by each student (minus the student's name, but listing the firm/employer, city, starting salary, and position).

What do you do for people whose top choice are things other than what you list in the 1.0 category? Should a school get ranked lower for fostering students' intellectual curiosity rather than streamlining them towards "Art III clerkship/V100 firm/law professor." This ranking system runs into the problem of imposing what you value in a legal education onto what others do, when they might in fact be quite different...

Not saying that the current rankings don't suck, but there are a lot of reasons why they cannot make them better. In order to not hurt schools that promote their student's doing whatever they want, they stick to employed/unemployed

[rad lulz]

Students tend to want good legal jobs d00d

[JCougar]

What do you do for people whose top choice are things other than what you list in the 1.0 category? Should a school get ranked lower for fostering students' intellectual curiosity rather than streamlining them towards "Art III clerkship/V100 firm/law professor." This ranking system runs into the problem of imposing what you value in a legal education onto what others do, when they might in fact be quite different...

Not saying that the current rankings don't suck, but there are a lot of reasons why they cannot make them better. In order to not hurt schools that promote their student's doing whatever they want, they stick to employed/unemployed

When facing an enormous load of debt, nearly all students opt for jobs that can pay down that debt, despite what they initially went to law school thinking they wanted to do.

So although there may be a few that don't want Biglaw/clerkships, etc., the school's ability to place students into those jobs tells a lot about how "good" the school is in any meaningful sense to law students.

FWIW, I also think the "teaching expenditures/library size" ranking needs to be changed, as well. This needs to be changed into an "average debt at graduation" category. Schools with lower average debt would be automatically better for anyone who wants to practice non-Biglaw. The way they have it set up now disincentivizes efficiency.

[ManOfTheMinute]

Valid points... however I think law schools should also get credit for when one is able to find a rich husband/wife and thus not have to work upon graduation (don't tell anyone, but this is my plan). Such epic success should be worth two points.

Dude, nothing is more important than the size of the library. We all know that there is a direct correlation between the size of your library and how good you are at reading.

[bluecouch]

Valid points... however I think law schools should also get credit for when one is able to find a rich husband/wife and thus not have to work upon graduation (don't tell anyone, but this is my plan). Such epic success should be worth two points.

Dude, nothing is more important than the size of the library. We all know that there is a direct correlation between the size of your library and how good you are at reading.

LOL. My favorite comment of the night.

[20141023]

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[iMisto]

Can you email those turds at USNWR already? Just send them a .doc with your methodologies.

[20141023]

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[ph14]

Honestly, the job outcomes are probably the most important part of the rankings. There's no reason for them to be so poorly measured. US News needs to come up with a formula that rewards some jobs over others. The "employment" part of the rankings should count at least as much as the reputational rankings, e.g. 40%. Each job should get assigned a certain point value depending on the type of job. For example:

1.0 - Art III clerkship/V100 firm/law professor
0.8 - NLJ350 firm, some jobs from the "business" category that fall into consulting
0.5 - other long-term + full time JD required (minus school-funded "fellowships"), or white-collar, professional "business" jobs
0.4 - JD preferred
0.25 - other legal (part time, temp, school fellowship, administrative academia)

You can adjust this formula any way you like, and maybe there can be exceptions made (some JD preferred may actually be highly desirable). But make granting any "exceptions" contingent on the school releasing a report of each individual job by each student (minus the student's name, but listing the firm/employer, city, starting salary, and position).

What do you do for people whose top choice are things other than what you list in the 1.0 category? Should a school get ranked lower for fostering students' intellectual curiosity rather than streamlining them towards "Art III clerkship/V100 firm/law professor." This ranking system runs into the problem of imposing what you value in a legal education onto what others do, when they might in fact be quite different...

Not saying that the current rankings don't suck, but there are a lot of reasons why they cannot make them better. In order to not hurt schools that promote their student's doing whatever they want, they stick to employed/unemployed

I would change the 1.0 category to include federal gov jobs and in-house jobs: Art. III clerkship/state supreme court/v100 firm/in-house positions/law professors (most law professors clerk or practice first though)/ and I would also add competitive federal government jobs.

And even if you don't want one of these jobs, the vast, vast majority of law school grads want one of these positions.

[M458]

To be honest, I am SHOCKED at how high that is for UVA. As a 1L I dont know that many 2Ls, but every single one I do know is going to biglaw this summer. Even have one friend who is in bottom 10% going to biglaw (market salary) and he is not a URM. I guess I just dont see it...

Yeah... and what is really weird is how much this number has increased over the past few years. According to this, UVA's school funded jobs accounted for the following percentages during the following years:

2008: 1.8%
2009: 4.8%
2010: 10.9%
2011: 17.3%

It has almost doubled every year for the past 3 years.

Dear God...in 3 years they'll be employing Michigan grads too.

[Spritzpiggy]

Can you email those turds at USNWR already? Just send them a .doc with your methodologies.

+1. Love Regulus' idea of including the ratio of tuition to expected income. I would love to see those rankings

[ms9]

"Dear God...in 3 years they'll be employing Michigan grads too."

HA! Or employ prospective students.

One thing about USNews rankings. I think people often assume (I did) that Bob Morse has a crack staff, resides in a palatial building, and had all kinds of resources at his disposal. In fact, it is Morse and a bunch of college age interns in an old, small building. This is not to say that they could change their methodology considerably or that he does not have the bandwidth to do so. But, I have a gut feeling that if one were to contact him and suggest mindful changes, it might not ever make it to him.

The sad fact of the matter is that the largest driver to where one goes to law school has been USNews rankings year after year after year. if I had a dollar for every time someone cam to me at an admissions even with a US News listing, just checking off the list of T14 or T25 I'd have enough to start my own law school & employ prospective students.

[somewhatwayward]

So the idea is to just apply to every school you can and go to the highest ranked school right?

Not sure if srs

But if srs, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO. (At first I made that like five lines of 'O's but decided this would suffice.) I have seen you around enough to know that you probably don't think this but other people still do. We hear it on here all the time - 'I got a 2/3 scholarship to a T3 but I don't know if I can pass up the prestige of going to [insert T1/T2 here].' Of course the right answer in that case is to retake, but the next best thing is to go to the T3 as long as employment prospects are decent, stips are not outrageous (drop out if you lose scholarship), and you have ties to the region the T3 is in or can credibly say you want to work there to employers. The only schools with enough prestige to pay for are HYS....maybe the rest of the T13 (sorry GT....regardless of prestige, your placement sucks bc you are so gigantic).

[313DetroitLove]

t14 or free hoe, ... hoe hoe hoe

[Sheffield]

The annual USNWR Law School rankings. . . it never get old. Especially this year since they are changing the ratings criteria. Last time they changed their criteria a couple T14s were bounced. If USNWR is going to make a notable change in the T14 (or T6, or…), this is their big chance to do it .

Hard to imagine all the politicking that goes on before THE LIST is published.

[Ti Malice]

Also, I believe that instead of simply categorizing full-time, long-term, JD-required positions by "tier," it would be better to base the score off of income instead. That is, take the median starting salaries and divide them by the cost of tuition for 3 years to get a score; this score would be an incentive for schools to lower tuition in order to raise their rank while simultaneously being an indicator of outcome to potential applicants. Instead of being based on absolute values, it would be based on a curve so that schools would be directly competing with each other for points. To make sure that low salaries are not intentionally left out, the score would be multiplied by the % of the graduating class for which the income was reported (so x 1.0 if 100% of the graduates were accounted for, and x 0.8 if only 80% of the graduates were accounted for).

Can't get behind you on this one, Regulus. So many people at YLS self-select out of BigLaw and into top PI jobs that pay a lot less. I don't think rankings should only reward BigLaw placement. Placement ability would obviously be worth rewarding, but we don't have that data. Also don't think schools should be punished for having students that continue in PhD programs after getting their JD -- something also more common at YLS than elsewhere.

[ms9]

Hard to imagine all the politicking that goes on before THE LIST is published.

Surprisingly enough, there isn't all that much politicking that goes on. or at least not at the three law schools I worked at. For example, some schools have conducted studies on hiring tenured or tenure track faculty as it relates to the prestige ranking from other law schools (which is voted on from the Dean, Assoc. Dean for Faculty, and most recently tenured faculty member, I believe). Depending on the study, there seems to either no correlation or even a negative correlation between the prestige of the faculty member's school you hire from and your school's prestige ranking in USNews the following year.

I think the general consensus is that it is at the margins of Admissions (LSAT, uGPA, slectivity), Employment (including Bar Passage) and Expenditure per Student where gains can be made.

So politicking doesn't seem to exist is the strata I lived in. Anxiety I can assure you is high at almost all law schools.

[risa]

all of this employment data confuses/overwhelms me. Especially because it seems so easily manipulated by different schools. Also, since I'm not gunning for Big Law (my goal is non-profit work) it's hard to gauge how much those stats will affect me.

Is the general consensus though that the worst employment stats in the T16 or so are Georgetown, UCLA and Texas?

Also, I feel like there should be some way to distinguish bullshit school-funded jobs like temporary admissions positions I've read about (was that GW?) vs. something like the year-long fellowships funded by NYU. While the latter might not be long-term or as great as a permanent job, there's a significant difference in terms of its value to the graduate.

Can't get behind you on this one, Regulus. So many people at YLS self-select out of BigLaw and into top PI jobs that pay a lot less. I don't think rankings should only reward BigLaw placement. Placement ability would obviously be worth rewarding, but we don't have that data. Also don't think schools should be punished for having students that continue in PhD programs after getting their JD -- something also more common at YLS than elsewhere.

This. I understand what the folks suggestion a salary rating are getting at but some of us don't want to make a big salary after law school, or at least that is not a realistic option considering our ideal practice area. I like the average debt at graduation stat going into the rankings but I don't think you can necessarily factor in salary with that because that would disadvantage schools with strong/large public interest programs.

[20141023]

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