New Alternative to U.S. News Rankings Forum

[jenesaislaw]

Today, Law School Transparency announces an alternative to the U.S. News law school rankings: The LST Score Reports.

LST has developed the Score Reports in an effort to produce a tool to help prospective students make application and enrollment decisions, keeping in mind that each person has a different risk tolerance, financial situation, and set of career aspirations.

The Score Reports are user-friendly tools for sorting law school employment outcomes, projected costs, and admissions stats. There is a Score Report for every state (includes only schools that place graduates there), every school (called a profile), and job types. They measure job outcomes, use a regional scope, and use real terms about the outcomes to allow prospective students to make an educated decision about not just which school to attend, but whether any school happens to meet their needs.

The Score Reports are not rankings, although they do serve as an alternative to conventional law school rankings. But unlike rankings, the Score Reports do not reduce complex data to a single metric. Instead, the Score Reports focus on observable relationships to specific legal markets and job types. Only a small handful of schools have a truly national reach in job placement. The rest have a regional, in-state, or even just local reach. A decision tool should not obfuscate this reality; it should embrace it.

You can view the Score Reports, and read more about them, by following these links:

The Score Reports: http://www.lstscorereports.com
Guide to Using the Score Reports: http://www.lstscorereports.com/?r=guides&show=12
The Value of the U.S. News rankings: http://www.lstscorereports.com/?r=guides&show=13
Methodology, Published in the Journal of Legal Metrics: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2106814

[jenesaislaw]

Thanks to the TLSers who beta tested and offered very valuable feedback.

[rad lulz]

Looks great y'all.

[Rahviveh]

The work you guys do is absolutely fantastic.

[usfvictor]

Great work.

[jenesaislaw]

Thanks everybody. Lots of people using it so far -- happy to see that.

[AlanShore]

This is EXCELLENT. Thank you so much!

[AlanShore]

Hey Jene, for "receiving discounts", are you including only scholarships and financial aid (that you don't have to pay back), anything else?

[jenesaislaw]

Hey Jene, for "receiving discounts", are you including only scholarships and financial aid (that you don't have to pay back), anything else?

This includes any scholarship, merit-based or need-based, from the law school or university. It does not include savings, family contributions, or outside contributions/scholarships/grants. Working on getting the median discount data in. Just finally got it last night at about midnight.

[epiphinous7]

Really amazing. Thanks so much!

[jenesaislaw]

Yup! Happy you all are liking it.

[bhan87]

It should be mandatory for every law school applicant to look through this site before applying.

[buddyblack]

The Score Reports are not rankings, although they do serve as an alternative to conventional law school rankings. But unlike rankings, the Score Reports do not reduce complex data to a single metric. Instead, the Score Reports focus on observable relationships to specific legal markets and job types. Only a small handful of schools have a truly national reach in job placement. The rest have a regional, in-state, or even just local reach. A decision tool should not obfuscate this reality; it should embrace it.

To that end, in the future will it be possible to sort by region of the country? Or by a metropolitan area/locality? Right now I've only been able to sort by state (though that might be because i'm tired and dumb). I imagine the data might be hard to come by but it'd be useful.

Also, like everyone has else said, this is great! Thanks for the doing good work.

[FeelTheHeat]

Looks great y'all.

[jenesaislaw]

To that end, in the future will it be possible to sort by region of the country? Or by a metropolitan area/locality? Right now I've only been able to sort by state (though that might be because i'm tired and dumb). I imagine the data might be hard to come by but it'd be useful.

Also, like everyone has else said, this is great! Thanks for the doing good work.

We actually have sufficient data to do the regional sorts, and the programming and design are actually in place. Unfortunately, it proved to be a terrible feature that did not produce reasonable sorts. In the end we decided if a person was genuinely interested in placement in any states in a region, they could just look at the state reports and see the overlap. This was better than putting schools in reports they really don't belong on, or leaving schools off that do belong.

I purposefully did not get into the details of why it didn't work because I'd like you (or anybody else) to suggest how they would go about creating regional reports. The state reports have one simple rule: place 5% of all graduates into the state. (In the future, we'll probably do this over 3 years, but don't have the data to do that right now.) What rule(s) would you use for regions?

As for metro areas/localities, yes, I would love to do that, but we do not have the data to do that. I think we're a few years away from being able to do it, even though the schools and ABA have all of the data we'd need to get it done already. It's time for the ABA and schools to put their money where their mouth is on lessening the impact of the U.S. News rankings.

[Granfalloon12]

Thank you very much for these statistics -- while it's disheartening to see the dismal employment statistics of some of the schools I'm looking at (American is a pretty bad investment, apparently) I'm definitely glad to have these statistics and be able to compare and contrast schools with more information at hand.

[jenesaislaw]

You're welcome.

[helix23]

This is awesome.

[jenesaislaw]

Does anybody want to talk to a reporter about the Score Reports?

[AlanShore]

Does anybody want to talk to a reporter about the Score Reports?

I'm interested. 0L.

[jenesaislaw]

Sadly I think it's too late. Will keep you in mind if anybody else asks.