underwear wrote:Even though UF has closed the gap from the year prior, aren't FSU's latest employment percentages, which ATL places greater weight on, still better? Odd.Nucky wrote:Florida ranked #32 in the new ATL rankings!
FSU not even in the top 50.
How odd that a 2014 ranking would use the most recent employment data available... What a concept!
Here's the methodology ATL uses for its rankings:
"Employment score (30%)
We are staying out of all of the hairsplitting about the definitions of “J.D. Advantage” versus “J.D. Preferred,” or whether employment data should be captured at 9 or 10 months after graduation. Much of the debate around law school employment data strikes us as so much fiddling around the edges of a larger problem. Thus for the employment score, we only counted full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar passage (excluding solos and school-funded positions).
Quality jobs score (30%)
This measures the schools’ success at placing students on career paths that best enable them to pay off their student debts. We’ve combined placement with the country’s largest and best-paying law firms (using the National Law Journal’s “NLJ 250”) and the percentage of graduates embarking on federal judicial clerkships. These clerkships typically lead to a broader and enhanced range of employment opportunities.
SCOTUS clerk & Federal judgeship scores (7.5% each)
Though obviously applicable to very different stages of legal careers, these two categories represent the pinnacles of the profession. For the purposes of these rankings, we simply looked at a school's graduates as a percentage of (1) all U.S. Supreme Court clerks (since 2009) and (2) currently sitting Article III judges. Both scores are adjusted for the size of the school.
Education cost (15%)
Solid data on individual law student educational debt is hard to come by. Published averages exist, but the crucial number, the amount of non-dischargeable government funded or guaranteed educational loan debt, is not available. So as a proxy for indebtedness, we’ve scored schools based on total cost. For those schools placing a majority of their graduates into the local job market, we’ve adjusted the score for the cost of living in that market.
Alumni rating (10%)
This is the only non-public component of our rankings. Our ATL Insider Survey asks students and alumni to rate their schools in terms of academics, financial aid advising, career services advising, social life, and clinical training. For the purposes of the ATL Top 50, we only counted the alumni ratings, as that was more in keeping with our “outcomes only” approach.
We've scaled the scores by their respective weights (a perfect total score would be 100), to generate the "ATL Score.""
I believe UF has the edge over FSU because of the "Quality Jobs Score," the "SCOTUS & Federal Clerkship Scores," and the "Alumni Rating." If I learned anything throughout this process it is that Gator Nation is fiercely loyal to UF Law. In addition, FSU Law has lagged behind UF in median salary meaning a lower ability to pay off student loans, a major factor in ATL's "Quality Jobs Score". Go Gators!
(that's as close to a gator as we got)
