Historically, U.S. news has been the gold standard of law school comparison: prospective students, law firms, and law school administrators have used their rankings heavily. The rankings do reflect some meaningful differences between schools, but the methodology behind them is flawed. Here, we offer a full breakdown of U.S. news’ methodology along with our commentary. In our view, 41% of the U.S. news ranking represents helpful indicators, while the other 59% represent worthless indicators.

Worthless: peer assessment score (25%) and lawyers/judges assessment score (15%). The largest component of the rankings is a mediocre survey. Every year, U.S. news asks a few hundred law school administrators, law firm partners, and judges to rank every law school in America on a scale of 1 through 5 or mark “I don’t know.” Nearly all of those people do not have direct experience with more than a handful of law schools, however, so their ratings are fairly arbitrary and heavily influenced by U.S. news rankings from past years.

Helpful: LSAT score (11.25%) and undergraduate GPA (8.75%): We think this data is helpful and U.S. news got their weighting about right: according to LSAC, LSAT scores have about 50% more predictive power than undergraduate GPA, so it makes sense to weight LSAT scores more. U.S. news does not account for transfer students or students admitted with only ACT scores in their calculations, however, and many law schools have taken advantage of this to inflate their rankings. Rankings pressure has also induced many schools to prioritize merit-based aid over need-based aid and to use tuition increases to finance merit aid awards.

Helpful: Employment rate at graduation (4%) and 10 months after graduation (10%). U.S. news assigns an “employment rate” for each law school, where jobs are weighted as follows:

  • Full weighting: Bar passage required and J.D. advantage jobs. According to U.S. news, “many experts in legal education consider these to be real law jobs.” We think that’s too generous; some of these jobs are good but many of them aren’t. In our view, a mediocre job in corporate compliance or a law firm job that pays $45,000/year doesn’t count as a “real law job.”
  • Partial weighting: Jobs that are designated “professional” or “other” on ABA reports, positions with a deferred start date, and students that are pursuing an additional advanced degree. U.S. news isn’t transparent about their weighting, although they do specify that they penalize schools for law school funded positions, which we think is a mistake. Ten years ago, many law schools artificially inflated their employment statistics by creating lots of law school funded jobs, but nearly all of them stopped doing this due to changes in ABA reporting requirements. Many of the remaining jobs in this category are prestigious fellowships at places like Yale.
  • No weighting: This includes part time/short term jobs and jobs where the law school was unable to determine length of employment or full time status.

Worthless: spending on “instruction, library, and supporting services” (9%) and “all other items, including financial aid” (1%). We think this indicator is counterproductive. Schools should be spending less money, not more, as all law school spending ultimately comes from tuition or sources that could have offset tuition. We consider spending on “financial aid” to be completely arbitrary, as financial aid money is often diverted from other students’ tuition: law schools rob Peter to pay Paul.

Worthless: average debt at graduation (3%) and percent of law school graduates who incur any debt (2%). U.S. news added these indicators a couple years ago in response to law schools being widely criticized for overloading students with debt. Unfortunately, the net effect here is more to reward law schools for admitting rich kids than for reducing tuition: only students with rich parents are able to graduate debt-free from law school under any circumstances. It’s worth noting that neither of these data points are publicly available to our knowledge: U.S. news likely requested them from law schools directly.

Helpful: bar passage rate (3%). U.S. news calculates bar passage rates more or less the same way we do, although the explanation on their website is confusing so we’re not sure.

Worthless: student to faculty ratio (2%) and ratio of law librarians to law students (1%). Low student to faculty ratios do not mean students get more attention: introductory law classes are as large as ever, but faculty are increasingly given fewer classes as an incentive to write more papers. In addition, the ratio of law librarians to students is not meaningful: this statistic favors small schools over large schools, since law library staff sizes are similar at both.

Worthless: acceptance rate (1%). A law school’s acceptance rate is roughly correlated with how many unqualified students apply. This leads to schools doing things like waiving their application fee for large numbers of students with LSAT scores and GPAs that don’t make them competitive applicants.