Earlier this week, U.S. News announced that it will make updates to the 2023-2024 Best Law Schools ranking in response to the public criticism and boycott of its rankings by a number of leading law schools. In an open letter to law deans, which was published on Monday just prior to the start of the American Association of Law Schools meeting, Robert Morse, Chief Data Strategist, and Stephanie Salmon, Senior Vice President of Data and Information Strategy, described the organization’s reaction to the recent public discourse. They wrote that the U.S. News interviewed more than 100 law school deans and representatives to gain a better understanding of the criticisms and strengths of the current ranking. Generally, they said, complaints were centered around a few key topics, including the weight placed on peer assessment surveys, a need for greater emphasis on outcome measures (e.g. bar passage, employment), re-consideration of the weight assigned to various employment outcomes, and a review of student expenditures and student debt metrics. The organization also conducted an internal review.
As a result, U.S. News will make the following changes to the ranking:
All law schools will be ranked using publicly available data required by the ABA, regardless of whether school representatives respond to the annual U.S. News survey. However, U.S. News will publish in-depth profiles for those schools that do respond to the survey.
There will be updates to the methodology that increase the weight on outcome measures and reduce the weight given to peer assessment survey results. Additionally, the employment outcomes measure will be updated to give full-weight to those who receive fellowships (including school-funded fellowships) or enroll in further graduate studies.
U.S. News will make more of the collected data available to students in order to allow them to make more informed comparisons between law schools.
Over time, the organization will work alongside key stakeholders to better recognize and represent other key factors such as loan forgiveness/repayment and student aid/financial assistance, as well as socio-economic and diversity metrics.
For some deans, the updates are still not enough to reverse their position. Heather Gerkin, Dean of Yale Law School, spoke to Law.com. “Having a window into the operations and decision-making process at U.S. News in recent weeks has only cemented our decision to stop participating in the rankings,” Gerkin said. Similarly, University of New Hampshire Law School Dean, Megan Carpenter, noted to Law.com that because U.S. News did not specify the modifications they plan to make to the formula, it raises concerns that the response “simply devolves into an exercise about tweaking their monolithic formula.”
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