The Over-Estimated Impact of Median LSAT Change on USNWR Rankings
It's that time of year again—when schools report their incoming class profiles.
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Rankings
13 Oct 2019
09 Sep 2019
2020 US News Undergraduate Rankings
U.S. News & World Report has released their 2020 Undergraduate Rankings. Below we've charted the change in each of the 2020 top fifty universities ranking from last year!
Read full post03 Sep 2019
Mike Spivey's My Rank Top 50 Law Schools
As many of you know, we have spent the past several months developing a tool for prospective law school applicants to create their own customized law school rankings.
Read full post13 Aug 2019
About the USNWR Peer & Lawyer/Judge Scores
These scores should be thought of as not leading the rankings but being led by the rankings.
Read full post06 May 2019
Create Your Own Law School Rankings (coming soon)
Good or bad, it seems almost everyone has something to say about law school rankings. One of the primary flaws of rankings, however, is that they dictate what is important by assigning weight to different categories. When algorithms and methodologies behind rankings change, or when new rankings are created, it is often with the purpose of adjusting the importance of the metrics that go into them to make them better or more meaningful to the people who are looking at those rankings. But no matter
Read full post06 May 2019
What the U.S. News Law School Rankings Looked Like in 1987
The U.S. News & World Report law school rankings have changed quite a bit over the years. In 1987, the methodology included just one metric—the percentage of law school deans who ranked the school, in their subjective estimation, as a "top 10 law school." See below the resulting top 20. As a bonus, you can also see what tuition rates looked like in 1987—the highest figure of which is under $14,000 (Columbia), and the lowest of which is just $4,500 (UT Austin—which is out-of-state) (note that all
Read full post29 Mar 2019
How to choose between a higher ranked school at sticker price and a lower ranked school with a scholarship
Introduction We were asked to write about choosing between a T14 school at sticker (full tuition) versus a T20 to T30 school with merit aid. The below constitutes our best stab at that, but please keep in mind that, as always, these are arbitrary cutoff points based on one flawed rankings system and not designed for you as an individual. Point being that a school ranked 18 may be much more valuable to you for any number of reasons that a school ranked 13, etc. If you want to read or watch more
Read full post15 Mar 2019
When a school drops in rank significantly, does that affect how "desperate" schools get?
This is an applicant question, and a timely one due to the recent USNWR rankings release and upcoming seat deposit deadlines. The applicant asking the question, I believe, uses “desperate” to mean, will a school that just dropped in the rankings suffer applicant pool consequences and thus need to go deeper into their own pool to admit? I will get to that a bit later in this post (and there is available data that anyone could look up by looking at schools that have dropped in the rankings in past
Read full post06 Mar 2019
2020 USNWR Rankings (2019 Release)
Please note, at the request of USNWR we have decided to take down this year's rankings. As a firm, we will always seek to give applicants critical information to help them with important and time-sensitive decisions. Going forward, we will be even more active on this blog in giving advice and value-added information. We will continue to break various rankings, admissions cycle numbers, future admissions cycle predictions, and employment numbers via our Twitter account [https://twitter.com/Spi
Read full post18 Feb 2019
Five U.S. News Rankings Failures
By Kyle McEntee, executive director of Law School Transparency [http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/]. Originally published on Above the Law [https://abovethelaw.com/] in 2016. Reposted with permission. In this post, I examine five U.S. News rankings failures. I consider the methodology and underlying rankings theory from the perspective of a student who features job prospects prominently in his application and enrollment decisions. Considering the near universal support for prioritizing job o
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