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by Charlton D. Rose
and David Chang

Understanding the US News Rankings

Misleading USNews Information

For all the good that USNews does, there are a lot of problems with their rankings of law schools.  The most important is that they use a statistical tool that skews their own data!  Here, let me show you.  If they didn't force the data into a bell curve, the results might be very different.  I tried calculating the difference if each variable was ranked independently; here are my results:  

The second is that they count too many variables that are extrinsic to the quality of the school and that fluctuate wildly from year to year.  Employment rates are often controlled by the local economy; dollars invested per student vary with construction schedules.   Moreover, since USNews doesn't publish the data used to calculate the dollars per capita, there's no way to analyze their results.  As a result, there are large differences in the rankings of law schools from year to year, while the reputations (the commonest measure of quality) remains much more constant.  These graphs show you the difference between ranking fluctuations over seven years as compared to reputation measurement over the same time.

Finally, there's the absolute worst part of the USNews ranking, the selectivity data.  There's so many things wrong with this number that it's hard to name them all:

• The number of people who apply to a school reflects popularity, which often breaks down into geography and special interests. A lot more people want to live in DC than want to live in Montana, and Mormons (and hardly anyone else) want to attend Brigham Young.  

• Median gpa and LSAT score are positive feedback loops:  publication of the data encourages people with those numbers to apply, guaranteeing that more people with those numerical indicators will be selected.  

• Finally, the numbers published (25th and 75th percentile) are not the numbers used in the calculations (medians).  So there's no way to reproduce (or challenge) the results.  

I undertook an analysis of this data once, just to see what happens.  Michigan dropped to 17th, reflecting the universal disinterest in Ann Arbor, while Fordham rose to 18th, proving that New York is the American Mecca.  

For these reasons (as well as others I discuss in the section on how I use the USNews info) I urge you to NEVER rely on the USNews composite ranking as indicative of anything.  Or, as I tell my clients, "I don't want to hear about 'third tier.'"  In fact, I've written a piece showing that the only thing a USNews tier shows you is the school's median LSAT and academic reputation.  

Of course, USNews isn't the only culprit.  Law schools can misrepresent data too.  I haven't yet heard of a law school counting the janitors as adjunct faculty, but I've heard of almost everything else.  In particular, reported median starting salaries are seriously incorrect.

A Median by Any Other Name...

As fall term starts, we begin to window shop for law schools, comparing our numbers with theirs. Our numbers include gpas and LSAT scores.  Theirs include those silly USNews rankings and more pertinent data like bar passage rates and median starting salaries.

For years now I've said that you don't know what a number means unless you know what the number means, and median starting salary is a good example.  

Let's look at my favorite imaginary law school, Princeton.  It has a median starting salary at the top of the heap -- $150,000.  It has 200 graduates. So you might think that means that 100 have $150k or better, while the other 100 have $150k or worse.  

Nope, that's not what it means.  We may not have found all our grads to interview them.  We're Princeton, so we have a pretty loyal alumni group, but we still misplace a few. Say we've found 99% of last year's grads.  So that "median" seems to indicate that 99 have $150k or better, while 101 may have $150k or worse.  

Nope; that's still wrong.  Of those 198 we found, they're not all working in the private sector.  Some are clerking for judges, others took public interest jobs, a few went on for an LL.M.  We shouldn't have to count them in with the ones working for big law firms -- it's clearly a case of apples and oranges.  Let's say 70% are working for private law firms. (That's a very high percentage, within the top 10% of all law schools.)  So that "median" represents 70% of 99% of 200, or 69 people above $150. The remaining 131 grads could be earning less than $150 k.  Right?

Nope.  We're still not through subdividing.  Not all of our grads felt like sharing their salary information.  Only 80% were willing to give a dollar amount.  That's a pretty good proportion; only thirty schools got as many grads to divulge salary data.  So we have data for 99% of 70% of 80% of our grads -- that's 55%.  And since we conveniently started with 200 grads (it was so nice of Princeton to cooperate like that), we have 55 students with salaries known to be at $150k or better, while the other 145 arguably have $150k or worse.  

Now you might say that the unrecorded people are as likely to have higher salaries as lower ones, to which I would say, "In a pig's eye."  People with high numbers are much more likely to share than people with low numbers. The ONLY known exception is golf scores.  

So Princeton's "median" salary represents 55 out of 200 grads. That's a really odd median.

And the sad news is that those are fantastically good numbers!   The "median" at the median law school represents only 36% of all graduates -- 18% above and 18% below.

I'm not going to bore you with calculations for all the law schools; I'm going to tell you where I got the data, then give you the results.  Click here for the shocking news.