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Every year we watch schools wander up and down the US News rankings, and wonder what drives these changes: changes in student quality? in financial resources? in employment data? And every year we shrug our shoulders and conclude, "I don't know."
Small movements are accounted for by changes in employment, percent accepted, or library size. But the overall ranking seems to be driven by only three variables: academic reputation, lawyer reputation, and median LSAT score. The graphs below help show this.
Here's some information that will be useful in understanding the graphs:
As you can see, the majority of the factors reported by US News are very scattered, and therefore don't correlate with rank.
In the graph above, we can see that acceptance rate is scattered: the highest-ranking school (Florida Coastal) is in the 4th tier, while three top-50 schools (Indiana, Minnesota, and Pittsburgh) are below 100th. The only meaningful thing that can be said about acceptance rate is that the top tier schools tend to have a lot of applications to choose from.
Student-faculty ratio is similarly scattered. Two of the top five schools (Arizona State and New Mexico) are outside the top 50, while two of the top 50 (Hastings and Georgia) are among the bottom quarter. The bands at 13 through 17 are almost equally comprised of the four tiers.
Employment data is almost comically random, given our propensity to think that rank equals employment.
Except at the very top and the very bottom, distribution of percent employed at graduation is almost even. The dictates of the local economies cause top tier schools to overlap with fourth tier schools.
By the time student loan payments are due, the only thing that can be said with any certainty is that some 4th tier schools aren't finding jobs for their graduates, and that all top-tier schools are doing pretty well. But the clustering of all the bands at the top, with 3/4 of all law schools showing 90% or more employed, makes this variable almost meaningless in ranking a law school: no matter where the student graduates from, the loans fall due and the student gets a job.
Bar Passage Ratio seems to prove something; the problem is that no one's quite sure what it proves. The reported rank reflects the ratio of a school's bar passage rate to the overall state rate. This means that the harder a state's bar exam, the better your students can look by comparison. In fact, the top four schools are Stanford, Berkeley, UCLA and USC, since the California bar is the hardest in the country. East coast schools are doomed to near-greatness, since the New York bar just isn't as hard.
The real problems arise for schools with isolated markets. What does it mean that Mississippi's bar passage rate is 103% of the state's average? Who else besides Mississippi grads takes the Mississippi bar exam? I know, Mississippi College grads -- but they pass at 99% of the state's average! Is it fair that their 92% bar passage rate counts for less than Chapman's 71%? I don't know.
all we know for sure is that top tier schools are mostly top tier schools in every way, and that some bottom tier schools are mostly bottom tier in every way, but the middle tier schools are not really distinguishable from either each other or from their higher- and lower-ranked compatriots.
So what's left?
Four factors: median GPA, median LSAT, practitioner reputation and academic reputation.
Median GPA (which I've estimated by subtracting .25 from the reported 75th %ile GPA) seems to show something meaningful; there are no outliers among the top tier, after all. But there are high-end outliers among the second, third and fourth tiers -- Baylor, Nebraska and Oklahoma have very high GPA's, as do Texas Tech in the 4th tier and more than a handful of third tier schools.
Practitioner reputation is subject to the same analysis: there are a number of schools at the top that clearly distinguish themselves from the rest, but the lowest eight in the top tier (Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, George Mason, Maryland, Pittsburgh, SMU, and Utah) overlap with the top five in the third tier (Creighton, Marquette, Montana, Penn State, and Syracuse).
Academic reputation is the first variable that clearly seems to correspond to US News rank. The first tier ends before the third begins, and the second and fourth tiers barely overlap. Of course, this may be partly the result of a positive feedback loop caused by 15 years of US News ranking, but be that as it may, academic reputation does seem to correlate strongly with ranking.
Well folks, there's only one variable left, and it's the most interesting.
Look at that correlation! Not a single outlier in any tier! Red, green, blue, yellow, marching neatly across the graph. And what variable is it, dear applicant? LSAT score!
I know you don't like that. I'm not sure if I like that. But mathematical reality must at least be considered in evaluating the rankings.
And so, boys and girls, we're back to exactly what I told you several years ago: As long as you want a top school, and you define "top" as "US News rank," you doom yourself to needing a higher LSAT score than most of you have.