USN&WR Law School Rankings, Color-Coded Changes from 2016 to 2017 Editions

Here is this year’s version of the big color-coded chart that shows the changes in all the reported metrics in the USN&WR law school rankings, from the 2016 Rankings Edition (released in March 2015) to this year’s 2017 Rankings Edition (released March 2016).

Click the title to view the whole thing on-line, or click the download link to save yourself a copy.

As the introductory text on the fist page says, contact me with any errors, questions, or other issues. And I've got some other analyses I might do if I have the time - will upload and publicize the same way.
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USN&WR Law School Rankings, Color-Coded Changes, 2015 to 2016 Editions

March 30 Update: A slightly revised version is now embedded below. Apologies to one school for having their two editions' data reversed (they know who they are - thanks for the polite heads-up!), and to Wake Forest for misspelling their name all these years.

(Original post:)

Last's year's color-coded table of all changes to the published metrics in the U.S. News and World Report law school rankings proved to be useful to some folks, so here is this years version:


As the document itself says, contact me for any questions, or if you find any errors. (I spent about half a day chasing down one erroneous number, but didn't see anything else that stood out as looking wildly out of place.)

Also as the document says, because USN&WR uses but doesn't report median LSAT and UGPA, I got those figures from the ABA's Standard 509 Disclosures. I found one discrepancy between those two sets of data, but it doesn't affect that schools' rankings: USN&WR publishes the 25th and 75th percentiles of LSAT and UGPA, though its the median figures they use in their rankings. One school provided a different 25th percentile LSAT score to US News  than they did to the ABA, and one of the statistics people at US News confirm that they indeed got that number from the school - and it was the same as their median LSAT figure - statistically possible if you have a very flat distribution of numbers, but unlikely. Which indicates it wasn't their fault, except that they didn't notice that the school provided the same number for the 25th percentile and median LSAT. More on that in a future blog post, perhaps (I'm waiting to hear back from the associate dean there - but really, it did NOT affect their rankings and was a harmless mistake - it just goes to issues of quality control, verification, etc., etc.)

In some e-mail exchanges last year, I learned about the usefulness of standard deviations - if I have time, I'll make those charts and also upload them here. Using Excel's conditional formatting you can visually represent the standard deviation and easily see if your school has a better (or worse) ranking by a particular metric, compared to your overall ranking. 

And if I figure out how to embed it like I want, I'll post my raw Excel file - its just what U.S. News publishes so they can't complain if I put up a sortable version of their numbers. 
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Number Crunching for Fun and Profit (Well, for Fun and Coffee, at Least!)

After my post back in March about my color-coded table of the new rankings showing changes from last year to this year, I got a handful of e-mails asking about the raw data. I've gotten good at taking the PDFs of the rankings and turning them into spreadsheets, which is how I made this and other charts, and was happy to share the results of my work.

So imagine my surprise when I got this in the mail:

How nice! There's a Starbucks two blocks from my house, and though I rarely go there, they do have a CD I've been interested in.

So now we have a going rate for my spreadsheets! Ha!

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Sloppy ABA Employment Statistics

The new ABA job numbers for the Class of 2013 were released yesterday. US News & World Report asks the same basic questions and divides graduates into the same basic categories as the ABA, so these will be the numbers that will make up 14% of next year’s USN&WR rankings and everyone is looking at how their schools’ numbers changed. (Screen caps after the jump).


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Law School Rankings: Color-Coded Changes, 2013 to 2014

Ever wonder what it would look like to take the US News & World Report Law School Rankings - all schools, all reported data - and color code the changes from the previous year in green (good change), red (bad change) and yellow (no change)? It would look something like this:

The entire, 29-page PDF of this is embedded below via SCRIBD.Com.

For good measure, I got the median LSAT and UGPA figures from the ABA that USN&WR uses to rank schools, but doesn’t publish, and put them next to the 25th and 75th percentiles of LSAT and UGPA, that they DO publish, but do NOT use to rank schools.

More explanations are on the first page of the document itself.

March 27, 2014 Update: Thanks to Paul Caron of Pepperdine School of Law and TaxProf Blog fame for catching that I had the math backwards in the Overall Score column. Those numbers now indicate +/- correctly and have the correct colors.

March 28, 2014 Update: Well, crap - I didn't know SCRIBD required people to join before they could download the PDF - sorry for that! Anyway, here's a direct link to it:

US News and World Report Law School Rankings: 2013 to 2014 Color-Coded Changes for All Reported Law Schools

And here it is embedded for on-line viewing at SCRIBD:

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Where’s the Burning Bush?

And Morses then summoned all legal academia and said "Hear, ye law schools, these Rankings which the Lord Our God, U.S. News, hath given to us this day" ...

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Let the Law School Rankings Games Begin ...

The U.S. News and World Report rankings for law schools will be out next week and one blog post making the rounds is Paul Caron’s “Student Selectivity” ranking of schools based on the new data, or, more likely, an advance copy of the ABA take-off data, which includes some of the same statistics that we all report to the US News folks.

Someone in the comments to that post asked about last year’s data; I had jumped on that so we could see how we did by those two numbers last year, but I decided to post the list for all schools. Prof. Caron’s blog doesn’t go into detail, but, like I say in the document below, I presume he took the median LSAT and UGPA and plugged them into the US News percentages to get a raw number. That’s what I did, so here’s the law school rankings of these stats side by side for this the 2015 and 2014 Rankings. (For anyone reading this who's new to the rankings, U.S. News publishes an "edition" of the ranking titled a year ahead of the calendar year: so we're waiting breathlessly in March 2014 for the "2015 Edition" of the rankings - one of many aggravating little things about working with all this data.)

MARCH 11, 2014 UPDATE

I screwed up the math in my original chart - thanks to Professor Jerry Organ of the University of St. Thomas School of Law for pointing that out. So the new ranking below is my comparison with the correct formula that I should have used to start with - see the explanation before the table for details.

The third leg of the “selectivity” stool - acceptance rate -  is not included in the above. We’ll have to wait until next week for that.


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