US News rankings: same as it ever was

 Above the Law and many other sites have the news of the latest rankings. The top remains basically the same. The middle ranks have some wide swings.   According to Bob Morse, the new rankings reflect how well schools place grads in true JD-required jobs. But Morse conceded that when a law school hires its own graduates, those jobs are included in the mix for rankings purposes. Let the gaming continue.

Comments

[Derek Tokaz]

What's ridiculous about the US News job placement score (other than the fact that they don't reveal the methodology) is that it counts jobs that require bar passage the same as ones where the JD is just an advantage. Some people do go to law school for non-lawyer jobs, and some are okay with non-lawyer alternatives when they can't get a job practicing, but the vast majority of people are going to law school in order to become lawyers.

Combining BPR and JDA jobs makes the number less meaningful for people who want to become lawyers, and it's completely meaningless for people seeking alternative careers. It's a number that matters only to people who don't have much preference between a BPR and JDA job, which is going to be an extremely narrow slice of prospective students.

The whole idea of assigning a single tell-all score to a school just shows how far behind the times USN is. They really should have a dynamic system that lets students weigh factors (including different job types) however they want, and then spit back a ranking that's customized for each student. I doubt this would be hard for a large enterprise like USN to implement, but they'd have to give up all the hype (and money) that comes from publishing a national one-size-fits-all ranking.

[John Steele]

Derek,

I'm inclined to agree with you, even though including even "JD advantage" is an improvement over prior rankings.

The fair way to do this is to poll the students, the practicing lawyers, and the profs to see which category -- JD required or JD advantage -- matters to them. My guess is that "JD required" is far more important.

Let's also remember how important this change is. The middle ranked schools were subject to a violent re-ordering on the basis of employment stats. Isn't that a huge step forward?