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USNWR should considering incorporating conditional scholarship statistics...
Earlier, I blogged about how USNWR should considering incorporating academic attrition into its methodology. Another publicly-available piece of data that would redound to the benefit of students would...
View ArticleUSNWR incorporates faculty citations, graduate salary, debt data into its...
USNWR has many rankings apart from its graduate school (and specifically law school) rankings, of course. (One of my favorites is its ranking of diets.) Its collegiate rankings have been around for a...
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Which law schools are most aggressively pursuing admissions UGPA and LSAT...
I’ve long noted that USNWR’s decision to use the medians for admissions distorts how law schools behave. Law schools pursue medians at the expense of higher-caliber students who may fall just below...
View ArticleThe deprecation of the LSAT appears to continue as LSAC drops the analytical...
In 1998, a technical study from the Law School Admission Council looked at each of the three components of the LSAT—the analytical reasoning (sometimes called “logic games”), logical reasoning, and...
View ArticleLaw schools have shed 7% of their full time faculty in the last five years
The ABA disclosures reveal trends over time. And they reveal that law schools have shed about 7% of their full time faculty in the last 5 years, from 2017 to 2022—around 700 people (from 10,026 to...
View ArticleCalifornia has lost 4 ABA-accredited law schools in the last decade
Golden Gate has announced a closure plan for its law school program. Karen Sloan at Reuters highlights some of the trends of recent closures, a trickle we’ve seen over the years. Golden Gate was long...
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Perhaps the most valuable legal education job in the new USNWR rankings...
After the USNWR law school rankings shakeup earlier this year, I pointed out that spending money on law professors would have less influence than in years past. So, where might there be incentives to...
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Law school 1L JD hits six-year low, non-JD enrollment trends down
The 2023 law school enrollment figures have been released. They show the a drop in JD enrollment and a drop in non-JD enrollment. About 16% of law school enrollees are not enrolled in a JD program.For...
View ArticleUpdating and projecting the 2024-2025 USNWR law school rankings (to be...
Last May, I projected USNWR law school rankings based on the publicly-available employment and bar passage data. New ABA data fills out most of the rest of the rankings data. I thought I’d update and...
View ArticleNYU, Cornell, and the new USNWR law school rankings landscape
After I project next year’s USNWR law school rankings, as I did last May and again here in December, there’s always a lot of chatter about the changes, about schools moving up and down. But the more...
View ArticleHard questions about experiential learning and legal education
The American Bar Association created an Experiential Credits Working Group out of the Standards Committee suggesting three potential proposals—increasing the number of “experiential credits” in legal...
View ArticleAnnual Statement, 2023
Site disclosuresTotal operating cost: $192Total content acquisition costs: $0Total site visits: 81,587 (+38% over 2022)Total unique visitors: 81,357 (+57% over 2022)Total pageviews: 120,609 (+70% over...
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Law school academic dismissal and conditional scholarship eliminations, 2023
Last year, I highlighted the fact that law schools have wide variance in how they handle academic dismissals of first-year law students and how they handle reducing or eliminating scholarships. Both...
View ArticleThere's not much to change with the USNWR rankings to disrupt the status quo
Last year’s dramatic overhaul of the USNWR law school rankings saw the potential for increased volatility in the new metrics. But not much at the top, and much more beneath. And USNWR can only use...
View ArticleSupreme Court analysis: Trump v. Anderson
This is a high level overview of the decision in Trump v. Anderson, written in a format as I’ve been presenting in various ways over the last few days. Disclosure: I did file an amicus brief in support...
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Law school faculty monetary contributions to political candidates, 2017 to...
I’ve done some work looking at law firms and where political contributions from each went among the largest law firms. I thought I’d try my hand at gathering some comparable data among law professor at...
View ArticleAnalysis of first-time bar passage data for Class of 2023 and ultimate bar...
The ABA has released its new batch of data on bar passage. The data includes the first-time passage data for the Class of 2023 and the “ultimate” passage data for the Class of 2021. As I noted earlier,...
View ArticleWhat percentage of law school faculty have recently contributed to political...
My recent post, “Law school faculty monetary contributions to political candidates, 2017 to early 2023,” has garnered a lot of attention and feedback, and I’m grateful for people’s interest in it! Some...
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The 2024-2025 USNWR law school rankings: methodology tweaks may help entrench...
Hours after the release of last year’s dramatic change to the USNWR methodology, I noted the dramatic increase in “compression and volatility” in the coming rankings. USNWR changed a couple of things...
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Overall legal employment for the Class of 2023 improves slightly, with large...
That is literally the same headline I had for the class of 2022, but it’s another year of incremental improvement. Outcomes improved incrementally once again. Below are figures for the ABA-disclosed...
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