A second issue with the Hylton rankings is that they completely ignore placement. This isn't to say that US News gets the placement numbers right (they do try hard, however. US News has changed how it measures post-graduation success several times in big ways.) Placement is very important for students, many of whom are shelling out huge amounts of money for their education and correctly consider it an investment that has to pay off. The current US News numbers have some serious problems, largely because schools are reporting such uniformly high employment rates as to raise the suspicion that gaming is going on. A serious competitor to US News, from an applicant point of view, needs to tackle placement issues.
Bill Henderson and I are working on a paper we hope to have out this summer on the post-graduation placement statistics. There some interesting stuff going on with the shifting basis of the post-graduation statistics and some major changes in numbers over time.
Alfred Brophy at Propery Profs states that I'm a strong supporter of the Hylton rankings, but I don't have a horse in this race. I'm just the announcer. While I posted the Hylton rankings on the ELS Blog, I can't say that I'm "positive on them" as Brophy states. Now this doesn't mean that I'm negative on them either, but they do exclude very important information as Andrew Morriss points out. To me, the two biggest variables excluded in the Hylton Rankings are job placement and faculty scholarship. Also, is LSAT score a good measure of student views about the quality of the law school? Though, like Andrew, I am happy to see the Hylton Rankings because "the law school world would be better if it looked more like the business school world on rankings, where competing sources of rankings exist." Perhaps someone should create a BCS-type ranking system that incorporates a number of rankings together.
Posted by: Jason Czarnezki | 13 April 2006 at 08:54 AM