Academic

US News Rankings Chess: Bob Morse Makes His Next Move

By Dan Filler

Last week, Paul Caron suggested that 16 law schools committed US News ranking malpractice for failing to properly game the magazine's employment data analysis.  That got the attention of Bob Morse, the rankings guru at US News.  He responded here. 

To restate the issue (as I did here), US News used a formula to estimate the at-graduation employment rates of schools that failed to report this data: they took the 9-month-after-graduation rate (which schools must report to the ABA) and subtracted 30 percentage points.  Thus, any school that saw a rise of more than 30 percentage points from date of graduation to 9 months after would have been ill-served by reporting the at-graduation number. 

Morse believes gaming is going on:

In the latest edition of the America's Best Law Schools rankings, 74 law schools (39 percent of those that were ranked) did not report their at-graduation employment rate. This is nearly double the number of schools (38) that did not report in the 2005 edition. U.S. News believes that this increase proves that far more law schools do track their students at graduation and believe that virtually all law schools could be reporting vital job placement data and have chosen not to do so in order to game the rankings.

His response?

U.S. News is planning to significantly change its estimate for the at-graduation rate employment for nonresponding schools in order to create an incentive for more law schools to report their actual at- graduation employment rate data. This new estimating procedure will not be released publicly before we publish the rankings.

My only question is whether Mr. Morse would have made this move but for Paul's savvy post. 

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on May 21, 2010 (boomark / email).