US News 2013 Law School Rankings Quick Takes

For some years now I've been blogging about quick takes on the U.S. News rankings.  This week when the rankings came out I didn't have time to get to them, but I want to focus now on some basic analysis of them....  The 2013 U.S. News rankings include 195 schools. Overall numerical ranks were published for the 146 highest ranked schools, but not for the other 49 schools. All other data were provided for all schools.

U.S. News lists the 146 schools in order of rank in a table titled “The Top Schools.” The other schools are listed alphabetically under the rubric “Second Tier”. This is similar to last year’s classification but different from previous years, when schools were divided into four tiers.  For old times’ sake and to provide a more detailed analysis for some variables, I’ve divided the schools into four groups, as follows:

Group.	N	   Ranks	    Schools
1		50	    1 - 49	Yale thru American, Pepperdine (tie)
2		50	 51 - 99	Baylor thru Rutgers-Camden, Tulsa (tie)
3		46	101 - 145	St. Louis + 4 other schools thru Montana, North Dakota
4		49	   RNP*
Total	          195
   *RNP = Rank Not Published

Peer assessment and Lawyer/Judge assessment by school group
			      Peer		Lawyer/Judge
			--------------		-----------------
Group		N	 M	 SD		 M	 SD
1		50	3.64	0.63		3.97	0.44
2		50	2.54	0.21		3.05	0.20
3		46	2.09	0.16		2.57	0.29
4		49	1.55	0.23		2.00	0.35


Here's a pdf file with the above data in a much more readable format.

The file also has some more data, including several correlation matrices.  

Of particular interest to me are the high correlation of peer assessment scores 

and lawyer/judge assessment (.96) and the substantially lower -- but still high

correlation -- between peer assessment and employed at nine months (.63).

Comments

[Ediberto Roman]

Thanks Al for this useful info.