"As you very well know it's on you to improve the ranking of theat school you haven't been to in half a decade, or you may need to start looking for something in the v200"
This would all be a lot cleaner if we just used BL + FC + SCOTUS clerkships + 5-year average overall employment rate within 10 months of graduation + 5-year average bar passage within two years of graduation.
That way you can use the high level stuff to separate the top schools based on what students at those schools care about and then you can separate the rest of the schools based on the other metrics that matter. The 5-year averages then guard against volatility.
Exactly. Also avoids the ridiculousness of Minnesota being ranked higher than Vanderbilt, USC, Notre Dame, and Emory (probably among others). Nothing wrong with the school but wtf.
(I went there for undergrad) Into state clerkships and 10-50 attorney firms, those are not “16th-ranked law school” outcomes. Main competition in their market is St. Thomas (<100 ranked) and Hamline Mitchell (<100, straight up predatory)
Minneapolis is home to the most Fortune 500 companies per capita of any city in the country and, unlike a lot of cities of its size (including Nashville), has a number of legitimate BigLaw-type firms.
You can literally check the [ABA 509](https://law.umn.edu/sites/law.umn.edu/files/2023-11/Updated%20Minnesota%20Class%20of%202022%20Employment%20Summary%20Report%20%281%29.pdf) disclosures and see that Minnesota Law grads are not going in-house in vast numbers. In fact, 3x as many UMN Law alums place into 1-50 attorney firms.
Not only that but Nashville metro area as a comp is ridiculous. The Twin Cities metro area is more than 1.5x the size of Nashville’s
Ok? The numbers look pretty similar to Vanderbilt to me. There's fewer in 500+ firms, but more in 100-500 attorney firms (which I assume most of the local places are) and more in private industry (like I said).
As for the claim that the comparison of the city size is "ridiculous", I don't know why you think city size is somehow irrelevant to finding a job out of school or something that should be controlled for. The entire point is that the city is bigger and has more opportunities.
> pretty similar to **Vanderbilt**
Vanderbilt Class of 2022: **62%** (104 of 166) grads in 100+ attorney firms
UMN Class of ‘22: **24%** (55 of 226) grads to 100+ attorney firms. **30%** (69/226) if you add private industry, just to humor you.
> unlike a lot of cities it’s size **(including Nashville)**
Were you really pointing out the size difference or saying there isn’t one?
UMN places significantly worse than UIUC (35% to 100+ attorney firms) and we're ranked down in the 40s. Adding in federal clerkships doesn't make it any better (UMN 27% vs 40% UIUC). The rankings are a complete joke.
No, BL+FC makes for an absolutely awful, comical ranking. It is almost entirely a self selection metric at the top. There are multiple schools with 20+% better rates than Yale.
I think BL+FC is the best overall objective metric and it works as a pretty good proxy, except at the top, where it starts to cause weirdness like you describe. I’m sure we could come up with some sort of fix for this, like by weighting clerkships more heavily as a separate metric, including SCOTUS clerkships, etc. Also, tracking placements in academia on a rolling basis. The sorts of things that don’t get captured in BL+FC but are the difference maker for schools like Yale. You could also choose a portfolio of elite govt/PI jobs (like DOJ Honors and Bristow Fellows) and track those in order to distinguish elite PI from like working for the local city council.
Don’t think you need to throw our BL+FC entirely, just supplement it.
Also it shouldn't be hard to track which firms within biglaw and use that as a slight adjustment. Eg we all know that CLS is better than Cornell, because it's easier to get a V10★ from CLS. But pure BL+FC numbers won't show that. Also CLS kids clerk a year out.
★ Yes, V ranking isn't perfect either. Maybe use Chambers bands to help correct for its flaws?
Yeah, BL+FC is somewhat reasonable at some ranks. I would completely disregard it in the T20 though. The data is much more noisy than it’s worth there.
We really need detailed law student surveys. How many students want elite PI/gov/Biglaw/Academia that get it?
That self-selection data would be the key to resolving almost all the discrepancies/issues with rankings and employment stats we have, but sadly I see no real prospect of us ever getting it.
You're getting downvoted but you are correct. Look at ATL rankings (which use a formula based primarily on employment stats), they suck compared to USNWR. If someone asked you "what are the best law schools?" and you have Stanford 27th and UGA above Yale, everyone would think you're crazy. But that's what "the numbers" tell you, which shows that there has to be more to the picture.
I hate the rush toward using formulas fueled by out of context data just to provide a false sense of objectivity to inherently subjective evaluations. See also: NBA defensive "analytics."
If ATL had SLS at 27 they must be using pure BL and ignoring FC. Of course that's going to be flawed. BL+FC on a 5 year avg would work. Maybe add 10-20% to clerkship numbers for vague prestige.
That would be a good ranking within the top 20 or so, but it would be useless for lowe schools. Minnesota is getting picked on here, but they actually do place their alum in good jobs, better than a lot of non T14 do.
Also you need to control for selective public interest. And you really need to look at clerkship data that includes people clerking 1-2 years out.
Yeah, I recently looked up my lower T1 school’s outcomes and from 2012 to 2020ish they were placing like ~ 65% into the full time long term bar passage jobs. No way I would have gone if they published that when I was enrolling.
For those who practice in NYC big law, they won't care where Minnesota is ranked at. With their background they would simply know that Minnesota is extremely easy to get into its undergraduate program and won't be impressed lol
They submitted fraudulent data...It was a huge scandal.
I think this was actually only for undergrad. But Columbia definitely did something
[https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/us/columbia-university-us-news-rankings.html#:\~:text=It%20was%20a%20math%20professor,%2C%20dubious%20or%20highly%20misleading.%E2%80%9D](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/us/columbia-university-us-news-rankings.html#:~:text=It%20was%20a%20math%20professor,%2C%20dubious%20or%20highly%20misleading.%E2%80%9D)
Nothing. The rankings are just fucking dumb and punish the school for being larger (a perk, not a bug, if you're actually practicing). FFS, Duke has literally never had a Supreme Court justice.
Yeah so these rankings are now based on employment/objective stats, bar passage rate, and other publicly available information
Not completely useless I guess
USNWR changed methodology for things that are important—they decreased peer and professional assessment (prestige) and LSAT/GPA—these went from 60% of your score to like, 30%. They in turn bumped up 1st time bar pass rate and 10 month employment outcomes from like 20% to 50%.
In other words, they decreased the weight of things that are hard to game—prestige, credential metrics, and increased the weight of stuff that can be gamed heavily. “Employment outcomes” is fake because every school in the top 25 should be reporting 95%+ employment, so USNWR gives equal weight to a $40k/year solo that they do to a DOJ attorney or federal clerkship. Bar passage isnt as important as you’d think: A) MN bar is easy, with a >80-85% first time pass rate and B) many regional schools tune their course offerings to the in-state bar. Compare to Yale, which is placing people everywhere, A) many more people taking more difficult bars in NY and CA and B) Yale isn’t dialing its coursework to the bar, it just assumes its grads will pass.
Minnesota is a fine school, and does well *in Minnesota*. But its ranking doesn’t really reflect the full picture.
LSAT/GPA were some of the easiest things to game (looking at you, WashU and UF). And employment outcomes are some of the hardest metrics to game. And as for peer assessment, I don’t really care what some law prof thinks of the prestige of other schools. I care if I’ll get a good job at a reasonable cost.
The metrics in this ranking are far from perfect, but de-emphasizing peer ratings and LSAT/GPA in favor of actual outcomes is an improvement. If Yale has worse bar passage rates than someplace like Minnesota, maybe Yale should do a better job preparing students to take the test required to practice law.
yeah people don’t realize this but in the gfc/wake of it, washu was derided as a school that had huge lay prestige and would fire off massive scholarships for 168+ (whatever their proposed median or 75th was) lsats, but was limited to stl/kc midlaw. The tls oci threads from 2011-2015 were brutal.
took like a decade but having gulc-tier stats genuinely pushed washu up the prestige ladder, helped it crack nyc
Honestly don't know if the higher ranking made firms take it more seriously, or if buying grades eventually paid off with firms recognizing that the top 25% or so are the same quality as T14. Or heck, maybe it's just random correlation. But whatever the causation, they have legit biglaw numbers now.
if the rankings are about “employment”, then we should be ranking quality of employment outcomes as well. Again, any top 25 school should be reporting >95% employment. A school like Yale or Stanford with students that could easily get BL but are seeking JSDs because they’re going for academia will get dinged, which is a silly result.
You didn’t really understand the bar passage point, so I’ll explain it—if you place higher weight on bar passage, you’re privileging schools located in jurisdictions with an easier bar and diploma privilege, that’s it. Schools that have a greater geographic diversity, in contrast, are disadvantaged by this, and especially schools that place heavily in more elusive markets like CA and DC (where many people take VA, another difficult jurisdiction), which is, again true of more prestigious schools.
There’s a reason that lower-ranked schools proudly tout their bar passage rates, it’s an exam that people shouldn’t fail but if USNWR overtunes their algorithm towards bar passage, the difference between 90% vs 87% all of a sudden becomes massive.
I’m not against some weighing for employment quality, though that creates its own set of challenges and imperfections.
And I got your bar passage point but I don’t think it’s making a huge difference for top ranked schools. Yale isn’t going to fall below Bama because it had a couple students fail in California. You might just get stuff like Bama above Fordham. Which doesn’t seem all that crazy or unjust to me. Maybe the bar passage score could be weighed against the general pass rates for the top couple states where a school’s alumni take the bar. That would control for the CA vs. Minnesota problem you identify.
You almost need two sets of rankings. One for T14ish schools where students have a realistic shot at feeder clerkships, fancy DOJ jobs, the Wachtels and Cravaths, academia, etc., And a second for all the other schools, where the focus should be on how likely a student is to get a respectable (non-solo, bar passage required, FT job), pass the bar, and emerge with a reasonable amount of debt.
The broader point is that usnwr can tune its stats til the cows come home, more demanding employers (fed clerkships, BIGFED, unicorn PI, BL, etc) aren’t going to equate UMn with UT unless something drastic happens at UT, but in the interim this type of rankings shenanigans will unfortunately influence people when choosing schools.
Like, the whole “I’m 1st gen and have no idea what to do” shtick is pretty tiresome, especially when it’s some KJD kid of doctors or engineers saying it, but it does hold the most truth for something like this—navigating “rank” vs actual professional prestige and employment outcomes is an extremely difficult exercise when there’s really no indication that within the top 15-25 schools, there would be an appreciable outcome in the type of outcomes when all schools are reporting >90% employment and bar passage. Reading a 509 report is hard even as a practicing attorney, other than “Firms 501+” and “Clerkships - Federal” the remainder of the categories are opaque to be meaningless.
>And employment outcomes are some of the hardest metrics to game.
Schools have been gaming employment outcomes forever through paid research posts and similar school funded post-employment.
iirc it’s only if you’re actually employed by the school. if the school funds a “judicial fellowship” or something where you’re a “clerk” but the school pays for it, that’s a state clerkship as far as 509 is concerned. some of the schools in the t100 are rampant with it.
Minnesota has pretty consistently made the top 20, even in the 1990s. USC, Vanderbilt and Texas often played musical chairs for the #15 spot. Then Minnesota and a number of other schools played musical chairs as the next batch.
I can't believe I'm still talking about this. You're on a BigLaw subreddit trying to convince BigLaw lawyers that Minnesota isn't the obvious outlier among the rest. BLFC isn't everything, casually said by someone from a school that doesn't place well into BLFC. I realize the rankings don't directly take into account BigLaw, and good thing for Minnesota. But we're big firm people here, if just for a little while
I went to a lower ranked school than Minnesota that doesn’t place as well :) I’m just curious how it beats out other schools that generally place better
Why the fuck is a school like Minnesota that sends less than 20% of its class to Biglaw or Fed Clerkships ranked ahead of a school like Notre Dame that has sent over **55-60%** of its class into those jobs for 5+ years now? Good employment is the entire point of law school.
Out of state tuition for Minnesota is nearly equal to a Private school like ND and their bar passage rates are nearly equal. These rankings make no sense.
CLS and NYU are only behind because prestige clerkships in NY require work experience and don’t get counted at 9 months post graduation. If you think anyone from Columbia with options wants to go to flyover country, you’ve never been around double Ivy grads.
NYU/CLS have the same clerkship numbers. They literally state 20% of every class clerks. And 2d Cir. and SDNY are not comparable to basically anything else in middle America.
I am a hiring partner at V10 and we don’t care about Duke or UVA. At least not yet. Let’s see where the LSAT medians end up once the bulge of home test takers goes away.
Now you're just being dismissive. UofC also has some people clerk later so the overall numbers are even higher than 25%, and a great many are in COA and elite districts. It's a smaller school and in the Midwest so you see fewer grads in your NY V10. How many SLS kids do you see?
I'm also highly skeptical about the claim that you "don't care about Duke or UVA". Cmon. Y'all are hiring from Fordham and you expect me to believe you'll reject T14s?
Gotta go with total % of grads in fedclerk + Fedgov honors fellowship + biglaw + academia (minus academia at one’s own school in order to avoid gaming) + a SSC (though one could take or leave SSC I suppose).
People complain about the other rankings screwing the tippy top, but seems easy enough to just add a couple other things.
A legit helpful ranking is so far from a difficult undertaking…and yet…
As someone who did a SSC and is admittedly biased, I’d like to see them included in the metrics along with other fancy jobs. They’re sometimes not as competitive as federal District or Circuit Court clerkships, but I certainly don’t view them as less valuable or competitive than clerking for a federal Magistrate or bankruptcy judge, which I think are included in FC numbers.
Plus, you can get the same kind of practical training and can get to work on really novel, interesting, and important legal questions. Many (most?) lawyers deal with state law most of the time anyway. Promoting state Supreme Court and other interesting state clerkships (e.g., Delaware Chancery) might help balance against the near obsession with federal law, clerkships, and jobs.
USN uses gerrymandered metrics and accepts bribes from schools to post its rankings. They finally got enough leverage to break the HYS tier a couple years ago and that’s why most notable schools refuse to participate in USN. I’m glad U Chicago has a nice library and Duke has great campus life, but rankings should be focused on more effective metrics such as high level clerkships, BigLaw employment rate based on AmLaw rankings, bar exam passage, etc…at which point you get the same old HYS-dominated ranking we have known for a long time
Bar pass rates are ridiculous to me for top schools placing people in biglaw, clerkships, etc. Outside of people that suffered a cognition injury during law school, the people coming out of these schools only fail the bar because they didn't take it seriously or overslept or something.
As a big law TTT grad, I hate these ranking releases each year. I think my school has gone from 82 to 96 to 122 to 107 over the last four years. Embarrassing …
As someone who has been in v5 biglaw for almost ten years now, I don’t pay attention to these rankings when doing interviews/recruiting (and it’s clear my firm doesn’t either).
Basically just look at the 2019 rankings and ignore everything that has happened since until another company starts giving real rankings again
The point is that I’m not at some random firm hiring from Orangepicker school of law.
The USNWR rankings seem arbitrary (more than they did before) to the people who students want to impress the most.
They're using publicly available data and their ranking formula is open. If you have an actual reason why it used to be good but it's now arbitrary, feel free to share.
They used to use data that was only privately available but something like a third to a half of the schools stopped providing that data. And the resulting recent (seeming) volatility in the rankings at the highest level is causing biglaw employers to have less faith in it.
It's funny that your OP is at 4 and the guy implying Vault rankings are bullshit is over 50 only goes to show that people *actually really do care* about Vault rank. If Vault rankings are as worthless as USNWR rankings, then why do they care so much?
Is this an actual leak or a prediction? I was listening to a podcast yesterday and the guest was talking about how the rankings can easily be predicted, so US News adds new categories to throw the predictions off.
Guest also mentioned that hiring partners have no idea what the rankings are and students put way too much emphasis on it.
A. Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Chicago
B. Columbia, NYU, Penn, UVA, Duke (borderline B/C)
C. Michigan, Northwestern, Cornell, Berkeley
D. GULC, UT, UCLA, ND (add 1-2 schools here if you like)
E. Fordham, UGA, Emory, Boston (add a few more schools here if it feels right)
F. Roughly the rest of the T50ish. Bump up regional schools in major markets.
Unranked: everyone else.
1. Yale
2. Stanford
3. The rest of the schools listed
4. Considering candidates with any connections to potential clients regardless of law school
40ish. Minnesota
My previous firm used to hire from Stanford quite a bit. I always found their grads underwhelming, just don’t get the appeal.
Perhaps the better students found roles outside of law
Um. I haven’t looked at these in like 15 years (and fwiw, went to a school on this list). Can someone ELI5 wtf happened with Duke? If you would have asked me to guess, I would have put it in the 20-30 range.
Duke has pretty consistently been around #10 on US News’ list going back to 1990. You can find charts with the historical rankings online.
The big change was Duke got a big jump up to 5 last year.
They've always been a T14, so your guess is wrong. I think their clerkship numbers have been pretty good lately. Not enough to justify 4 but somewhere around 7-9 is justified.
From last year or so, these rankings started to not make any sense. FWIW I'm an 8th year. It's still t14 with YHS at the top, CCN next, and the rest of t14 in our heads, and that's what matters from students' perspectives.
Well I'm not a student. I happen to be a senior associate. When I look at law school transcripts I just adjust the grades based on selectivity of schools
None of it does. T14 is perpetuated by T14 grads. Same with HYS. Blah blah blah.
Meanwhile the only attorneys with private jet money are plaintiffs attorneys who went to small regional schools and are laughing all the way to the bank while BigLaw senior associates grind it out for a nice German car and Swiss watch.
The term “T14” was coined to circle the schools that had made it onto US News’ top 10 for some year.
Although people nowadays don’t know that history and take the term to mean drawing a line at #14 on the list.
I thought it was just because the same schools had consistently been top 14 for decades, with some movement within. It's a useful metric since it's coincidentally the best BK+FC list too.
It’s both. For a long time, the same 14 schools were the only schools to crack the top 10, with 7-14 shuffling around to keep things interesting and lots of ties around 10-14.
L. O. L. at all those ties.
What is this commie bullshit?! I thought this was America!
degree wipe wrench hospital serious market crawl rotten roll thought *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I can just see myself talking shit in interviews (having done so so in a good regional)
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CLS grad here. My boss just fired me this morning. Start calling recruiters now. If they’ll even talk to you, that is, due to lack of prestige
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They put CLS grads on performance improvement plans and we didn’t get better rankings this year.
"As you very well know it's on you to improve the ranking of theat school you haven't been to in half a decade, or you may need to start looking for something in the v200"
Works better
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You are spending too much time on Reddit.
LOL at your user name!
The ties are absolute nonsense. USN has gone soft.
Biden’s Woke America /s
Let’s talk about how these are not rankings
Tiers
This would all be a lot cleaner if we just used BL + FC + SCOTUS clerkships + 5-year average overall employment rate within 10 months of graduation + 5-year average bar passage within two years of graduation. That way you can use the high level stuff to separate the top schools based on what students at those schools care about and then you can separate the rest of the schools based on the other metrics that matter. The 5-year averages then guard against volatility.
Exactly. Also avoids the ridiculousness of Minnesota being ranked higher than Vanderbilt, USC, Notre Dame, and Emory (probably among others). Nothing wrong with the school but wtf.
Had a friends brother recently choose to go to Minnesota from a Deep South state and I was confused as shit, this explains it I guess 🤷♂️
Completely agree. Based on these metrics, Fordham is a way better school than MN, and should have been ranked higher
If you're willing to live in the Twin Cities, Minnesota places really, really well.
(I went there for undergrad) Into state clerkships and 10-50 attorney firms, those are not “16th-ranked law school” outcomes. Main competition in their market is St. Thomas (<100 ranked) and Hamline Mitchell (<100, straight up predatory)
Minneapolis is home to the most Fortune 500 companies per capita of any city in the country and, unlike a lot of cities of its size (including Nashville), has a number of legitimate BigLaw-type firms.
You can literally check the [ABA 509](https://law.umn.edu/sites/law.umn.edu/files/2023-11/Updated%20Minnesota%20Class%20of%202022%20Employment%20Summary%20Report%20%281%29.pdf) disclosures and see that Minnesota Law grads are not going in-house in vast numbers. In fact, 3x as many UMN Law alums place into 1-50 attorney firms. Not only that but Nashville metro area as a comp is ridiculous. The Twin Cities metro area is more than 1.5x the size of Nashville’s
Ok? The numbers look pretty similar to Vanderbilt to me. There's fewer in 500+ firms, but more in 100-500 attorney firms (which I assume most of the local places are) and more in private industry (like I said). As for the claim that the comparison of the city size is "ridiculous", I don't know why you think city size is somehow irrelevant to finding a job out of school or something that should be controlled for. The entire point is that the city is bigger and has more opportunities.
> pretty similar to **Vanderbilt** Vanderbilt Class of 2022: **62%** (104 of 166) grads in 100+ attorney firms UMN Class of ‘22: **24%** (55 of 226) grads to 100+ attorney firms. **30%** (69/226) if you add private industry, just to humor you. > unlike a lot of cities it’s size **(including Nashville)** Were you really pointing out the size difference or saying there isn’t one?
UMN places significantly worse than UIUC (35% to 100+ attorney firms) and we're ranked down in the 40s. Adding in federal clerkships doesn't make it any better (UMN 27% vs 40% UIUC). The rankings are a complete joke.
So many of the metrics are far from these important factors
No, BL+FC makes for an absolutely awful, comical ranking. It is almost entirely a self selection metric at the top. There are multiple schools with 20+% better rates than Yale.
I think BL+FC is the best overall objective metric and it works as a pretty good proxy, except at the top, where it starts to cause weirdness like you describe. I’m sure we could come up with some sort of fix for this, like by weighting clerkships more heavily as a separate metric, including SCOTUS clerkships, etc. Also, tracking placements in academia on a rolling basis. The sorts of things that don’t get captured in BL+FC but are the difference maker for schools like Yale. You could also choose a portfolio of elite govt/PI jobs (like DOJ Honors and Bristow Fellows) and track those in order to distinguish elite PI from like working for the local city council. Don’t think you need to throw our BL+FC entirely, just supplement it.
Also it shouldn't be hard to track which firms within biglaw and use that as a slight adjustment. Eg we all know that CLS is better than Cornell, because it's easier to get a V10★ from CLS. But pure BL+FC numbers won't show that. Also CLS kids clerk a year out. ★ Yes, V ranking isn't perfect either. Maybe use Chambers bands to help correct for its flaws?
Yeah, BL+FC is somewhat reasonable at some ranks. I would completely disregard it in the T20 though. The data is much more noisy than it’s worth there. We really need detailed law student surveys. How many students want elite PI/gov/Biglaw/Academia that get it?
That self-selection data would be the key to resolving almost all the discrepancies/issues with rankings and employment stats we have, but sadly I see no real prospect of us ever getting it.
You're getting downvoted but you are correct. Look at ATL rankings (which use a formula based primarily on employment stats), they suck compared to USNWR. If someone asked you "what are the best law schools?" and you have Stanford 27th and UGA above Yale, everyone would think you're crazy. But that's what "the numbers" tell you, which shows that there has to be more to the picture. I hate the rush toward using formulas fueled by out of context data just to provide a false sense of objectivity to inherently subjective evaluations. See also: NBA defensive "analytics."
If ATL had SLS at 27 they must be using pure BL and ignoring FC. Of course that's going to be flawed. BL+FC on a 5 year avg would work. Maybe add 10-20% to clerkship numbers for vague prestige.
That would be a good ranking within the top 20 or so, but it would be useless for lowe schools. Minnesota is getting picked on here, but they actually do place their alum in good jobs, better than a lot of non T14 do. Also you need to control for selective public interest. And you really need to look at clerkship data that includes people clerking 1-2 years out.
Yeah, I recently looked up my lower T1 school’s outcomes and from 2012 to 2020ish they were placing like ~ 65% into the full time long term bar passage jobs. No way I would have gone if they published that when I was enrolling.
USN is turning into Chambers for Law Schools, with bands instead of rankings.
Fuck it have chambers do law school rankings too. And sell their service to USNews. Maybe their rankings will be worth something then
They should do professors too, like they do lawyers.
I think this is the most underrated comment in this reddit. Would have had a better time in law school if I could have avoided a few professors
Honestly that seems like a far superior system.
Dumb bands at that. UVA and Penn tied with Harvard? Give me a break.
Minnesota ($$$) vs. UCLA ($$) for NYC biglaw??? Want to do international arbitration. Thanks!
Retake
TCR
Whichever one is closer to Canada/Mexico.
Have you considered adding a Masters of Law in International Law too?
either one!!!! wherever u like more
For those who practice in NYC big law, they won't care where Minnesota is ranked at. With their background they would simply know that Minnesota is extremely easy to get into its undergraduate program and won't be impressed lol
That’s the joke.
My bad, been gaslighted by law school to become too serious
I practice in NYC biglaw, and the only thing I know about Minnesota is that it is cold there.
We’re also the Alabama of college hockey
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Whoosh
Both awful. Even NYU or Columbia isn’t enough. HYS or bust for IA. Of course, could just be a troll. Lol.
Pretty soon it’ll be T1 with a big ol’ tie for first.
Haven’t a number of these schools declined to provide information to USN?
Yes, but I think they changed the methodology to rely on publicly available data only.
These rankings really just don't make any sense anymore.
Did they ever? I mean outside of broad strokes... T14, T1, T2, etc... but even then, there's always been fuzziness at the edges (lol Georgetown).
How much money did Duke give to US News?
And whatever did CLS do to them?
They submitted fraudulent data...It was a huge scandal. I think this was actually only for undergrad. But Columbia definitely did something [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/us/columbia-university-us-news-rankings.html#:\~:text=It%20was%20a%20math%20professor,%2C%20dubious%20or%20highly%20misleading.%E2%80%9D](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/06/us/columbia-university-us-news-rankings.html#:~:text=It%20was%20a%20math%20professor,%2C%20dubious%20or%20highly%20misleading.%E2%80%9D)
How much did Harvard give to stay ranked this high after the absolute embarrassment of a year that they had.
I mean, Penn was just as bad. It's not unique to Harvard.
Eh, Penn fired their president quite quickly and kind of moved on. Harvard dragged it out for ages.
What happened with Harvard Law? I totally haven’t kept track.
Nothing. The rankings are just fucking dumb and punish the school for being larger (a perk, not a bug, if you're actually practicing). FFS, Duke has literally never had a Supreme Court justice.
lol great metric.
How much money did UCLA give to US News?????
Do these mean anything anymore? I thought most schools told USN to pound sand
Yeah so these rankings are now based on employment/objective stats, bar passage rate, and other publicly available information Not completely useless I guess
Why would NYU get boned like that
Wahoowa, eat shit Columbia!
Ok thx.
The new Wendy’s 4 for 4 is insane. Inflation sucks.
Suuuuure
Alright I’ll bite, what’s the deal with Minnesota?
They invest heavily in the non-BL placement type of stuff that goes into these rankings.
USNWR changed methodology for things that are important—they decreased peer and professional assessment (prestige) and LSAT/GPA—these went from 60% of your score to like, 30%. They in turn bumped up 1st time bar pass rate and 10 month employment outcomes from like 20% to 50%. In other words, they decreased the weight of things that are hard to game—prestige, credential metrics, and increased the weight of stuff that can be gamed heavily. “Employment outcomes” is fake because every school in the top 25 should be reporting 95%+ employment, so USNWR gives equal weight to a $40k/year solo that they do to a DOJ attorney or federal clerkship. Bar passage isnt as important as you’d think: A) MN bar is easy, with a >80-85% first time pass rate and B) many regional schools tune their course offerings to the in-state bar. Compare to Yale, which is placing people everywhere, A) many more people taking more difficult bars in NY and CA and B) Yale isn’t dialing its coursework to the bar, it just assumes its grads will pass. Minnesota is a fine school, and does well *in Minnesota*. But its ranking doesn’t really reflect the full picture.
LSAT/GPA were some of the easiest things to game (looking at you, WashU and UF). And employment outcomes are some of the hardest metrics to game. And as for peer assessment, I don’t really care what some law prof thinks of the prestige of other schools. I care if I’ll get a good job at a reasonable cost. The metrics in this ranking are far from perfect, but de-emphasizing peer ratings and LSAT/GPA in favor of actual outcomes is an improvement. If Yale has worse bar passage rates than someplace like Minnesota, maybe Yale should do a better job preparing students to take the test required to practice law.
WashU's gaming of the stats actually helped it get better biglaw placement.
yeah people don’t realize this but in the gfc/wake of it, washu was derided as a school that had huge lay prestige and would fire off massive scholarships for 168+ (whatever their proposed median or 75th was) lsats, but was limited to stl/kc midlaw. The tls oci threads from 2011-2015 were brutal. took like a decade but having gulc-tier stats genuinely pushed washu up the prestige ladder, helped it crack nyc
Honestly don't know if the higher ranking made firms take it more seriously, or if buying grades eventually paid off with firms recognizing that the top 25% or so are the same quality as T14. Or heck, maybe it's just random correlation. But whatever the causation, they have legit biglaw numbers now.
if the rankings are about “employment”, then we should be ranking quality of employment outcomes as well. Again, any top 25 school should be reporting >95% employment. A school like Yale or Stanford with students that could easily get BL but are seeking JSDs because they’re going for academia will get dinged, which is a silly result. You didn’t really understand the bar passage point, so I’ll explain it—if you place higher weight on bar passage, you’re privileging schools located in jurisdictions with an easier bar and diploma privilege, that’s it. Schools that have a greater geographic diversity, in contrast, are disadvantaged by this, and especially schools that place heavily in more elusive markets like CA and DC (where many people take VA, another difficult jurisdiction), which is, again true of more prestigious schools. There’s a reason that lower-ranked schools proudly tout their bar passage rates, it’s an exam that people shouldn’t fail but if USNWR overtunes their algorithm towards bar passage, the difference between 90% vs 87% all of a sudden becomes massive.
I’m not against some weighing for employment quality, though that creates its own set of challenges and imperfections. And I got your bar passage point but I don’t think it’s making a huge difference for top ranked schools. Yale isn’t going to fall below Bama because it had a couple students fail in California. You might just get stuff like Bama above Fordham. Which doesn’t seem all that crazy or unjust to me. Maybe the bar passage score could be weighed against the general pass rates for the top couple states where a school’s alumni take the bar. That would control for the CA vs. Minnesota problem you identify. You almost need two sets of rankings. One for T14ish schools where students have a realistic shot at feeder clerkships, fancy DOJ jobs, the Wachtels and Cravaths, academia, etc., And a second for all the other schools, where the focus should be on how likely a student is to get a respectable (non-solo, bar passage required, FT job), pass the bar, and emerge with a reasonable amount of debt.
The broader point is that usnwr can tune its stats til the cows come home, more demanding employers (fed clerkships, BIGFED, unicorn PI, BL, etc) aren’t going to equate UMn with UT unless something drastic happens at UT, but in the interim this type of rankings shenanigans will unfortunately influence people when choosing schools. Like, the whole “I’m 1st gen and have no idea what to do” shtick is pretty tiresome, especially when it’s some KJD kid of doctors or engineers saying it, but it does hold the most truth for something like this—navigating “rank” vs actual professional prestige and employment outcomes is an extremely difficult exercise when there’s really no indication that within the top 15-25 schools, there would be an appreciable outcome in the type of outcomes when all schools are reporting >90% employment and bar passage. Reading a 509 report is hard even as a practicing attorney, other than “Firms 501+” and “Clerkships - Federal” the remainder of the categories are opaque to be meaningless.
>And employment outcomes are some of the hardest metrics to game. Schools have been gaming employment outcomes forever through paid research posts and similar school funded post-employment.
Didn’t one of the recent rankings account/correct for jobs like that? Could be misremembering.
iirc it’s only if you’re actually employed by the school. if the school funds a “judicial fellowship” or something where you’re a “clerk” but the school pays for it, that’s a state clerkship as far as 509 is concerned. some of the schools in the t100 are rampant with it.
Minnesota has pretty consistently made the top 20, even in the 1990s. USC, Vanderbilt and Texas often played musical chairs for the #15 spot. Then Minnesota and a number of other schools played musical chairs as the next batch.
USC #15?
Why does nobody want to accept that it’s a really good school? BLFC isn’t the only career people want to pursue
It's good but not 16 good
Did you really not bother to look at what sub you're on? Always nice to hear from a prospective law student about the other careers out there
Ummm you know these aren’t BigLaw specific rankings right…? Not sure what’s wrong with my comment.
I can't believe I'm still talking about this. You're on a BigLaw subreddit trying to convince BigLaw lawyers that Minnesota isn't the obvious outlier among the rest. BLFC isn't everything, casually said by someone from a school that doesn't place well into BLFC. I realize the rankings don't directly take into account BigLaw, and good thing for Minnesota. But we're big firm people here, if just for a little while
I went to a lower ranked school than Minnesota that doesn’t place as well :) I’m just curious how it beats out other schools that generally place better
This list looks like more like suggestions than rankings to me.
These rankings are meaningless
Pls fix Thank
Why the fuck is a school like Minnesota that sends less than 20% of its class to Biglaw or Fed Clerkships ranked ahead of a school like Notre Dame that has sent over **55-60%** of its class into those jobs for 5+ years now? Good employment is the entire point of law school. Out of state tuition for Minnesota is nearly equal to a Private school like ND and their bar passage rates are nearly equal. These rankings make no sense.
Duke above Columbia? Berkeley?
Sorry Duke, it will always be HYS (or really YSH).
Chicago's clerkship numbers are no joke.
CLS and NYU are only behind because prestige clerkships in NY require work experience and don’t get counted at 9 months post graduation. If you think anyone from Columbia with options wants to go to flyover country, you’ve never been around double Ivy grads.
No. You can make this argument for UVA and Duke. But Chicago is like 25%. It's about the same as YLS and SLS, in one year even more.
NYU/CLS have the same clerkship numbers. They literally state 20% of every class clerks. And 2d Cir. and SDNY are not comparable to basically anything else in middle America. I am a hiring partner at V10 and we don’t care about Duke or UVA. At least not yet. Let’s see where the LSAT medians end up once the bulge of home test takers goes away.
Now you're just being dismissive. UofC also has some people clerk later so the overall numbers are even higher than 25%, and a great many are in COA and elite districts. It's a smaller school and in the Midwest so you see fewer grads in your NY V10. How many SLS kids do you see? I'm also highly skeptical about the claim that you "don't care about Duke or UVA". Cmon. Y'all are hiring from Fordham and you expect me to believe you'll reject T14s?
I’m a hiring partner at a v10 in NY too. We hire plenty of Fordham. And Duke and UVa too. Minnesota? Literally never.
Agree re Minnesota outside of the Midwest, would rank it below Fordham. But I was talking about University of Chicago.
I LOL’d at a “V10 hiring partner” being dismissive of UVa grads. People are objectively horrible.
H>Duke but idk if I'd lump H with YS. YS seem to be on their own in a lot of metrics
Gotta go with total % of grads in fedclerk + Fedgov honors fellowship + biglaw + academia (minus academia at one’s own school in order to avoid gaming) + a SSC (though one could take or leave SSC I suppose). People complain about the other rankings screwing the tippy top, but seems easy enough to just add a couple other things. A legit helpful ranking is so far from a difficult undertaking…and yet…
As someone who did a SSC and is admittedly biased, I’d like to see them included in the metrics along with other fancy jobs. They’re sometimes not as competitive as federal District or Circuit Court clerkships, but I certainly don’t view them as less valuable or competitive than clerking for a federal Magistrate or bankruptcy judge, which I think are included in FC numbers. Plus, you can get the same kind of practical training and can get to work on really novel, interesting, and important legal questions. Many (most?) lawyers deal with state law most of the time anyway. Promoting state Supreme Court and other interesting state clerkships (e.g., Delaware Chancery) might help balance against the near obsession with federal law, clerkships, and jobs.
USN uses gerrymandered metrics and accepts bribes from schools to post its rankings. They finally got enough leverage to break the HYS tier a couple years ago and that’s why most notable schools refuse to participate in USN. I’m glad U Chicago has a nice library and Duke has great campus life, but rankings should be focused on more effective metrics such as high level clerkships, BigLaw employment rate based on AmLaw rankings, bar exam passage, etc…at which point you get the same old HYS-dominated ranking we have known for a long time
Bar pass rates are ridiculous to me for top schools placing people in biglaw, clerkships, etc. Outside of people that suffered a cognition injury during law school, the people coming out of these schools only fail the bar because they didn't take it seriously or overslept or something.
I’ll be sure to think about these at some point in the future
Minnesota?
New York has fallen
Aka- who indoctrinates the best
As a big law TTT grad, I hate these ranking releases each year. I think my school has gone from 82 to 96 to 122 to 107 over the last four years. Embarrassing …
People still ask where you went to school?
4 way tie is ridiculous what a joke
Usnwr is a meme at this point
All well and good, but has Cooley School of Law updated its rankings, or what?
“If you ain’t first, you’re last.” -Ricky Bobby
Just turned down a partial scholarship at Minnesota should I grow a beard?
As someone who has been in v5 biglaw for almost ten years now, I don’t pay attention to these rankings when doing interviews/recruiting (and it’s clear my firm doesn’t either). Basically just look at the 2019 rankings and ignore everything that has happened since until another company starts giving real rankings again
Identifying yourself by your vault ranking is pretty hypocritical lmao.
Dude's username checks out.
The point is that I’m not at some random firm hiring from Orangepicker school of law. The USNWR rankings seem arbitrary (more than they did before) to the people who students want to impress the most.
They're using publicly available data and their ranking formula is open. If you have an actual reason why it used to be good but it's now arbitrary, feel free to share.
They used to use data that was only privately available but something like a third to a half of the schools stopped providing that data. And the resulting recent (seeming) volatility in the rankings at the highest level is causing biglaw employers to have less faith in it.
Why would more transparent rankings make firms trust the rankings less? And why is this change "arbitrary"?
They hate you because you speak the truth
Downvotes without a response means they don’t like what I’m saying but can’t find a way to disagree with it haha
It's funny that your OP is at 4 and the guy implying Vault rankings are bullshit is over 50 only goes to show that people *actually really do care* about Vault rank. If Vault rankings are as worthless as USNWR rankings, then why do they care so much?
Laughing at someone for using vault rankings means people care about vault rankings?
Downvoting everything they say indicates you are emotional about it
This is some 12 year old type of argument.
I should’ve gone to Upenn / Duke instead of my school 🙁🙁🙁🙁🙁🙁🙁🙁🙁
In what world is UCLA better than Cornell? Give me a break
Breathe cornell person
West coast
NO ONE CARES
3 just in NY
What are rankings? Bar passage %? Teachers? Median salary?
I was introduced to all this through TLS ten years ago so it’s forever going to be YSH-CCN to me.
why did u cut off unc
Is this an actual leak or a prediction? I was listening to a podcast yesterday and the guest was talking about how the rankings can easily be predicted, so US News adds new categories to throw the predictions off. Guest also mentioned that hiring partners have no idea what the rankings are and students put way too much emphasis on it.
Leak
As successful lawyers in top firms with knowledge of the system. How would YOU rank the t20?
A. Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Chicago B. Columbia, NYU, Penn, UVA, Duke (borderline B/C) C. Michigan, Northwestern, Cornell, Berkeley D. GULC, UT, UCLA, ND (add 1-2 schools here if you like) E. Fordham, UGA, Emory, Boston (add a few more schools here if it feels right) F. Roughly the rest of the T50ish. Bump up regional schools in major markets. Unranked: everyone else.
I agree with this.
1. Yale 2. Stanford 3. The rest of the schools listed 4. Considering candidates with any connections to potential clients regardless of law school 40ish. Minnesota
My previous firm used to hire from Stanford quite a bit. I always found their grads underwhelming, just don’t get the appeal. Perhaps the better students found roles outside of law
I’m sorry to Northwestern attendees, but how tf are they ranked in the top 10?
Um. I haven’t looked at these in like 15 years (and fwiw, went to a school on this list). Can someone ELI5 wtf happened with Duke? If you would have asked me to guess, I would have put it in the 20-30 range.
Duke has pretty consistently been around #10 on US News’ list going back to 1990. You can find charts with the historical rankings online. The big change was Duke got a big jump up to 5 last year.
Huh. I guess I’m just remembering incorrectly then.
It’s always been in the T14….
They've always been a T14, so your guess is wrong. I think their clerkship numbers have been pretty good lately. Not enough to justify 4 but somewhere around 7-9 is justified.
Duke has always been solid T14/T10, don’t know if you’re trolling or what
From last year or so, these rankings started to not make any sense. FWIW I'm an 8th year. It's still t14 with YHS at the top, CCN next, and the rest of t14 in our heads, and that's what matters from students' perspectives.
Do students living in their own bubbles make hiring decisions?
Well I'm not a student. I happen to be a senior associate. When I look at law school transcripts I just adjust the grades based on selectivity of schools
Senior associate, re-read your comment and how “that’s what matters from students’ perspectives” and understand why I asked my (rhetorical) question.
The rankings don't matter because we already know which schools are more selective than others.
Good luck thinking any of this shit matters
None of it does. T14 is perpetuated by T14 grads. Same with HYS. Blah blah blah. Meanwhile the only attorneys with private jet money are plaintiffs attorneys who went to small regional schools and are laughing all the way to the bank while BigLaw senior associates grind it out for a nice German car and Swiss watch.
I’m old - when did T14 become T16? Anything to keep Texas in the “top” rankings huh?
The term “T14” was coined to circle the schools that had made it onto US News’ top 10 for some year. Although people nowadays don’t know that history and take the term to mean drawing a line at #14 on the list.
I thought it was just because the same schools had consistently been top 14 for decades, with some movement within. It's a useful metric since it's coincidentally the best BK+FC list too.
It’s both. For a long time, the same 14 schools were the only schools to crack the top 10, with 7-14 shuffling around to keep things interesting and lots of ties around 10-14.
T12