The official (as opposed to the leaked) 2010 US News Law School rankings came out today. Over at MoneyLaw, Tom Bell has an interesting post, How Top-Ranked Law Schools Got That Way, Pt. I. He looks at the weighted standardized scores on each of the 12 components of the overall score. He then compares the amounts by which the component scores vary among the top 100, and the top 12, law schools. As expected, the peer reputation scores (PeerRep) vary (and count) the most. The surprising result is that the second highest variation is in overall expenditures per student (Over$/Stu):
[T]he Over$/Stu z-scores range quite widely, with Yale having more than double the score of all but two schools, Harvard and Stanford, which themselves manage less than two-thirds Yale’s Over$/Stu score. That wide spread gives the Over$/Stu score an especially powerful influence on Yale’s overall score, making it almost as important as Yale’s PeerRep score and much more important than any of the school’s remaining 10 z-scores. In effect, Yale’s extraordinary expenditures per student buy it a tenured slot at number one.
If would be interesting to see the relative component contributions for Tiers 3 and 4, as well as Tiers 2 and 3.
Gary Rosin
Tags: US News
[…] the strong influence of peer reputation in the US News law-school rankings, should lower-tier law-schools try to move up in the rankings by using pay-for-placement bonuses […]