Law School Rankings… Official?

by Claudine Vainrub, Principal of EduPlan / Wednesday, 12 March 2008 / Published in College Admissions

What would you think if you saw this?

(From Daniel Solove´s Concurring Opinions Blog)

I almost fell for it, but then again, is it too far from reality? Do you know how the ranking process really works? If you do not, you are one of many.

Here is the official info on the criteria used for the US News college rankings (applicable also to US News graduate school rankings):

“The U.S. News college rankings, published on usnews.com Aug. 18, 2007, are based on several key measures of quality, described below. U.S. News uses these measures to capture the various dimensions of academic quality at each college. These measures fall into seven broad categories: peer assessment; graduation and retention rate; faculty resources (for example, class size); student selectivity (for example, average admission test scores of incoming students); financial resources; alumni giving; and, only for national universities and liberal arts colleges, graduation rate performance. The indicators include both input measures, which reflect the quality of students, faculty, and other resources used in education, and outcome measures, which capture the results of the education an individual receives.”