Measuring outcomes: Post-graduation measures of success in the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings

Indiana Law Journal

Volumn 83, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 791-834

  Morriss, Andrew P ^a   Henderson, William D ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

^b INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 49049117536     PISSN: 00196665     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (207)

1. In general, we agree with Professor Russell Korobkin's theory that the U.S. News rankings are not a measure of educational quality. See Russell Korobkin, Harnessing the Positive Power of Rankings: A Response to Posner and Sunstein, 81 IND. L.J. 35, 40 (2006) (criticizing "the dominant paradigm that assumes rankings should reflect . . . the quality of education offered by the institutions that are ranked"). Rather, as Korobkin observes, the rankings are primarily a market-clearing device that enables top law students and legal employers to identify each other, thus augmenting "employment opportunities and . . . long-term earning potential" for prospective law school applicants. Id. at 40-43 (positing the primary purpose of the U.S. News rankings is to provide a signal to students and legal employers that coordinates the market for entry level lawyers).
2. See also Russell Korobkin, In Praise of Law School Rankings: Solutions to Coordination and Collective Action Problems, 77 TEX. L. REV. 403, 407-14 (1998) (same).
3. Leigh Jones, Law Schools Mean Business: For-Profits Joined in New Approaches, NAT'L L.J., Apr. 17, 2006 at 17.
4. Mark Donald, Ranking Rift Hastens UH Dean's Resignation; News, TEX. LAW., Apr. 24, 2006, at 1, 2.
5. See id. at 1 (discussing resignation of University of Houston Law Center Dean Nancy Rapoport in spring 2006); Leigh Jones, Law Deans Feel the Heat from Rankings: Houston Law Center's Dean's Resignation is Latest Sign of Growing Pressure, NAT'L L.J., May 1, 2006, at 6.
6. Michelle S. Maxwell, 'The Rankings Game' - WVU's Neglect Harms Its Law School, CHARLESTON GAZETTE, Apr. 21,2006, at 5A.
7. Jones, supra note 4 (quoting Hiram Chodosh, incoming dean at the University of Utah S.J. Quinney School of Law). See also Gadi Dechter, UB's Next Law School Dean to Burnish School's Image: Closius, Former Dean at U. of Toledo, is Chosen From Among Twelve Candidates, BALT. SUN, Feb. 15,2007 (reporting on the new law school dean at the University of Baltimore School of Law, who was hired based on his track record of bolstering the rankings at his former school).
8. See, e.g., Paul D. Carrington, On Ranking: A Response to Mitchell Berger, 53 J. LEGAL EDUC. 301, 301 (2003) (conceding that rankings supply "useful" information but quantification distorts and magnifies its relative importance);
9. Nancy B. Rapoport, Ratings, Not Rankings: Why U.S. News & World Report Shouldn't Want to Be Compared to Time and Newsweek - or The New Yorker, 60 OHIO ST. L.J. 1097, 1099-1100 (1999) (lamenting that "objective" input factors used by U.S. News rankings, such as GPA and LSAT scores, are not "good indicator[s] of quality" because "[t]hese numbers don't reflect how well the law school teaches, how cutting-edge its research is, or whether the law school community is cutthroat or supportive," among other relevant factors);
10. Law School Admissions Council, Deans Speak Out, http://www.lsac.org/Choosing/deans-speak-out-rankings.asp [hereinafter Deans Speak Out] (letter that condemns the U.S. News rankings as "inherently flawed," endorsed by over 100 law school deans).
11. Although more information will neutralize the effects of U.S. News rankings, schools that unilaterally pursue this strategy can actually be made worse off. In other words, there is a massive collective action problem that hinders an effective response. See infra Part IV.
12. Although the post-graduation measures contribute only twenty percent of the overall score in U.S. News's system, post-graduation measures alone explain sixty-five percent of the variance of overall score of the 100 individually ranked schools in the 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006 rankings. One reviewer asked us whether or not a focus on outcomes ignored law schools' claim to be providing education. There may well be independent value to a legal education, but our sense from countless conversations with students is that the vast majority of law students enter law school with finding a law-related job as an important, if not the important, goal.
13. Cf. Brian Letter's Law School Rankings, How Students Should Use This Information, http://www.leiterrankings.com/students/2003studentguide.shtml (noting the distinction between faculty and teaching quality that is not captured by surveys of academic reputation).
14. Library holdings account for 0.75% of a school's total composite score. Law Methodology, U.S. News and World Report, http://www.usnews.com/ articles/education/best-graduate-schools/2008/03/26/law-methodology.html.
15. We agree with other commentators, such as Brian Leiter, that numerical rankings that are composites of several different input variables are inherently misleading. Cf. Brian Leiter, Commentary, How to Rank Law Schools, 81 IND. L.J. 47, 51 (2006) (noting that relevant factors *should be measured separately rather than aggregated on the basis of unprincipled and unrationializable [sic] schema. One can rank schools [on many factors, including 'job placement'] . . . but there is no way these criteria can be meaningfully amalgamated.").
16. We also think students would benefit from disclosure of other law school data, but this paper is focused on post-graduation outcomes.
17. Despite well-publicized "salary wars" in large legal markets, see, for example, Gina Passarella, First-Year Pay Up 250 Percent in 20 Years at Big Firms, LEGAL INTELLIGENCER, Mar. 7, 2006, over the last fifteen years, the cost of legal education has increased much faster than associate salaries.
18. See Leigh Jones, Salary Raises Dwarfed by Law School Tuition Hikes, NAT'L L.J., Feb. 6, 2006 (reporting data from NALP showing that average private sector pay increased 60% between 1990 and 2005 while private school tuition increased by 130% and instate public school tuition increased 267%).
19. For example, one of the leading attorney recruiting firms publishes an annual guide for evaluating transcripts, academic honors, and journal membership at schools ranked in the first tier of the U.S. News rankings. See BCG ATTORNEY SEARCH, THE 2007 BCG ATTORNEY SEARCH GUIDE TO AMERICA'S TOP 50 LAW SCHOOLS (2006), available at http://www.bcgsearch.com/pdf/BCG_Law_Schoool_Guide_2007.pdf.
20. See RONIT DINOVITZER, BRYANT G. GARTH, RICHARD SANDER, JOYCE STERLING & GITA Z. WILDER, AFTER THE JD: FIRST RESULTS OF A NATIONAL STUDY OF LEGAL CAREERS 75 tbl.10.3 (2004) [hereinafter AFTER THE JD] (documenting that graduates of Top 10 law schools, as measured by U.S. News, have the highest median debt), available at http://www.nalpfoundation.org/webmodules/articles/articlefiles/ 87-After_JD_2004_web.pdf.
21. Empirical studies on this topic are readily accessible to prospective law students. See, e.g., Brian Letter's Law School Rankings, The Most National Law School Based on Job Placement in Elite Law Firms, 2003), www.leiterrankings.com/jobs/2003job_national.shtml;
22. Michael Sullivan, Law School Job Placement, www.calvin.edu/admin/csr/ students/sullivan/law/ (updating Leiter's 2003 study).
23. See, e.g., William D. Henderson & Andrew P. Morriss, Student Quality as Measured by LSAT Scores: Migration Patterns in the U.S. News Rankings Era, 81 IND. L.J. 163, 187-88 (2006) (presenting regression results based on bottom three quartiles of the U.S. News rankings that showed a statistically significant relationship between various cost factors, such as tuition, student debt, and status as a public law school, and change in a law school's median LSAT score over a twelve year period);
24. Alex M. Johnson, Jr., The Destruction of the Holistic Approach to Admissions: The Pernicious Effects of Rankings, 81 IND. L.J. 309, 347 n.141 (2006) (law school dean noting that students admitted to more than one law school will make their enrollment decision based on several factors, including "the financial aid or scholarship package offered").
25. See, e.g., Melissa Nann, Over Seventy Percent Passed July Bar, Examiners Report Temple Raises Success Rate for Test Makers, LEGAL INTELLIGENCER, Oct. 17, 2003 (quoting the dean of Penn State Dickinson School of Law that "bar exam passing rates are something prospective students look at when they screen law schools" and that a recent forty-six percent rise in applicants is attributable "in part to the school's rising bar scores").
26. In a recent article on employer placement, a law student bluntly lays out the calculus: While some applicants may place a very high premium on diversity, many others may not care at all. The overwhelming majority of applicants, however, will place a very high value on career placement and cost of attendance. A legal education is not cheap. Debt of $80,000 or more is typical . . . . Naturally, one would expect prospective law students to weigh the monetary costs of attendance - tuition, fees, opportunity cost - against the benefits of expected future earnings and increased job prestige. Anthony Ciolli, The Legal Employment Market: Determinants of Elite Firm Placement and How Law Schools Stack Up, 45 JURIMETRICS 413, 414 (2005).
27. See Henderson & Morriss, supra note 18, at 193. See also Paul Oyer & Scott Schaefer, Personnel-Economic Geography: Evidence from Large U.S. Law Firms 31 (Stanford Bus. Sch. Working Paper, June 29, 2007) (reporting on the importance of geographic proximity rather than law school rank in explaining concentration of educational credentials in a particular law firm office), available at http://faculty-gsb.stanford. edu/oyer/wp/lawyers.pdf.
28. See Henderson & Morriss, supra note 18, at 187-88 (using multivariate regression analysis to explore changing LSAT medians among law schools and observing statistically significant increases for law schools in the bottom three U.S. News quartiles that charged lower tuition or saddled students with less debt).
29. See id. at 188-90 (using multivariable regression to show that change in the number of Am Law lawyers in a region is a strong predictor of gains in median LSAT scores for local law schools and further corroborating results by showing that the number of on-campus interviews by Am Law 200 firms is a function of the number of firms located in the local market). We think these data suggest that students prefer schools in larger and more prosperous legal markets, although students may also be choosing a school where they believe they will achieve a higher class rank over a higher ranked school, on the theory that this will give them an advantage in the job market.
30. Top 25 Law Schools, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., Apr. 29, 1991, at 74.
31. Id. at 74-75.
32. In addition, schools were not as focused on their U.S. News rankings during the earlier years and so may have not put as much effort into gathering the requisite input data.
33. U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., supra note 24. Cornell and Northwestern might well have fallen below Texas (ranked fifteenth overall, sixteenth on placement) had they not done so well on placement, for Texas beat Cornell on two of the other four metrics and tied with Cornell on one of the other four and beat Northwestern on one of the other four and tied with Northwestern on one of the other four. Certainly had Northwestern beaten Cornell on placement rank, it would have traded places with Cornell in the overall rankings, since their total scores were separated only by 0.8 points.
34. Had Stanford received a placement ranking commensurate with its other rankings, it likely would have been ranked third instead of fourth, beating Chicago, since Stanford ranked higher than Chicago on three of five components (Lawyer/Judge reputation third versus seventh; Student Selectivity, third versus sixth; Faculty Resources, second versus third), tied with Chicago on one (Academic, both ranked first) and behind Chicago only on Placement (seventeenth versus first). It is not clear whether Stanford could have beaten Harvard for number two, since it beat Harvard on one ranking (Faculty Resources, second versus sixth) and tied on one (Academic Reputation, both first) but lost to Harvard on two (Student Selectivity, third versus first, and Lawyer/Judge Reputation, third versus first) in addition to losing on Placement (seventeenth versus fifth). Had Minnesota received a placement ranking commensurate with its other rankings, it likely would have been ranked several ranks higher, since with a better placement score, it might have beaten George Washington (which Minnesota outranked on two of the other four criteria by fairly wide margins, losing on the other two by narrower margins) with whom it tied for overall rank twenty-second and Wisconsin (twenty-first) (Minnesota beat on four of four of the other criteria) and Hastings (twentieth) (Minnesota beat on three of four of the other criteria) and possibly even challenged Iowa (nineteenth) (Minnesota beat on two of four of the other criteria).
35. Best of the Rest, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., Mar. 23, 1992, at 80.
36. See Law Schools: The Top 25, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., Mar. 23, 1992, at 78.
37. The editors at U.S. News eventually noticed these incentives and altered the methodology. See infra notes 37-41 and accompanying text.
38. Law firms and law schools reported much lower recruitment activity in the early 1990s than the late 1980s. See, e.g., Claudia MacLachlan, Another Paltry Summer, the Largest Firms Offer Even Fewer Jobs, NAT'L L.J., Jun. 8, 1992, at 1 (discussing lower rates of OCI activity in 1991 than in 1990 and noting the trend toward smaller summer programs among several larger firms);
39. Ken Myers, New Placement Survey Confirms Just How Bleak Job Market Is, NAT'L L.J., May 4, 1992, at 4 (discussing a report by NALP that found "fewer on-campus interviews, few job offers - both for summer associate positions and for full-time employment - and few graduates with jobs six months after graduation").
40. Note, however, that the total contribution of the score remained at twenty percent.
41. The "A" List: The Top 25, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., Mar. 22, 1993, at 62, 62-63.
42. Our findings in Part III.A, infra, suggest that employment rates for some schools are negatively affected by location in a large legal market. We theorized that this is due to an influx of résumés for students at higher ranked schools outside the region. See Henderson & Morriss, supra note 18, at 188-90 & tbl.7 (providing a discussion and data on the relationship between geography and law firm interviews).
43. Methodology, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., Mar. 21, 1994, at 72, 73.
44. Disturbing Discrepancies, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., Mar. 20, 1995, at 82.
45. Id.
46. In addition, unemployed graduates might well have been more likely to be disaffected than employed graduates and so less likely to report their status to their school.
47. Methodology, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., Mar. 20, 1995, at 85.
48. Id.
49. In essence, the availability of information via U.S. News permitted the coordination function of rankings described by Professor Korobkin. See Korobkin, In Praise Of Law School Rankings, supra note 1.
50. Disturbing Discrepancies, supra note 37, at 82 (quoting Ward Bower of Airman Weil Pensa, Inc.).
51. Authors' calculations. In contrast, the correlation between 1992 and 1993 was a much more plausible 0.872.
52. Disturbing Discrepancies, supra note 37, at 82. The schools (and discrepancies) were Alabama (four); Detroit Mercy (four); Duquesne (three); Golden Gate (three); SUNY at Buffalo (three); Whittier (three); Creighton (two); Indiana (Indianapolis) (two); Mississippi College (two); Pace (two); Stetson (two); Akron (one); Boston University (one); Catholic (one); Cumberland-Samford (one); Hawaii (one); Iowa (one); Louisiana State (one); Loyola at L.A. (one); Miami (one); New England (one); Pennsylvania (one); Pittsburgh (one); San Francisco (one); Santa Clara (one); Washington and Lee (one); and Washington University (one). Id.
53. Id.
54. See Press Release, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., Methodology (Mar. 18, 1996).
55. See Chris Klein, Stats Change, But Very Little Differs in Magazine's Ranking, NAT'L L.J., Mar. 10, 1997, at A13 (noting that the "methodological changes were spurred by statistics culled from a new, detailed ABA survey of law schools and their operations"). The survey, which is now published annually, was compiled by the Office of the Consultant on Legal Education for the American Bar Association.
56. See ABA-APPROVED LAW SCHOOLS (Rick L. Morgan & Kurt Snyder, eds.,1997).
57. The data were reported school-by-school, with no tables facilitating comparison.
58. The new bar passage variable was calculated as follows: [first-time bar passage rate in the state where the largest number of graduates took the bar] divided by [that state's overall first-time bar passage]. See Press Release, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., Methodology (Mar. 10, 1997).
59. Id.
60. In other words, the 1991 to 1996 time period strongly corroborates the market coordinate theory of Russell Korobkin. See Korobkin, In Praise of Law School Rankings, supra note 1 and accompanying text.
61. In the current rankings-obsessed environment, it is hard for most readers to fathom how peripheral the LSAT was to most admission decisions during the 1950s and 60s. See, e.g., Patricia W. Lunneborg & Donna Radford, The LSAT: A Survey of Actual Practice, 18 J. LEGAL EDUC. 313, 314 (1966) (reporting the results of a survey of admissions practices by eighty-eight law schools and reporting that only one school weighted the LSAT more than UGPA and that overall, "there is widespread distrust of formulae and a visible shrinking away from the spectre of automated admissions. . . . [Despite strong evidence of the LSAT's efficacy in predicting 1L performance, the] arguments for more rigorous and systematic evaluation have not convinced [the] jury.").
62. In 2006, U.S. News reduced the weight given to employment at graduation (from 6% to 4%) and increased that given to employed at nine months (from 12% to 14%). See supra Table 1. p. 7.
63. See, e.g., Methodology, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., Mar. 2, 1998, at 81;
64. Methodology, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., Apr. 10, 2000 at 74;
65. Methodology, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., Apr. 9, 2001, at 79;
66. Methodology, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REP., (2002) at 61;
67. Methodology, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT (2005) at 61.
68. Note that we divide the fifty highest ranked law schools into "Top 16" and "Rest of Tier 1" because all of these schools have maintained their Top 16 status since the inception of the U.S. News rankings. See Richard Schmalbeck, The Durability of Law School Reputation, 48 J. LEGAL EDUC. 568, 572 (1998) (noting that "the same sixteen schools have occupied the top sixteen spots in every survey" since 1990).
69. See, e.g., Leigh Jones, Law Schools Play the Rankings Game, NAT'L L.J., Apr. 18, 2005, at 1, 1 (noting that "[o]ne relatively easy way to move up [in the law school rankings] is by more closely tracking students' job placements after graduation" because of the way the U.S. News methodology treats incomplete data and citing several examples of law schools who now more closely and methodically monitor these numbers).
70. See Alex Wellen, The $8.78 Million Maneuver, N. Y. TIMES, July 31, 2005, 4A, at 18 (reporting examples of two schools that utilize short term internships to boost the employment numbers reported to U.S. News);
71. Dale Whitman, Doing the Right Thing, AALS NEWSLETTER, Apr. 2002, available at http://www.aals.org/presidentsmessages/pmapr02. html (citing an example of a law school that hired unemployed graduates to work in its library in order to boost its employed at nine months statistics).
72. See Richard A. Matasar, Ya Gotta Pay the Pig, 37 U. TOL. L. REV. 109, 112 (2005) (reporting how law schools boost their placement rates by employing graduates upon and shortly after graduation "or, calling graduates, and leaving them messages that if they do not call back, you will assume that they are employed").
73. The 1995 and 2004 bar passage rates were utilized by U.S. News for the rankings published in the springs of 1997 and 2006, respectively. The figures reported in the text were averages that weighed each school's full-time and part-time entering classes. According to data from the National Conference of Bar Examiners Web site, the overall bar passage rates followed a similar trend: 69.8% in 1995, dropping to 63.6% in 2004. National Conference of Bar Examiners, Bar Admission Statistics, http://www.ncbex.org/bar-admissions/stats/. This gives us some confidence despite the obvious dangers of attempting to reverse engineer bar passage rates for schools, since the U.S. News numbers report only the bar passage rate in the state where the largest number take the bar. See supra note 50. These data are exactly the sorts of information law schools ought to be reporting in detail: bar passage statistics adjusted for LSAT and UGPA information, to allow prospective students to predict their own potential for success on the bar based on their credentials.
74. AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION, 2007-2008 STANDARDS FOR APPROVAL OF LAW SCHOOLS 39 (2007), available at http://www.abanet.org/legaled/ standards/standards.html. "Basic information" includes "placement rates and bar passage data." Id. at 40 (Interpretation 509-1).
75. The U.S. News bar passage score is the school's first-time passage rate in the primary jurisdiction for graduates divided by the first-time bar passage rate in that jurisdiction.
76. See, e.g., STEPHEN P. KLEIN & ROGER BOLUS, ANALYSIS OF JULY 2004 TEXAS BAR EXAM RESULTS BY GENDER AND RACIAL/ETHNIC GROUP (2004), http://www.ble.state.tx. us/one/analysis_0704tbe.htm (studying 2004 Texas bar exam results as part of a commissioned study and finding that "almost all of these differences [in bar passage rates among schools] can be explained by differences in the admissions scores of the students they graduate" and that "there is a nearly perfect relationship between a law school's mean total bar exam scale score and its mean LSAT score (the correlation is 0.98 out of a possible 1.00)").
77. Henderson & Morriss, supra note 18, at 186-87 (summarizing data and regression results and noting that "[t]he relative gains and declines in median LSAT scores over time strongly support our initial starting position hypothesis").
78. See Michael Sauder & Ryon Lancaster, Do Rankings Matter? The Effects of the U.S. News & World Report Rankings on the Law School Admissions Process, 40 LAW & SOC'Y REV. 105, 123-24 (2006) (using multivariate regression analysis to show how slight upward or downward movement in U.S. News rankings affect the number and credentials of applicants to a law school the following year).
79. Interquartile range is the difference between the 75th and 25th percentile figures. See ALAN AGRESTI & BARBARA FINLAY, STATISTICAL METHODS FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCE 62-63 (3d ed. 1997).
80. Jeffrey E. Stake, Minority Admissions to Law School: More Trouble Ahead, and Two Solutions, 80 ST. JOHN'S L. REV. 301, 312-13 (2006) ("When the difference between the P75 and P25 at each school is regressed on time, the coefficient on the year is -.247, which is significant at better than the .001 level. . . . The average width of the midrange in 2004 was 5.4, down from 6.8 in 1998.")
81. See LAW SCH. ADMISSION COUNCIL, MINORITY DATABOOK 24 & tbl.VI (2002) (summarizing applicant volume, ethnicity, average GPA, and LSAT from 1984-1985 to fall 2000).
82. See, e.g. LINDA F. WIGHTMAN, LSAC NATIONAL LONGITUDINAL BAR PASSAGE STUDY 37-54 (1998) (presenting detailed empirical evidence showing that LSAT scores and law school grades are the two strongest predictors of bar passage);
83. Richard H. Sander, A Systemic Analysis of Affirmative Action in American Law Schools, 57 STAN. L. REV. 367, 442-45 (2004) (same).
84. See Deborah J. Merritt, Lowell L. Hargens, & Barbara F. Reskin, Raising the Bar: A Social Science Critique of Recent Increases to Passing Scores on the Bar Exam, 69 U. CIN. L. REV. 929, 929 & n.1 (2001) (reporting that during the 1990s approximately a dozen states raised the minimum score required to pass the bar exam).
85. A few schools experienced a shift from one year to the next because their plurality bar jurisdiction changed (e.g., from Kentucky to Ohio), but this was relatively rare.
86. James Bradshaw, Law Dean Says Bar Exam Is Too Tough, COLUMBUS DISPATCH, Nov. 23, 1998, at 1A (noting that "[t]he Ohio Board of Bar Examiners raised the minimum passing score on the state bar exam in 1996 and 1997" in an effort to improve minimum competence).
87. The spreads were 0.31 in 2000; 0.38 in 2001; 0.39 in 2002; 0.25 in 2003; 0.36 in 2004; 0.40 in 2005; and 0.24 in 2006.
88. See Committee on Bar Admissions and Lawyer Performance & Richard White, AALS Survey of Law Schools on Programs and Courses Designed to Enhance Bar Examination Performance, 52 J. LEGAL EDUC. 453, 456-57 (2002) [hereinafter AALS Survey] (reporting results of fall 1999 survey in which forty-two of 108 responding law schools (38.9%) indicated that they provide or sponsor at least some "activities, programs, or courses specifically designed . . . to enhance bar examination performance").
89. See Steven C. Bahls, Standard Setting: The Impact of Higher Standards on the Quality of Legal Education, THE BAR EXAMINER, Nov. 2001, at 15, 15 (noting that many law schools have dealt with bar passage problems by "increasing academic attrition").
90. See WIGHTMAN, supra note 69, at 29, 49 & n.84.
91. See, e.g., Bahls, supra note 75, at 15 (Dean of Capital University Law School reporting that in an effort "to improve bar performance," Capital shrank the size of its entering class and admitted fewer students with lower LSAT and UGPA and noting the unfortunate side effect is that "many . . . potentially strong future lawyers are being denied admission to law school" as a result).
92. An exception is University of Richmond School of Law, which implemented a rigorous academic support program that posted significant bar passage gains among participants whose law school GPA placed them in the bottom half of the class. See Linda Jellum & Emmeline Paulette Reeves, Cool Data on a Hot Issue: Empirical Evidence that a Law School Bar Support Program Enhances Bar Performance, 5 NEV. L.J. 646, 671-80 (2005) (reporting four years of detailed results).
93. The Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE) is an annual survey of students at participating law schools. It is designed to gauge various aspects of the law school experience, including how students spend their time, how challenging their coursework is, their interaction with faculty, and their impressions of their own educational gains. Since 2003, over 100 law schools have participated in at least one LSSSE survey. See Law School Survey of Student Engagement, About LSSSE, http://www.lssse.iub.edu/html/about_lssse.cfm;
94. Law School Survey of Student Engagement, http://lssse.iub.edu/html/ quick_facts.cfm.
95. This trial-and-error method of attrition was originally championed by the famous Professor Wigmore. See John H. Wigmore, Juristic Psychopoyemetrology - Or, How to Find Out Whether a Boy Has the Makings of a Lawyer, 24 ILL. L. REV. 454, 463 (1929) (advocating first-year grades as the best method to determine whether a student had ability to become an able lawyer).
96. See supra note 69 and accompanying text.
97. Authors' calculations from attrition data posted on the ABA Web site. See Total J.D. Attrition, http://www.abanet.org/legaled/statistics/ charts/stats%20-%2017.pdf. During the 1997 to 2004 observation period, 4L attrition remained statistically unchanged.
98. We discussed this gaming strategy in our earlier work. Henderson & Morriss, supra note 18, at 191. See also Leigh Jones, "No" Sometimes Means "Later", NAT'L L.J., Sept. 11, 2006, at S1, S11 (discussing the trend toward more 2L transfers to elite law schools); Whitman, supra note 58 (President of AALS reporting on the transfer students gaming strategy).
99. For example, many schools require a minimum GPA for graduation; students who perform below that level during the 1L year have the option of continuing their studies on a probationary basis. The decision to withdraw from law school is therefore deemed voluntary. Anecdotally, we know of several schools that have increased the minimum GPA required for good standing or instituted academic warning programs for students with marginal GPAs.
100. See supra notes 37-51 and accompanying text.
101. See supra notes 47-49 and accompanying text.
102. See Sauder & Lancaster, supra note 65, at 122-24 (reporting how minute changes in rankings affect the numerical quality of applicant pools).
103. See Jeffrey E. Stake, The Interplay Between Rankings, Reputations, and Resource Allocation: Ways Rankings Mislead, 81 IND. L.J. 229, 250-55 (2006) (presenting statistical evidence that the prior year's U.S. News ranking affects the direction of the following year's academic reputation input).
104. See Wendy Nelson Espeland & Michael Sauder, Quantitative Authority and the Reflexivity of Rankings, Paper Presented at the Law & Soc'y Conference, Chi., Ill. (2004) (documenting through media reports and interviews with faculty and administrators how law schools have changed policies and allocated resources to improve their U.S. News standing).
105. See Stake, supra note 88, at 266 ("Because some student law review editors consider the author's institution's rank in U.S. News, it is in a prospective employee's best interest to pay some attention to the rankings when choosing employers."); Dan Subotnik & Glen Lazar, Deconstructing the Rejection Letter: A Look at Elitism in Article Selection, 49 J. LEGAL EDUC. 601, 605-07 (1999) (discussing the belief of many law professors that "editors' selections of articles are [at least partially] based on extraneous factors such as the rank of the author's school");
106. See Henderson & Morriss, supra note 18, at 182 & n.64 (noting "market evidence that law firms rely upon the U.S. News rankings to direct their recruiting efforts" and citing to book prepared by a leading law firm recruiter that uses the Top 50 schools as ranked by U.S. News as its cutoff).
107. On the cartel-like nature of legal education, see Harry First, Competition in the Legal Education Industry (I), 53 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 311 (1978);
108. Harry First, Competition in the Legal Education Industry (II): An Antitrust Analysis, 54 N.Y.U. L. REV. 1049 (1979);
109. George B. Shepherd, No African-American Lawyers Allowed: The Inefficient Racism of the ABA's Accreditation of Law Schools, 53 J. LEGAL EDUC. 103 (2003).
110. There is strong historical evidence that law schools have actively opposed the compilation of information that would facilitate direct school-to-school comparisons. Compare Charles D. Kelso, Adding up the Law Schools: A Tabulation and Rating of Their Resources, LEARNING AND THE LAW, Summer 1975, at 38 (ranking the faculty and library resources of all ABA-approved law schools),
111. with Charles D. Kelso, In Defense of the Mathematics of Law School Evaluation: An Answer to Our Critics, LEARNING AND THE LAW, Fall 1975, at 14 (responding to vociferous criticism on the ratings from law school administrators),
112. and Adding up Law Schools is a Poor Way to Count: The Critics of Our Resources Index Do Their Own Arithmetic, LEARNING AND THE LAW, Fall 1975, at 16 (publishing letters from several law school deans, all of which express the opinion that the author's law school was undervalued).
113. See, e.g., Leiter, supra note 12, at 51 (arguing that "there is no way [various inputs of law school quality] can be meaningfully amalgamated" into a single ranking system).
114. Jones, supra note 57 (quoting a common characterization of U.S. News rankings).
115. See Wellen, supra note 58 (documenting how elite law schools focus on issues of cost-accounting for university-provided facilities or the commercial value of electronic databases as a way to boost average expenditures per student).
116. See Henderson & Morriss, supra note 18, at 182-92. Specifically, we reported empirical evidence that (1) the market for students is segmented into regional and national markets that operate under different rules; (2) a school's relative starting position matters; (3) within the regional market, students discount rank for geographic proximity to vibrant legal employment markets; (4) within the regional market, students discount rank for lower tuition and law school debt; and (5) there is little or no association between higher reputation scores and gains in the median LSAT; (6) various gaming strategies are associated with higher LSAT scores. See id.
117. MICHAEL LEWIS, MONEYBALL: THE ART OF WINNING AN UNFAIR GAME (2003).
118. See Paul L. Caron & Rafael Gely, What Law Schools Can Learn from Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics, 82 TEX. L. REV. 1483 (2004) (book review) (giving a cogent explication of why this book on baseball has important implication for the legal academy); Henderson & Morriss, supra note 18, at 197-202 (drawing upon the Moneyball philosophy to formulate three data-driven strategies to increase a law school's median LSAT);
119. MoneyLaw, http://www.money-law.blogspot.com (popular law professor blog devoted to the application of Moneyball principles to the legal academy).
120. See Table 1, supra, p. 7.
121. We have already discussed reasons why the law school employment numbers should be viewed with skepticism. See supra Part II.B.1. The puffery, however, appears to be relatively uniform and systemic. While we may not give much credence to the actual numbers that individual law schools report, the techniques used to boost these employment variables have become established lore among most competent law school administrators. As a result, despite a compression of the underlying scale, the ordinal ranking of employment outcomes among law schools may remain largely intact. In other words, if all law schools game their employment numbers in similar fashion, it may still be possible to tease out meaningful factors that affect employment outcomes.
122. See Henderson & Morriss, supra note 18, at 182-86.
123. See William C. Kidder, Portia Denied: Unmasking Gender Bias on the LSAT and Its Relationship to Racial Diversity in Legal Education, 12 YALE J.L. & FEMINISM 1, 22-24 & nn.103-104 (collecting sources that document how some legal employers, including law firms and federal judges, have relied on the LSAT in making hiring decisions).
124. These data were compiled by National Jurist magazine. See Colleen Gareau, Who's Hiring on Campus This Fall?, NAT'L JURIST, Sept. 2005, at 16, 20 tbl..
125. For example, 248 OCI employers visited Notre Dame Law School, which has a typical class size of 185 students. The marginal benefit of the 248th employer visit was presumably considerably less than the marginal benefit of the 100th employer visit.
126. To assess whether law schools with higher percentages of minority students generally gamer higher "employment at graduation" numbers, we tried an alternative specification that included percentage of minority students as an independent variable. However, this variable was not a significant predictor of employment.
127. See Leigh Jones, Law Firms Digging Deeper On Campus, NAT'L L.J. Nov. 27, 2006, at 1, 10 (reporting that "amid calls from corporate clients to add minority attorneys or risk losing the clients' business, most big law firms have boosted their efforts to diversify" and citing example of Philadelphia-based firm Duane Morris, which "target[s] four or five schools with strong minority enrollments").
128. Using the number of Am Law 200 lawyers in the metropolitan statistical area (MSA) as the metric, the Top 10 corporate law markets are New York City (21,210 Am Law 200 lawyers); Washington, DC (13,512); Chicago (6988); Los Angeles (6475); San Francisco (5688); Boston (3904); Philadelphia (3155); Atlanta (2856); Houston (2753); Dallas (2742). As of 2003, these ten MSAs included 69.8% of all Am Law 200 lawyers. See William D. Henderson, An Empirical Study of Single-Tier Versus Two-Tier Law Partnerships in the Am Law 200, 84 N.C.L. REV. 1691, 1720 tbl.2 (2006) (summarizing size of Top 10 corporate law markets). As shown in the table below, the appeal of these markets is reflected in the compression of the LSAT interquartile range (the difference between the 25th and 75th percentiles) for law schools located inside and outside these major markets: (Table Presented)
129. See, e.g., Brian Leiter, More on the U.S. News Rankings Echo Chamber, Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, Apr. 1, 2005, http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2005/04/more_on_the_us_.html (noting that "[t]he lawyer/judge reputation rank fluctuates meaninglessly year in and year out").
130. Henderson & Morriss, supra note 18, at 199.
131. See id. at 199 n.115 (citing Baylor Law School as an example of a law school that appears to have fared well in the rankings by emphasizing faculty teaching rather than scholarship).
132. 10 (K - old variable), where K equals the largest possible value plus one. BARBARA G. TABACHNICK & LINDA S. FIDELL, USING MULTIVARIATE STATISTICS 85 (3d ed. 1996) (suggesting transformation to correct for substantial negative skew). In turn, by subtracting the new variable from 2.00, we preserved both the scale and direction of the underlying relationships - that is, higher employment at nine months would correspond to a larger, rather than a smaller, transformed variable. We also visually checked scatter plots of the dependent and independent variables to confirm the presence or absence of linear and non-linear relationships.
133. Compare Table 7 (reporting results of employed at graduation model), with Table 8 (reporting results of employed at nine months model).
134. Our regression analysis corroborates that historically black law schools, even after controlling for rank, law school size, and the number of large law firms with offices in the local market, tend to garner more on-campus interviews than other law schools. It is also possible that recruiting at historically black law schools allows firms to send a signal about the intensity of their commitment to diversity. The fact that a firm interviews at a historically black school can be publicized more readily than the number of minority candidates interviewed at other schools.
135. Note that we also ran a specification that included schools' U.S. News academic reputation scores. Despite being highly correlated with the lawyer/judge score, the academic variable had no predictive power for the "employed at nine months" variable. In contrast, the lawyer/judge variable was positively correlated with the "employed at nine months" variable and had a relatively low p-value of 0.068.
136. See William D. Henderson, Variations in U.S. News Reputation over Time, Conglomerate Blog: Bus., Law, Econ., & Soc'y, April 4, 2006, http://www.theconglomerate.org/2006/04/variation_in_us.html.
137. See Stake, supra note 88, at 250-55 (2006) (presenting statistical evidence that the prior year's U.S. News ranking affects the direction of the following year's academic reputation input).
138. See, e.g., Jay M. Feinman, The Five-Dollar Solution, 7 GREEN BAG 225, 225-26 (2004) (suggesting that law school deans preempt the staggering waste and expense of promotional material by sending their colleagues a letter summarizing some key highlights plus a five dollar bill the school would have spent on a fancy publication, eliminating the deadweight loss);
139. Todd Zywicki, Dropping the U.S. News Fig Leaf, 9 GREEN BAG 8, 8 (2005) (decrying the wasteful annual ritual of disseminating "full-color, and glossy, and professionally photographed" news reports to law professors and administrators in the hope of influencing U.S. News reputational surveys). Of course, much of this material does not arrive on time for the balloting or is not targeted to the audience of potential voters, suggesting that law schools might profit from talking with the marketing department of their university's business school.
140. See STEPHEN P. KLEIN & LAURA HAMILTON, AM. ASS'N OF LAW SCHS., THE VALIDITY OF THE U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT RANKING OF ABA LAW SCHOOLS (1998), http://www.aals.org/reports/validity.html#review (noting that little is known about the survey of judges and lawyers).
141. Authors' calculations.
142. Cf. Harry T. Edwards, The Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education and the Legal Profession, 91 MICH. L. REV. 34 (1992) (arguing that the work of elite legal educators is becoming increasingly irrelevant to practicing lawyers);
143. Harry T. Edwards, The Growing Disjunction Between Legal Education and the Legal Profession: A Postscript, 91 MICH. L. REV. 2191 (1993) (reiterating and further developing this critique).
144. The scaled MBE cut score for New York is 134; the cut score is 132 in Illinois. See PMBR, MULTISTATE UPDATE (brochure published by a bar preparation company that specialized in MBE). New York also places more weight on non-MBE materials (60% versus only 50% in Illinois), including a fifty-question multiple-choice section on N.Y. law.
145. See BAR/BRI DIGEST 23, 36 (2006)
146. In the 2006 edition, Chicago outscored NYU on most of the reported criteria, tied on one, and was outscored by NYU on only the undergraduate GPA numbers.
147. See supra note 107 (providing breakdown of Top 10 markets).
148. Since many of the non-New Yorkers taking the New York bar would be lawyers who had gotten jobs in New York, which is among the most desirable locations for large firm jobs, it seems likely that the New York bar takers would be disproportionately drawn from the higher ranks of their graduating classes. This perception is further reinforced by the disproportionate number of top law schools outside New York for which New York is the plurality bar exam, including seven among the sixteen non-New York schools ranked in the Top 20 (Yale, Harvard, Perm, Michigan, Duke, Georgetown, and George Washington.
149. See supra note 69.
150. We calculated the mean 2006 25th percentile LSAT scores for each bar jurisdiction, weighted by average class size, for each law school sharing the same plurality bar exam. According to this (highly imperfect) measure of applicant pool quality, New York was ranked first (161.1) followed by Virginia (160.7), Utah (159.7), and Illinois (158.7). The jurisdictions with the weakest applicant pools, based on 25th percentile LSAT, were Wyoming (149.0), West Virginia (148.0), and South Dakota (147.0). It is worth noting that the 25th percentile LSAT statistics have climbed considerably in the last six years. In 2000, New York, Virginia, and Utah also had the strongest applicant pools, but with measurably lower numbers: 157.3, 157.1, and 155.3, respectively.
151. Statistics, THE BAR EXAMINER, May 2005, at 8 [hereinafter 2005 Statistics]. U.S. News reported a pass rate for California of 61%, which is the first-time taker pass rate for the January and July exams. Unfortunately, the "source of legal education" information does not break down bar exam takers by first-time status. Id.
152. At least one non-ABA-accredited-law-school graduate took the bar exam in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, D.C., Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. Only in Alabama, California, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Washington did more than 10% of the total number of bar takers come from non-ABA-accredited schools, however. The performance gaps in those states were Alabama, 50%; California, 38%; Massachusetts, 37%; Tennessee, 25%; and Washington, 2%. This is the result of the Authors' calculations using data from 2005 Statistics, supra note 127, at 8-9.
153. Remarkably, the sixth school was Ave Maria (Tier 4), which claimed a 100% bar passage rate in a jurisdiction with a 74% first-time bar passage rate (resulting in a bar input score of 1.35). Because 2006 was the first year that Ave Maria was ranked by U.S. News, we could not compare this stellar performance to prior years. However, the Ave Maria Web site has posted 2003-2006 bar results for all Michigan law schools. According to these figures, Ave Maria has been number one in three of the last four years, posting perfect results in both 2004 and 2006. See Ave Maria School of Law, State of Michigan Bar Exam Results (July Exam), http://www.avemarialaw.edu/community/sharedFile/ documents/MichiganBarResults2003to2006JulyExam.pdf.
154. The Wisconsin schools do not have the maximum bar input score for U.S. News purposes because their pass rates are weighted by the 84% first-time passage for out-of-state graduates sitting for the Wisconsin bar.
155. Authors' calculations from our assembled datasets.
156. See supra note 67, at 309-13, and accompanying text; supra note 126 (reporting that the 25th percentile LSAT score has jumped approximately four points since 2000).
157. See supra notes 74-83 and accompanying text.
158. A fruitful line of inquiry might be research results reported by the LSSSE. See, e.g., LSSSE, ENGAGING LEGAL EDUCATION: MOVING BEYOND THE STATUS QUO 11 & n.1 (2007) (reporting that higher levels of faculty-student interaction resulted in self-reported gains in analytical ability, after controlling for LSAT scores, law school grades, gender, law school year, and race and ethnicity).
159. Several contributions to the recent Next Generation of Law School Rankings Symposium in the Indiana Law Journal made precisely this point. See, e.g., Scott Baker, Stephen J. Choi & Mitu Gulati, The Rat Race as an Information-Forcing Device, 81 IND. L.J. 53, 78 (2006) (acknowledging that "U.S. News doesn't accurately measure . . . the quality of a legal education" but the fact that the rankings may be "imperfect, imprecise, or just plain bad" may be outweighed by the information-forcing effect the rankings have on law schools); Leiter, supra note 12, at 51 (discussing several valid and important ways to distinguish law school quality but noting that those measures "should be measured separately rather than aggregated on the basis of unprincipled and and unrationalizable schema");
160. Michael Sauder & Wendy N. Espeland, Strength in Numbers? The Advantages of Multiple Rankings, 81 IND. L.J. 205, 213 (2006) (noting that because the process of rankings "magnif[ies] the importance of trivial differences, rankings change the phenomena that they purport only to measure");
161. Michael E. Solimine, Status Seeking and the Allure and Limits of Law School Rankings, 81 IND. L.J. 299, 303 (2006) (arguing that while the U.S. News may facilitate competition among law schools, the rankings themselves have become the measure of how the competition is won, thus stifling law schools' willingness to innovate in ways that will harm their U.S. News input measures); Stake, supra note 88, at 247-250 (providing various graphical depictions of how the process of ranking distorts distinctions between schools); see also Sauder & Lancaster, supra note 65 (discussing problems of aggregating data into a single index).
162. See, e.g., Mitchell Berger, Why the U.S. News and World Report Law School Rankings are Both Useful and Important, 51 J. LEGAL EDUC. 487, 496-500 (2001) (arguing that U.S. News rankings supply students with relevant information such as law school reputation, bar passage rates, and faculty-student ratios, in a form that facilitates comparisons and that such information can "promote accountability and positive change" among law schools);
163. Robert M. Lloyd, Hard Law Firms and Soft Law Schools, 83 N.C. L. REV. 667, 687 (2005) (arguing that "[j]ust as competition Hardened American business . . . the rankings have the potential to Harden law schools. Already, some law schools have started to impose discipline that would otherwise be unthinkable.").
164. Espeland & Sauder, supra note 89, at 206 & n.3 (quoting comments of one law school administrator during a qualitative study of rankings on U.S. law schools and acknowledging that faculty and administrators "consistently reported]" the pressure to make these trade-offs).
165. See generally Brian Leiter, Measuring the Academic Distinction of Law Faculties, 29 J. LEGAL STUD. 451 (2000);
166. Leiter's Law School Rankings, http://www.leiterrankings.com.
167. See, e.g., Bernard S. Black & Paul L. Caron, Ranking Law Schools: Using SSRN to Measure Scholarly Performance, 81 IND. L.J. 83 (2006) (unveiling law school rankings based on number of papers and downloads from the Social Science Research Network);
168. Tracey E. George, An Empirical Study of Empirical Legal Scholarship: The Top Law Schools, 81 IND. L.J. 141 (2006) (ranking schools based on proportion of faculty with graduate degrees in the social sciences and various measures of output of empirical legal scholarship).
169. Most of the academic energy that goes into formulations of alternative rankings tends to omit roughly three-quarters of all schools. One prospective student wrote in a comment to a ranking post on a blog run by law professors that virtually all of the analysis was limited to highly ranked schools: I am having to make a decision once & for all between St. Mary's Univ. and Texas Wesleyan Univ. . . . yes, I realize, not the most earth shattering decision - both 4th tier, etc- who cares, - however, this is quite likely an excessively important decision for my life, so Im trying desperately to get a finite, qualitative answer as to which is the bottom line "better" school. Posting of Dan Filler to Concurring Opinions, http://www.concurringopinions.com/ archives/2006/04/us_news_law_sch.html (Apr. 3, 2006, 01:00).
170. The annual anti-ranking letter signed by the majority of law school deans from ABA-approved law school seems to reflect a similar sentiment: "Rankings generate huge hype. . . . Applicants need help in widening their knowledge of schools that may be right for them, not narrowing their choices according to a ranking system." Deans Speak Out, supra note 7.
171. See Henderson & Morriss, supra note 18, at 187-90.
172. We concede that a massive collective action problem hinders our solution - that is, a law school that provides more (unflattering) data in an environment of endemic gaming is going to get clobbered. This problem can be solved by an honest regulator or an accrediting agency that (a) imposes uniform guidelines and (b) has credible enforcement authority. Cf. William D. Henderson & Andrew P. Morriss, Rank Economics, AM. LAW., June 1, 2007, http://www.law.com/jsp/PubArticle.jsp?id=900005482655 (arguing that "law schools and the ABA have failed to adopt effective self-regulation" and suggesting several ways that the ABA could improve law school accountable through uniform standards and greater information transparency) (subscription required).
173. See supra text accompanying notes 58-61 (expressing doubt about the veracity of employment figures reported to U.S. News).
174. Whether an alternative could compete with U.S. News in terms of brand name and distribution is a fair question. Alternative rankings might be sponsored by other media (for example, the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, or Business Week - all of whom rank M.B.A. programs) or gain prestige by developing a reputation (for example, the Leiter Law School Reports).
175. See supra Table 1, p. 7.
176. See supra text accompanying notes 58-61.
177. For a cogent discussion of the disparate range of cut scores as "federalism run amok," see Gary S. Rosin, Unpacking the Bar: Cut Scores, MBE Scaling, the LSAT, and Law School Bar Passage, Conference on Empirical Legal Studies, Austin, TX, (Poster Session, Oct. 27-28, 2006) ("With such a broad range of state Bar passage rates and the recent flurry of cut-score increases, it is easy to understand how some might consider state Bar admissions to represent federalism run amok. At root, these concerns call into question the quality of the stewardship of the states over admission to practice law."), revised version available at http://papers.ssrn. com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=914224.
178. Cf. Korobkin, Harnessing the Positive Power, supra note 1, at 40-44 (observing that the rankings are primarily a market-clearing device that enables top law students and legal employers to identify each other, thus augmenting "employment opportunities and . . . long-term earning potential" for prospective law school applicants).
179. Cf. Baker et al., supra note 135, at 78 ("Before U.S. News, most law schools did not share information about faculty scholarship and hiring, the bar-passage rate and employment status of recent graduates, the number of books in their libraries, or student-faculty ratios.").
180. See supra note 113 and accompanying text; see also Henderson & Morriss, supra note 18, at 189-90 (discussing regression results of Am Law 200 OCI activity).
181. This was the source of our data, which we painstakingly compiled with the help of research assistants.
182. U.S. News already charges a small fee for "premium" access to its rankings data, suggesting that such a fee is viable.
183. See supra note 109 and accompanying text.
184. James G. Leipold, After the Bar Exam: Legal Employment Trends For Law School Graduates, THE BAR EXAMINER, May 2005, at 28, 34 (reporting that, according to the Executive Director of NALP, "[i]n 2003, just under one quarter of all jobs were obtained through the fall OCI process, and the vast majority were with large law firms").
185. Id.
186. Id.; see AFTER THE JD, supra note 16, at 82 & fig. 11.2, tbl.11.2 (showing relative importance of various methods of finding a first job after law school).
187. See Leipold, supra note 155, at 34.
188. See AFTER THE JD, supra note 16, at 80-82 & fig.11.2, tbl.11.2 (summarizing how job search varies dramatically by relative rank of law school).
189. See Press Release, NALP, Market for New Law Graduates Up - Approaches 90% for First Time Since 2001 (July 18, 2006), available at http://www.nalp.org/press/details.php?id=61 (reporting on the 32nd consecutive report of detailed demographic, employment, and salary information, which was drawn from 178 ABA-accredited law schools, who "provid[ed] employment information on 92% of all graduates of the Class of 2005");
190. Press Release, NALP, Market for New Law Graduates Is Steady (July 15, 2006), available at http://www.nalp.org/press/details.php?id=55 (providing similar summary for class of 2004).
191. See NALP Press Releases, supra note 160.
192. Although the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to Law Schools reports the number of graduates whose employment status is unknown, its percentage breakdowns by sector are based on the number of known respondents. "Hence," the Official Guide cautions, "for the schools reporting a large percentage of graduates for whom the employment status is unknown, the percentage reported may not be a very accurate reflection of the actual percentage of the class as a whole." ABA-LSAC OFFICIAL GUIDE TO LAW SCHOOLS 72 (2008 ed.).
193. Moderate increases in starting salaries and the debt loads brought on by spiraling tuition are on a collision course. See, e.g., Jones, supra note 14 (reporting that the average cost of a legal education has increased 267% since 1990, compared to a 60% rise in associate salaries working in private firms).
194. Cf. Rachel F. Moran, Of Rankings and Regulation: Are the U.S. News & World Report Rankings Really a Subversive Force in Legal Education?, 81 IND L.J. 383 (2006) (noting the current rankings phenomenon is marked by gaming strategies rather than competitive innovation and marshaling a cogent argument that rigid one-size-fits-all ABA-accreditation standards foster this stagnant climate).
195. Over the last few years, there has been a rapid proliferation in the number of new law schools. See Leigh Jones, Bar Exam Failures Are on the Rise, NAT'L L.J., Mar. 13, 2006, at 1, 16 (noting that "[s]ince 2003, at least seven new law schools have popped up across the country" and are in the process of getting provisionally approved by the ABA). A countervailing force, which we should consider, is letting inferior schools fail. Providing accurate and complete consumer information will expedite this process.
196. See 2005 Statistics, supra note 127, at 37 (summarizing the MBE).
197. See id. at 37, 40. In contrast, the Multistate Performance Exam (MPT) and the Multistate Essay Exam (MEE), which are used by roughly half of the states, are graded by bar examiners for each state and are therefore not commensurable.
198. This type of large-scale analysis was actually done thirty years ago, before we had the benefit of advanced computers. See, e.g., ALFRED B. CARLSON & CHARLES E. WERTS, RELATIONSHIPS AMONG LAW SCHOOL PREDICTORS, LAW SCHOOL PERFORMANCE, AND BAR EXAMINATION RESULTS (ETS 1976).
199. Among the forty-eight states requiring the MBE, the cut scores range from 120 to 145 on a 200-point scale. See PMBR, supra note 121.
200. See, e.g., AALS Survey, supra note 74, at 455 (summarizing reactions of many law professors who worry about excessive emphasis on higher bar scores).
201. See ROBERT STEVENS, LAW SCHOOLS: LEGAL EDUCATION IN AMERICA FROM THE 1850s TO THE 1980s (1983) (discussing controversies about the bar exam and reasons why it has endured).
202. See Randolph N. Jonakait, The Two Hemispheres of Legal Education and the Rise and Fall of Local Law Schools (N.Y. L. Sch. Pub. L. & Legal Theory Res. Paper Series 05/06-29), available at t http://ssm.com/abstract=913084 (questioning the agenda set by elite law schools where most law professors obtained their law degrees).
203. See, e.g., WIGHTMAN, supra note 69, at 27-32 (reporting large racial disparities in the LSAC Bar Passage Study for first time and eventual bar passage rates); STEPHEN P. KLEIN & ROGER BOLUS, INITIAL AND EVENTUAL PASSING RATES OF THE JULY 2004 FIRST TIMERS (2006) (reporting essentially the same results for the Texas bar population), available at http://www.ble.state.tx.us/announcements/ klein%20report%200606.doc.
204. In other words, to do more than to gripe about bar exams around the coffee machine in the faculty lounge.
205. See supra note 12.
206. Clark L. Maxam, Ehsan Nikbakht, Milena Petrova & Andrew C. Spieler, Manager Characteristics and Hedge Fund Performance, 16 J. APP. FIN. 57, 69 (2006).
207. See supra note 98 and accompanying text.