Earlier this week, U.S. News & World Report announced that it plans to delay the publication of its law and medical school rankings. These graduate school rankings will be the first rankings U.S. News has released since many top universities dropped out of the rankings system.
According to a press release from U.S. News: “We are dealing with an unprecedented number of inquiries during our embargo period for the 2023-2024 Best Graduate Schools, including requests from law and medical schools to update data submitted after the collection period. We are working to address these inquiries. The level of interest in our rankings, including from those schools that declined to participate in our survey, has been beyond anything we have experienced in the past.” The 2023-2024 Best Medical Schools and Best Law Schools rankings will be released once those inquiries are finished. The press release cites that “all other Best Graduate School Rankings will be released on April 25, 2023.”
Earlier this month, US News released its tentative list of the top 14 law schools. Robert Morse of US News also cited updated methodology for the rankings, including, among other criteria: “a significant increase in the weight of the bar passage rate, and the inclusion of “Ultimate Bar Passage,” a two-year measurement of a graduating class’s bar exam success and a significant increase in weight of employment 10 months after graduation.” Morse further explains that the full methodology will be released when the 2023-2024 Best Law Schools rankings are published.
Anemona Hartocollis of The New York Times argued that “Although U.S. News said it was addressing some of the criticism with new methodology, the outcomes remained strikingly similar.” She points out that Yale Law School, the first school to drop out of the rankings, remained number one, although it is now tied with Stanford Law School. It is important to note that although many schools have boycotted the rankings, U.S. News will continue to rank them, but will have to seek out data through other means, such as “in some cases turn[ing] to publicly available data rather than data provided by the universities themselves.”
