New Alternative To U S News Law School Rankings

Today, Law School Transparency announces an alternative to the U.S. News law school rankings: The LST Score Reports.

LST has developed the Score Reports in an effort to produce a tool to help prospective students make application and enrollment decisions, keeping in mind that each person has a different risk tolerance, financial situation, and set of career aspirations.

The Score Reports are user-friendly tools for sorting law school employment outcomes, projected costs, and admissions stats. There is a Score Report for every state (includes only schools that place graduates there), every school (called a profile), and job types. They measure job outcomes, use a regional scope, and use real terms about the outcomes to allow prospective students to make an educated decision about not just which school to attend, but whether any school happens to meet their needs.

The Score Reports are not rankings, although they do serve as an alternative to conventional law school rankings. But unlike rankings, the Score Reports do not reduce complex data to a single metric. Instead, the Score Reports focus on observable relationships to specific legal markets and job types. Only a small handful of schools have a truly national reach in job placement. The rest have a regional, in-state, or even just local reach. A decision tool should not obfuscate this reality; it should embrace it.

You can view the Score Reports, and read more about them, by following these links:

The Score Reports: https://www.lawschooltransparency.com
Guide to Using the Score Reports: https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/help/Methodology
The Value of the U.S. News rankings: https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/help/Value-of-US-News-Rankings
Methodology, Published in the Journal of Legal Metrics: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2106814

Founded in 2009, Law School Transparency is a nonprofit legal education policy organization dedicated to improving consumer information and to reforming the traditional law school model. LST and its administrators operate independently of any legal institutions, legal employers, or academic reports related to the legal market. The LST Score Reports are a new project from LST Reform Central.