Corporate Governance

US News and a Change in the Formula for Law School Rankings: Part Time v. Full Time Students (Part 4)

By J. Robert Brown

We occasionally examine issues associated with law school rankings (for a paper on the impact of law blogging and rankings can be found here). We are examining the impact of a proposal put out by US News to alter the formula for determining the median LSAT and GPA (which provide 22.5% of a law school's ranking). The magazine proposes that medians be calculated based not on full time students but all students, including part time.

We have already compared the median LSAT score of the part time and full time divisions.  We noted that in every case the median (an average of the 25th and 75th percentile) of the part time division was lower that the full time division.  We also noted that the average differential was 3.7%.

The average of the part time program shows that they have about 38% of the students in the full time division (8685/3330) or about 28% of the entire student body.  Some, however, have part time divisions that are quite large relative to the matriculating day class.  George Mason has a part time division equal to 52% of the day division (176 full time; 91 part time), SMU's equals 59% (177/105), Brooklyn's equals 61% (207/187), Seton Hall equals 71% (214/151), Indiana equals 51% (199/101), Dickinson equals 52% (151/79), Loyola Chicago equals 56% (177/99), Catholic equals 50% (201/100) and, the prize for the largest as a percentage of the full time class goes to Rutgers-Camden, where the law school has the only part time division in the top 100 larger than the full time division, with the percentage equal to 106% (114/121). 

All other things being equal (this assumes the median calculation is accurate, the law schools admit a roughly similar class in both quality and size, and that all of the other numbers remain unchanged), it is safe to say that Georgetown and GW will see a drop in the median LSAT, with GW in particular confronting the risk that it will lose its position in the top 25.  Maryland, Connecticut and SMU will likewise see a drop and confront the real possibility of falling out of the top 50.  All of the schools ranked 80 and below confront some risk of a fall in the median and some possibility that they will drop out of the top 100, with St. John's, St. Louis, and McGeorge perhaps having the greatest risk of this occurring. 

For the law schools in the top 100, we have the data on the differences in the median LSAT scores for full and part time programs and the number of students as a percentage of the day division that each part time program accepts.  If you want a the data, it will be sent gratis to anyone who writes a comment on this series and asks for the data.  

Full post as published by The Race to the Bottom on July 31, 2008 (boomark / email).