Academic

Over at Morse Code, Bob Morse -- US News' rankings guru -- is asking for assistance in developing US News' diversity measure for law schools.  This is in response to the criticism in Wendy Espeland's and Michael Sauder's recent article "Rankings and Diversity," which appeared in the Review of Law and Social Justice.  They charge (at 588) that 

because rankings include selectivity statistics (LSAT scores, undergraduate grade point averages, and acceptance rates account for 25% of a school's overall rank) that reflect racial, gender, economic and geographical differences, and because the ability to perform well under duress on a timed, standardized test is a highly restrictive form of merit, efforts to improve these statistics can threaten various forms of diversity. 

U.S. News doesn't incorporate its current diversity index into the law school rankings, because measuring how successful law schools are at achieving diversity is a very complicated issue that cannot easily be included in our rankings formula in a fair and meaningful way. The current U.S. Newsdiversity index does not measure how successful law schools are at achieving diversity against a benchmark. For example, U.S. News would need to determine what scale would be used to measure diversity for each law school. How should law schools be compared in ethnically diverse states like California and Florida, say, with those in far less diverse states like Maine and Kansas? U.S. News is willing to work with legal educators and others to develop such fair diversity yardsticks, but we cannot do it without outside assistance.