The 2016 ATL Top 50 Law School Rankings

Law School Rankings

Most people attend law school to obtain jobs as lawyers.

(While fewer people are going to law school, those that do are hyper-focused on employment outcomes.)

Despite a massive contraction in the number of applicants, law schools are still filling their seats. The schools are just reaching deeper into the pool and matriculating students who wouldn’t have gotten in a decade ago.

But can law schools employ those students? Is it worth it to be the last person admitted to a law school that can’t find jobs for students outside the top 10% of their class? Which schools have the brand to overcome the “brain drain”? And which schools have employers questioning the quality of their recent graduates?

We welcome you to the fourth annual installment of the Above the Law Top 50 Law School Rankings. These are the only rankings to incorporate the latest ABA employment data concerning the class of 2015. The premise underlying our approach to ranking schools remains the same: that given the steep cost of law school and the new normal of the legal job market, potential students should prioritize their future employment prospects over all other factors in deciding whether and where to attend law school. The relative quality of schools is a function of how they deliver on the promise of gainful legal employment.

Our list is limited to 50 schools. We want to look at "national" schools, the ones with quality employment prospects both outside of their particular region and/or for graduates who don’t graduate at the top of the class.

This year, we’ve added a new wrinkle to our methodology: a “salary-to-debt” ratio, courtesy of our friends at SoFi, who have mined their enormous database of loan refinancing applicants to give us a useful measure of which law schools graduate people “underwater.” SoFi has calculated the ratio between individual graduates’ average salaries versus their loan burden. The average salary-to-debt ratio for all graduates was 0.94 (i.e., the grads’ annual salary is 94% of what they owe). That’s not great. Financial planners advise that educational debt should not exceed annual salary of your first job out of school. But some schools perform well. By a significant margin, BYU is the best rated law school by this metric, with a ratio of 1.71. This new data complements our existing “debt-per-job” stat, which compares how much student debt is piled up by a school’s graduating class relative to every actual legal job obtained by its members.

The ATL Top 50 Law School Rankings keep an exclusive focus on the only thing that really matters: outcomes.

Enjoy the rankings, but please use them responsibly. If you have any questions, complaints, or other feedback, please reach out to research@abovethelaw.com.


Let's put it simply:



Scales tipped toward OUTPUT

What happened last year?

Class of 2015 placement graph



KAPLAN ASKED: “Should law school be reduced from three years to two?”

  • BEFORE LAW SCHOOL: 34% of pre-law students say that J.D. programs should be condensed to two years.
  • AFTER: 56% of law school graduates believe that law school should be shortened by a year.

Apparently, for those who actually experience law school, less is more.

*Based on email surveys of Kaplan LSAT and Kaplan Bar Review students

Methodology

In 2015, we surveyed our audience about the most relevant factors that potential law students should consider in selecting a school. By a large margin, these were the top choices, along with the percentage of respondents classifying them as “highly relevant”:

  1. Employment data (85.43%)
  2. Large firm placement (54.54%)
  3. Federal clerkship placement (46.64%)
  4. Tuition/Cost – (40.73%)

In other words, you prioritize employment outcomes above all else in comparing law schools. We agree. Therefore, these are the components of our rankings methodology:



The Rankings See the 2015 rankings →

How do law schools fare when assessed using this outcome-based methodology?

2016 Rank School 2015 Rank Change Score
1 University of Chicago Law School 3 ↑ 2 84
2 University of Virginia Law School 6 ↑ 4 79
3 Duke Law School 7 ↑ 4 78
4 Harvard Law School 1 ↓ 3 81
5 Stanford Law School 2 ↓ 3 85
6 Yale Law School 5 ↓ 1 86
6 University of Pennsylvania Law School 4 ↓ 2 82
8 University of Michigan Law School 12 ↑ 4 66
9 Cornell University Law School 9 → 0 73
10 Northwestern University School of Law 13 ↑ 3 75
11 UC Berkeley School of Law 11 → 0 72
12 Vanderbilt Law School 15 ↑ 3 65
13 Columbia Law School 8 ↓ 5 67
14 NYU School of Law 10 ↓ 4 64
15 University of Texas at Austin School of Law 14 ↓ 1 66
16 Georgetown University Law Center 20 ↑ 4 59
17 Boston University School of Law 21 ↑ 4 60
17 Washington University of St. Louis School of Law 25 ↑ 8 57
18 University of Notre Dame Law School 23 ↑ 5 59
19 USC Gould School of Law 0 ↓ 19 0
21 University of Georgia Law School 27 ↑ 6 56
22 University of Alabama School of Law 32 ↑ 10 54
23 UCLA School of Law 19 ↓ 4 60
24 Boston College Law School 16 ↓ 8 60
25 University of Illinois College of Law 31 ↑ 6 53
26 University of Iowa College of Law 17 ↓ 9 60
27 William & Mary School of Law 24 ↓ 3 56
27 Temple University, James E. Beasley Law 34 ↑ 7 49
29 Ohio State – Moritz College of Law 29 → 0 54
30 Washington and Lee University School of Law 30 → 0 56
31 University of North Carolina School of Law 26 ↓ 5 54
32 University of Minnesota, Twin Cities 28 ↓ 4 52
33 Baylor Law 0 ↓ 33 53
34 SMU Dedman School of Law 37 ↑ 3 54
35 Seton Hall Law School 44 ↑ 9 51
36 University of Florida – Levin College of Law 35 ↓ 1 54
37 University of Tulsa College of Law 48 ↑ 11 0
37 Florida State University College of Law 0 ↓ 37 50
38 Wake Forest University School of Law 47 ↑ 9 48
39 University of Washington School of Law 0 ↓ 39 50
39 Villanova Law 38 ↓ 1 0
40 Louisiana State University, Hebert Law Center 41 ↑ 1 49
40 BYU – J. Reuben Clark Law School 22 ↓ 18 50
41 University of Houston Law Center 39 ↓ 2 50
41 Emory University School of Law 45 ↑ 4 50
42 University of Arizona, James E. Rogers 0 ↓ 42 50
42 University of Wisconsin Law 0 ↓ 42 0
43 University of Missouri, Columbia 0 ↓ 43 49
44 George Washington University Law School 40 ↓ 4 52
45 University of New Mexico School of Law 18 ↓ 27 51




Some further notes on methodology


Employment score (30%)

We only counted full-time, long-term jobs requiring bar passage (excluding solos and school-funded positions). Look, we know that there are some great non-lawyer jobs out there for which a J.D. is an “advantage.” It's not as if these jobs don't count, it's that they can't be compared in a meaningful way. The definition of "J.D. Advantage" changes from year to year and is based on a self-reported metric that defies independent third-party verification. One school's apples is another school's oranges, but we're not going to count lemons.

Quality jobs score (30%)

This measures the schools’ success at placing students on career paths that best enable them to pay off their student debts. We’ve combined placement with the country’s largest and best-paying law firms (using the National Law Journal’s “NLJ 250”) and the percentage of graduates embarking on federal judicial clerkships. These clerkships typically lead to a broader and enhanced range of employment opportunities.

Education cost (15%)

Solid data on individual law student educational debt is hard to come by. Published averages exist, but the crucial number, the amount of non-dischargeable government funded or guaranteed educational loan debt, is not available. So as a proxy for indebtedness, we’ve scored schools based on total cost. Data courtesy of Law School Transparency.

SCOTUS clerk & Federal judgeship scores (5% each)

Though obviously applicable to very different stages of legal careers, these two categories represent the pinnacles of the profession. For the purposes of these rankings, we simply looked at a school's graduates as a percentage of (1) all U.S. Supreme Court clerks (since 2010) and (2) currently sitting Article III judges. Both scores are adjusted for the size of the school. Obviously, we are aware that for the vast majority of students, Supreme Court clerkships or the federal bench are simply not prospects. But for the students who do want to be judges and academics, this outcome represents a useful separating factor for the most elite schools. Some schools put you in robes, others can't.

ATL Alumni rating (5%)

This is the only non-public component of our rankings. Our ATL Insider Survey asks students and alumni to rate their schools in terms of academics, financial aid advising, career services advising, social life, and clinical training. For the purposes of the ATL Top 50, we only counted the alumni ratings, as that was more in keeping with our “outcomes only” approach.

Debt-per-job ratio (5%)

A comparison between the indebtedness of a school’s graduates to the number of actual legal jobs they obtain.

Salary-to-job ratio (5%)

The ratio between individual graduates’ average salaries and their loan burdens. The data was gathered from the pool of applicants for SoFi student loan refinancing between January 1, 2014 and February 25, 2016. The pool of applicants with a JD degree have, on average, six years of work experience since graduation.




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