The 2015 ATL Top 50 Law School Rankings

Law School Rankings

Most people attend law school
to obtain jobs as lawyers.

(Paid, full-time attorneys, not people looking for clients on Craigslist.)

For all the talk about law school applications hitting historic lows, there are still roughly 40,000 people who will enroll in law school this fall, and a high percentage of people who didn’t apply to law school still thought about it. It’s possible to dip your toe into the water without stripping naked and getting all wet.

Out of respect for the 40,000 new law students who still, you know, exist, we welcome you to the third 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 2014. 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 “debt per job” metric which measures how much student debt is accrued by a school’s graduates for every actual legal job obtained. We term this data point the “M7 Ratio” to acknowledge our friends at M7 Financial, whose idea it was, and who crunched the relevant numbers on our behalf. This data point aligns nicely with the spirit of the ATL Top 50 Law School Rankings, which keeps an exclusive focus on the only thing that really matters: outcomes.

There have been some major shakeups in this year’s rankings. It looks like one law school is not feeding 3Ls to federal clerkships like it used to.

Enjoy the rankings, but please use them responsibly.


Let's put it simply:



Scales tipped toward OUTPUT

What happened last year?

Class of 2014 placement graph


Methodology

In 2014, 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:



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

The Rankings See the 2014 rankings →

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

2015 Rank School 2014 Rank Change Score
1 Harvard Law School 2 ↑ 1 72
2 Stanford Law School 3 ↑ 1 71
3 University of Chicago Law School 5 ↑ 2 71
4 University of Pennsylvania Law School 8 ↑ 4 70
5 Yale Law School 1 ↓ 4 69
6 University of Virginia Law School 9 ↑ 3 66
7 Duke Law School 7 → 0 66
8 Columbia Law School 4 ↓ 4 65
9 Cornell University Law School 13 ↑ 4 65
10 NYU School of Law 6 ↓ 4 64
11 UC Berkeley School of Law 12 ↑ 1 61
12 University of Michigan Law School 10 ↓ 2 59
13 Northwestern University School of Law 11 ↓ 2 58
14 University of Texas at Austin School of Law 15 ↑ 1 52
15 Vanderbilt Law School 14 ↓ 1 50
16 Boston College Law School 21 ↑ 5 48
17 University of Iowa College of Law 18 ↑ 1 47
18 University of New Mexico School of Law 22 ↑ 4 46
19 UCLA School of Law 19 → 0 45
20 Georgetown University Law Center 16 ↓ 4 45
21 Boston University School of Law 30 ↑ 9 45
22 BYU – J. Reuben Clark Law School 24 ↑ 2 45
23 University of Notre Dame Law School 17 ↓ 6 44
24 William & Mary School of Law 39 ↑ 15 43
25 Washington University of St. Louis School of Law 26 ↑ 1 42
26 University of North Carolina School of Law 23 ↓ 3 42
27 University of Georgia Law School 20 ↓ 7 41
28 University of Minnesota, Twin Cities 33 ↑ 5 41
29 Ohio State – Moritz College of Law 38 ↑ 9 41
30 Washington and Lee University School of Law 37 ↑ 7 40
31 University of Illinois College of Law 27 ↓ 4 39
32 University of Alabama School of Law 28 ↓ 4 39
33 Georgia State University College of Law 45 ↑ 12 39
34 Temple University, James E. Beasley Law 44 ↑ 10 39
35 University of Florida – Levin College of Law 32 ↓ 3 38
36 Arizona State University – Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law 43 ↑ 7 38
37 SMU Dedman School of Law 25 ↓ 12 38
38 Villanova Law 0 ↓ 38 37
39 University of Houston Law Center 34 ↓ 5 37
40 George Washington University Law School 29 ↓ 11 36
41 Louisiana State University, Hebert Law Center 0 ↓ 41 36
42 Rutgers Law, Newark 0 ↓ 42 36
43 Tulane University Law School 50 ↑ 7 35
44 Seton Hall Law School 40 ↓ 4 34
45 Emory University School of Law 36 ↓ 9 34
46 Indiana University – Maurer School of Law (Bloomington) 31 ↓ 15 34
47 Wake Forest University School of Law 46 ↓ 1 34
48 University of Tulsa College of Law 0 ↓ 48 32
49 Saint Louis University School of Law 0 ↓ 49 31
50 University of Akron 0 ↓ 50 31


Click here to receive a PDF copy of this table with our free eBook


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.

SCOTUS clerk & Federal judgeship scores (7.5% 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.

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.

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.

M7 ratio (5%)

Our “debt per job” metric. One measure of how a law school is performing is to compare the indebtedness of its graduates to the number of actual legal jobs they obtain.

We've scaled the scores by their respective weights to generate the "ATL Score." A perfect total score would be 100.




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