Despite all the buzz about some law schools withdrawing from the annual ranking of schools by US News, that commercial entity has ranked all law schools again this year, using a very different formula that has had a negative impact on our school's ranking.

After rising 17 places in the last two years under the old formula, our school's overall ranking has suddenly fallen this year from 94 to 122, despite very similar data. The ranking of our part-time program – which has the same educational elements as our full-time program – has risen seven places, from 38 to 31.

We are the same great 125-year-old law school. In fact, anyone who has been paying attention will know that our school's trajectory has been heading dramatically upward.

Our students receive one of the finest legal educations available and graduate ready to practice law at the highest level. Indeed, they do so: our rate of placing students into the best-quality jobs is now one of the highest in the nation. Our students have access to programs in many specializations, internships in the nation's capital that cannot be secured elsewhere, full- and part-time faculty (including several outstanding new hires) recognized nationally in their fields, and an accomplished alumni network second to none. Our small size and supportive community make us a unique environment in which to study law, with unparalleled individual attention.

In the past few years, we also have broken all of our fundraising records, established a new endowed faculty chair, launched a new center and constitutional law project (including new student fellowships), and renovated the lower-level of our facility to provide beautiful new space for our centers and institutes, including a state-of-the-art media production studio. Our school is, to say the least, flourishing.

The dramatic changes in the calculation of this year's rankings have produced some wild swings and strange results, such that the specific spot of a given school in the rankings seems to provide little useful information to prospective students.

As one obvious example, consider the number of ties among schools throughout the rankings list and specifically around our school. Last year, we were ranked #94. There is no #94 this year because so many schools (seven) are tied for #89 – so the next group of rankings is three schools tied at #96. We are only five ranking steps – groups of tied schools – away from #96, and yet are tied for #122. The group ranked immediately above us has 11(!) schools tied for the #111 ranking. The fact is that the margins in the objective data supporting the ranking differentials of large swaths of the schools on the list are simply not meaningfully different.

In any event, there is nothing we can do about the current year, in which the rules have been changed at the end of the game, but we previously developed a successful strategy to improve our ranking under the old formula and will do so again under the new. The good news is that our ranking should be at this new level for only one year before we see some significant improvement.

Here are some important factors that help explain why:

1. The new formula places much more weight on our graduates' job placement rates. Not all kinds of jobs "count," so despite having post-graduation employment around 90% the last few years, that has included some kinds of jobs that US News does not give full credit. For example, if one of our part-time students, who is already fully employed, decides to stay in her or his satisfying job after graduation, that job may not count because it does not require bar passage and may not qualify as a job for which a J.D. is an advantage.
   
   Over the last few years, we already had done much to continue the upward trajectory of our placement rates in jobs that receive full credit, but the figure that was counted by US News this year in this important category stayed steady at about 81%. We already know that next year, with the help of our amazing new team in our Office of Career and Professional Development, that figure for "full credit" jobs will be over 91%. To give you a sense of the potential impact on our ranking this figure will have next year (and how close together this way of scoring makes things), our 91% is higher than the numbers for some of the schools in the top 35 this year.
   
   
2. The new formula places much more weight on bar passage rates. Our "ultimate" bar passage rate (within two years of graduation) is over 90%. But US News places much more weight on the passage rate for first-time bar takers. This is where we slipped for this year's rankings. For the class of 2019, our (first-time) bar passage rate was 85%; for the class of 2020, it was 89%. However, for the class of 2021, which is the class included in this year's rankings, it was 74%. Our bar-passage task force thinks this class was particularly affected by the morale-busting pandemic and our necessary use of take-home exams during that period. The good news is that we already know that the 2022 bar passage rate is better -- 78% -- and we are significantly retooling our robust bar-passage support program to help ensure we will continue to improve.
   
   
3. Finally, the old formula had placed a great deal of weight on a school's selectivity in admissions (acceptance rate, median LSAT score, median undergraduate GPA). Our focus on improving in this category had been a significant driver of our previous rise in the rankings. We continued to improve our selectivity in the last cycle -- raising our median LSAT score another point and our median undergraduate GPA a full tenth of a point -- but US News significantly decreased the weight assigned to these factors this time around. Over time, our efforts in this area will pay dividends toward bar passage and other important outcomes-measures that will help us continue our previous progress in the rankings.

* * * * *

The rankings were particularly unpredictable with all of the changes in the formula for determining them this year, but I am proud of the fundamental quality of our school and am confident we will see our ranking improve again. We are the same thriving school we have always been, and our recent advances on the many fronts described above indicate that even better days are ahead. We appreciate your support.

Sincerely,
Steve

Stephen C. Payne
Dean, Columbus School of Law
Knights of Columbus Professor of Law
The Catholic University of America