Updates to Some Grad School Data

A few schools have told us that they made errors reporting some of their data that were used in the newly published America's Best Graduate Schools 2010 rankings. U.S. News is not going to recalculate the rankings because of these mistakes, but we are soon going to correct the data on our website.

Two law schools made errors in how they reported the information used to calculate the percentage of their 2007 graduating class that was employed nine months after graduation, which affected the new law school rankings. Both of these law schools would have ranked higher if these data had been used in the rankings. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's corrected rate of 2007 law graduates employed nine months after graduation is 96.2 percent. The correct rate for the University of Hawaii (Richardson) is 100 percent.

One business school incorrectly supplied data that were used in the new business school rankings.

Boston University's M.B.A. program misreported the data used to calculate the percentage of 2008 graduates employed at graduation and the percentage employed three months after graduation. The school would have moved up in the M.B.A. ranking if the correct data had been used in the calculations.

Boston University's correct rate of 2008 M.B.A. graduates employed at graduation is 86.8 percent. The figure for three months after graduation is 94.7 percent.

In another law school ranking issue, we have received reports that Brooklyn Law School in New York appears to have given U.S. News only its 2008 full-time entering class admission data for the LSAT, undergraduate grade-point average, and applications and acceptances instead of the requested data combining full-time and part-time students for those same variables. U.S. News is waiting for the American Bar Association (ABA) to publish its 2008 ABA Annual Questionnaire information in order to cross-check Brooklyn Law's and other schools' statistics with the association's official data. U.S. News asked each law school to report the same data to U.S. News that they reported to the ABA on its 2008 annual questionnaire used for accreditation. The bar association has told us that its goal is to publicly post these data on its website by May 22.