Entries for March 2009

A new law school ranking was recently published as part of an article that studied the social structure of the American legal academic community. The article, "Reproduction of Hierarchy? A Social Network Analysis of the American Law Professoriate," was written by Daniel Martin Katz, Joshua Gubler, Jon Zelnerm, Eric A. Provins, and Eitan Ingall, all of whom work for the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

In order to do their analysis, the authors first created a detailed database of 7,200 legal academics, using the The Association of American Law Schools' annual directory as a starting point. They were looking for those teaching at 184 law schools accredited by the American Bar Association and ranked by U.S. News in 2007.

U.S. News already is working on the upcoming 2010 edition of the America's Best Colleges rankings, scheduled to be published in late August 2009. On March 17, we began the statistical data collection for the information used to produce the college rankings, guidebook, and website. This data collection is done online through a secure U.S. News website.

We're in the process of mailing out the annual peer assessment surveys that will be used in the rankings. College presidents, provosts, and admission deans at about 1,420 colleges and universities should start receiving their individual surveys during the week of March 23. Respondents have roughly eight weeks to return the surveys. After the first month, we send a second survey mailing to those who haven't yet responded.

More and more higher education conferences are including discussions of the U.S. News "America's Best Colleges" rankings and their effects on higher education and admissions. Wake Forest University in North Carolina is holding a conference open to the general public titled "Rethinking Admissions" on April 15-16 that I will participate in; it will also include a debate on the role of college rankings in higher education.

The upcoming 2010 edition of our America's Best Graduate Schools rankings will be published online on April 23, 2009, at usnews.com. We're currently redesigning our grad school rankings website in order to improve the usability for the business, law, engineering, medicine, education categories as well as the rest of the rankings.

The law school rankings will be getting an upgrade. We plan to publish our first-ever ranking of part-time J.D. law programs. This new ranking will evaluate the part-time law programs at 87 American Bar Association fully accredited law schools that are fully accredited by the American Bar Association. We defined a part-time J.D. program as a law school that has a separate admission process for part-time law students and has at least 20 part-time students enrolled. As we have annually since 1990, we'll also publish updated law school rankings, which will cover all law schools. We'll also have new rankings in clinical training, dispute resolution, environmental law, healthcare law, intellectual property law, international law, legal writing, tax law, and trial advocacy.