To identify law schools where students are most likely to encounter classmates from a different racial or ethnic group, U.S. News has created an index based on the total proportion of full- and part-time minority J.D. students—not including international students—and the mix of racial and ethnic groups on campus during the 2011-2012 academic year. Groups that form the basis for our calculations are black, Asian, Hispanic, American Indian, Pacific Islander, white, and multiracial.
Our formula produces a diversity index that ranges from 0.0 to 1.0. The closer a school comes to 1.0, the more diverse is the student population. Keep in mind that law schools enrolling a large proportion of students from any one ethnic group won't receive a high number. This index doesn't measure how successful schools are at meeting diversity goals.
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To be included in the table, a law school must be accredited by the American Bar Association. Because student-body ethnic diversity data are not consistently compiled and reported as yet for other types of graduate schools, U.S. News has prepared a diversity table only for law schools.
Note: The diversity index is based on ethnicity data collected by U.S. News from each law school. The methodology used to compute the index was published in a 1992 article by Philip Meyer and Shawn McIntosh in the International Journal of Public Opinion Research. For this index, students classified as ethnicity unknown/unreported were counted as white.
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Roger Clegg, Ctr for Equal Opportunity of VA 3:47PM March 15, 2012