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Law Schools Taken to Task in New Book
Tweet Share on Facebook July 26, 2012 CommentA new book on the current state of legal education is generating a lot of buzz. Failing Law Schools, by Brian Tamanaha, professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, provides a detailed look at the things that are wrong with today's law schools. He contends that behind the facade of high paid professors and the key role that lawyers play in all parts of the judicial system, business, government, and politics, the law schools are failing.
One of the book's key themes, according the University of Chicago Press, is that going to law school is a raw deal for many of today's students:
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Final Adjustments to Best High Schools Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook July 20, 2012 CommentAs discussed in detail in my May 30 blog post, "Adjusting the Best High Schools Rankings for Government Data Errors," the federal government found that data from the 2009-2010 school year for a small number of schools that appeared in the U.S. News 2012 Best High Schools rankings was incorrect. The information came from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which collects data from states for all public elementary and secondary schools annually and publishes that data on the Common Core of Data (CCD) website.
As a result of these errors in the federal government data, the U.S. News rankings for a few schools with these data errors were not correct. The federal government has now finished rechecking all public high school data; it has issued a final tally of which schools had incorrect data in 2009-2010 and has removed that data from the CCD website.
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New Paper Examines Growing Importance of Global University Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook July 19, 2012 CommentCollege rankings have become a powerful force both on the national and global levels over the last 25 years. A major concern for some university administrators around the world is how to use both the national rankings in their countries and the global rankings wisely in their mid-term and long-term strategic planning in order to build their institutions into world-class universities.
I was a co-author of a recently published paper, "An analysis of mobility in global rankings: making institutional strategic plans and positioning for building world-class universities," which joins a rapidly expanding body of literature on the impact of college rankings. The other authors on the paper were Angela Yung Chi Hou and Chung-Lin Chiang, both from the Faculty Development and Instructional Resources Center at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taipei, Taiwan.
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U.S. News Discusses Best High Schools Rankings at Ed Department Meeting
Tweet Share on Facebook July 12, 2012 CommentSoon after the U.S. News 2012 Best High Schools rankings were published in May 2012, it became clear that there were errors in the 2009-2010 enrollment data used in the calculations. The data came from the U.S. Department of Education's Common Core of Data (CCD) and the errors affected a small number of the ranked high schools.
[See the detailed methodology used in Best High Schools rankings.]
One reason why U.S. News ranks the Best High Schools and publishes data on nearly every U.S. public high school is to help consumers by standardizing the reporting and transparency of high school-level data from every state. As part of this goal, I recently attended the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics' (NCES) 25th Annual STATS-DC 2012 Data Conference and was on a panel titled "High School Rankings by the Media: What We Learned About the Importance of Data Quality in the Common Core of Data and Opportunities for Improvements."
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Recent Law School News Focuses On Rankings
Tweet Share on Facebook July 5, 2012 CommentThere have a been a few recent, noteworthy pieces that relate to the U.S. News Best Law Schools rankings:
• "Despite an Uncertain Employment Landscape, Law School Applicants Still Consider School Rankings Far More Important than Job Placement Rates When Deciding Where to Apply": According to Kaplan's report based on a June 2012 survey of Kaplan Test Prep's LSAT students:
