The LSU Law Center remained in the top 100 law schools in the nation in the 2016 U.S. News rankings released today. The school ranked #94 among the nation’s public and private law schools. The #94 ranking is down from the previous year in which the Law Center ranked #72, the highest ranking in Law Center history.
Some 198 accredited law schools in the nation are reviewed by the U.S. News magazine. LSU Law is one of only nine public law schools from Texas to Florida, and only one of four law schools in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi, public or private, ranked in the Top 100. LSU Law entered the U.S. News Top 100 for the first time in 2004.
“The U.S. News rankings are heavily weighted toward inputs such as students’ entering credentials and how much money a school spends,” said LSU Law Chancellor Jack Weiss. ”I’d encourage prospective students and their parents to look instead at value—the outcomes students at LSU Law achieve relative to the reasonable cost of attending law school here,” Weiss said.
“In National Jurist magazine’s “Best Value” ranking that relates to outcomes to cost, we remain one of the highest ranked law schools in the nation, ranking in the top 10 of all public or private schools,” Weiss said. “Our employment outcomes remain strong, with only 26 schools according to US News, public or private, having higher employment rates than LSU Law nine months after graduation. National Jurist also ranked LSU Law as a top 10 school for bar exam passage, and of course our students consistently outperform those at other Louisiana law schools on the Louisiana bar exam.”
This year’s drop in LSU Law’s U.S. News ranking follows a strong jump in the school’s U.S. News ranking—from 91 to 72—over the preceding years of Weiss’s tenure as Chancellor. Asked to explain this year’s drop, Weiss said: “State funding for LSU Law has declined more than 50 percent since 2008. A drastic reduction in state support directly or indirectly affects a number of the US News inputs, so I am not shocked that these funding cuts finally had a big impact on our US News ranking. Fortunately, the value and quality of the legal education at LSU Law remain fully intact and very competitive with the other opportunities available to prospective law students.”
Factors in the rankings include: Quality Assessment-40% (peer assessment and assessment scores by lawyers, recruiters and judges); Selectivity-25% (median LSAT scores, median undergrad GPA and acceptance rate); Placement Success-20% (employment rates for 2013 graduates at graduation and nine months after graduation, as well as their bar passage rate); and Faculty Resources-15% (expenditures per student for instruction, library and supporting services and student/faculty ratio).
