The latest edition of the U.S. News and World Report law and medical school rankings saw little movement at the top of the list despite a number of top-ranked schools saying they would no longer participate in the rankings.
The 2023-2024 rankings, which were released on Thursday, once again placed Yale Law School as the top-ranked law school in the country, but in a slight change, Stanford Law School rose one spot from second place to tie Yale at the top of the list despite both schools announcing last year they would no longer provide information to the magazine to use for the rankings.
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For medical schools, Harvard Medical School retained its top spot in the rankings, while Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine placed second.
The magazine said it used publicly available data from the American Bar Association to determine each law school’s placement in its rankings. The 2023-2024 edition saw several schools make significant jumps up the leader board, with Duquesne University’s Kline Law School seeing the biggest climb, rising 40 places to become the 89th top-ranked law school.
For medical schools, the outlet said if a school did not respond to its survey, that school’s data from last year were recycled. However, if that information was unavailable, U.S. News said the school was not included in the rankings.
“It is vital for law and medical students to be equipped with the skills and experiences necessary to flourish in this ever-changing and complex world,” U.S. News executive chairman and CEO Eric Gertler said in a statement. “By focusing on metrics that measure outcomes, our rankings and resources can provide a road map for the first step in those students’ journeys — their education.”
Last year, a number of law schools, including Yale, Harvard, and Stanford, stated they would no longer provide information to U.S. News, saying that the rankings formula was flawed and did not properly account for a wide range of career choices made by law school graduates, including pursuing further graduate studies, and penalized schools that dedicated their scholarship money to students from lower-income backgrounds.
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The magazine vowed to continue the rankings in spite of the mass exodus, and in January, the outlet announced it would overhaul its methodology to assuage the concerns raised by the deans of the law schools, but Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken told the Wall Street Journal at the time that it was too little, too late.
“Having a window into the operations and decision-making process at U.S. News in recent weeks has only cemented our decision to stop participating in the rankings,” Gerken said.