Fordham’s law school slipped three spots to number 30 in the latest annual survey by U.S. News & World Report. Fordham Law is currently tied with law schools at the University of Alabama, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Washington and Washington and Lee University.
Fordham Law’s part-time program also came in at number three out of 87 similar part-time programs at other schools, behind only Georgetown and George Washington University.
The change was partially due to a new ranking methodology used by U.S. News & World Report. The rankings now factor in median LSAT scores, grade point averages and acceptance rates from all students at the school; previously, the rankings only measured data from full-time students.
“This change improves the methodology, because U.S. News is now comparing each law school’s entering class against every other’s based on the entire student body, which produces the most complete comparisons,” according to the magazine’s Web site.
In addition, Bob Morse, director of data research for U.S. News, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal law blog they were hoping to improve the accuracy by closing a loophole in the system.
“In the past, we’d just used full-time [enrollment],” Morse said in the interview. “But some schools we think were gaming the system. There were some part-time programs that were set up just for U.S. News reporting purposes.”
A press release from the Fordham law school says that while the methodology has been changed, the school is still performing on par with past years.
“While the average admissions numbers tend to be lower for evening students than for day students, this does not reflect any difference in academic strength,” the press release said. “Rather, it reflects the nature of evening school programs, which have as their mainstay older students who work while in law school. For Fordham Law, the underlying data that U.S. News analyzes was even stronger this year than last, and the school’s overall ranking this year is quite close to what it was under the old ranking system.”
Fordham Law School also placed highly in the specialty areas of Dispute Resolution (No. 10), Clinical Training (No. 12) and Intellectual Property (No. 18).
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