On Mar 16, 2018, 11:30 AM -0700, Law Dean wrote:
Dear Students,
I want to share with you information I just shared with faculty, staff, and members of our board.
On Tuesday morning, U.S. News released to law schools an embargoed confidential electronic version of the 2019 edition of its annual rankings to be published online on Tuesday, March 20. We immediately analyzed the data U.S. News used in calculating our ranking. To our horror, we learned that we had made an inadvertent data entry error in reporting our median LSAT for the class that began in Fall, 2017.
We immediately contacted U.S. News Tuesday morning to inform them of the error and requested that they update the rankings with the correct median LSAT. On Tuesday afternoon, anonymous source(s) leaked the embargoed rankings which were posted on several blogs, showing Pepperdine’s ranking as 59 (up from 72 last year).
Unfortunately, U.S. News has denied our request and instead issued a revised embargoed electronic version of the rankings that replaced the original. In the new version, Pepperdine is removed from the rankings. Instead, Pepperdine is listed as “unranked due to a data reporting error by the school.”
We contacted three law school rankings experts — Bill Henderson (Indiana), Andy Morriss (Texas A&M), and Mike Spivey (Spivey Consulting) — who all confirmed our analysis that Pepperdine would have ranked 62nd or 64th had U.S. News Rankings recomputed the rankings with our correct LSAT median.
I published a fuller description of this year’s rankings snafu on my blog this morning. In the coming days, we will be hosting a forum to discuss more fully the U.S. News rankings.
It is, of course, disappointing that we won’t have an “official” US News rank this year. But the reality is that we made great progress in the rankings this year, and should continue our ascent next year. Next year’s rankings will include jobs data for the Class of 2017, and we were up ten percentage points by yesterday’s reporting deadline (March 15). We are also very encouraged by a 40% surge in our applications for this coming fall.
The future is very bright at Pepperdine Law, and we are grateful to have you in our community.
Sincerely,
Dean Caron
Paul L. Caron
Duane and Kelly Roberts Dean
Professor of Law