Law Schools

Texas Tech Law School Admits U.S. News Ranking Reporting Error... Not That Anyone Cares About U.S. News Anymore

Oopsie!

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Dear Law School Community,

I write to inform you, in full transparency, that the Law School has inadvertently submitted incorrect data to US News for their ranking of US Law Schools. The error was discovered this year and disclosed to US News earlier today with our new report for 2023.

The misreport involved an undercount of our average graduate debt numbers.

The error was originated three years ago by the main campus Office for Student Financial Aid and Scholarships, which collects this data for the Law School. The Law School relies reasonably and in good faith on our campus partners in Financial Aid to collect accurate data for us for our rankings purposes. We were very surprised and disappointed to learn that we received inaccurate data from this office under its prior leadership.

The main campus error involved the exclusion of a category of loans and was present in both the average total debt numbers and the supporting backup data (graduate R-numbers and individual debt amounts) supplied to the Law School. Because the main campus error was in both the total debt numbers and the backup data, our internal review of the data did not detect it. Additionally, a sharp upswing of almost $20,000 in the true debt number for the first year of the misreport made the undercount much harder to discern.

As Dean, I take full responsibility for the Law School’s failure to uncover the Office of Student Financial Aid’s reporting errors and ensure a correction before the Law School in turn reported incorrect data to US News. In particular, I should have implemented a more extensive and systematic set of review procedures for this area, which would have uncovered the error, and placed less reliance on the Office of Student Financial Aid’s review process and reports.

The misreport on this metric was substantial. The corrected debt numbers are the following: For 2019, the correct average debt number was $98,695, and the incorrect reported number was $62,583. For 2020, the correct average debt number was $86,023, and the incorrect reported number was $56,898. For 2021, last year, the correct average debt number was $85,956, and the incorrect reported number was $60,088. While these numbers were misreported to US News, they were never directly marketed to applicants by the Law School. We also remain a lower debt law school, and our corrected debt number for 2021 is still well below the national average for debt and a lower number than all but one of the other law schools in this state reporting average debt to US News.

Sponsored

Notably, the impact of this misreport was not substantial on our overall US News ranking.

This measure—average debt—was only 3% of the overall US News assessment for the last two ranking years and was not used at all for the rankings in the first year of our misreport. Had we found this mistake earlier, and reported accurate data for the last two years, we believe our ranking would have been just six to seven spots lower at most and could even have stayed the same—based on an analysis done for us by the Spivey Consulting Group. Additionally, US News has already announced that they will not be using this debt metric at all in the next set of rankings which they will release in March of 2023.

We deeply regret this inadvertent reporting mistake, and I offer my personal apology as Dean. The Dean’s Office will institute a comprehensive reform of all our reporting procedures and establish new levels of review and additional safeguards against error. We will continue to work with the new leadership in Financial Aid to ensure accurate reporting of debt numbers, and we are thankful to them for their work this year in uncovering this error. We will also continue to work to reduce graduate debt.

I will provide more information and updates as they become available.

Sincerely,

Sponsored

Jack Wade Nowlin
Dean and W. Frank Newton Professor of Law
Texas Tech University School of Law

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