Dean Caron has a post rounding up his coverage of the 2021 rankings and another post quoting an essay on understanding the changes made in the ranking methodology this year.
The impact of the new Percent of Students with Graduate Debt looks to be particularly interesting:
Interestingly but perhaps unsurprisingly, the T14 don’t fare so well in this new metric. The best performing of them in 2019 was Northwestern at 92nd nationally. The rest ranged as low as Harvard Law at 152nd. Given that they don’t need to compete as much on price as other schools, this does make sense. But if that doesn't change, perhaps we see schools who are more willing to spend have a shot at breaking into the T14?
This change makes it somewhat harder for ambitious law schools to quickly change their ranking. Historically one of the easiest ways of doing so was to target dramatic improvement in admissions metrics: LSAT, GPA, and acceptance rate. Schools could also goose their average expenditures. Now, however, those admissions metrics count for somewhat less, making it harder to achieve significant year-over-year changes. And increased spending is often accompanied by more dollars from students but now those dollars, if financed by student debt, will come back to haunt the school.
