<p>1) U.S. News does not provide evaluators with any information about the schools to be evaluated: evaluators receive a list of about 180 school names, and thats all. This survey provided evaluators with current faculty rosters for all the schools being evaluated. As evaluators completed the evaluation, they did so with the faculty roster right in front of them. This might explain why schools like NYU and Michigan essentially trade places in the EQR survey as compared to U.S. News: NYU has strengthened its faculty significantly over the last decade, while Michigans overall faculty strength (while still quite considerable) has eroded from its previous lofty heights. But because for many decades Michigan was one of the top five law schools, while NYU was not, evaluators presented only with school names rank Michigan more highly than NYU; evaluators presented with current faculty lists reverse that evaluation.</p>
<p>(2) U.S. News sends out their surveys to four faculty at every school in the country: the Dean, the Associate Dean, the chair of the hiring committee, and the most recently tenured faculty member. (Based on our experience at Texas, it appears that instead of sending the survey to the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, usually a faculty member, U.S. News often sends the survey to a non-faculty Associate Dean like the Dean of Admissions!) We have no idea who among these recipients actually completes these surveys, and what their competence is to do so. By contrast, this survey was completed exclusively by leading scholars, junior and senior, in a diverse range of academic specialties. The list of evaluators appears below, and its distinction and credibility speaks for itself.</p>
<p>(3) U.S. News asks not only about the reputation of the faculty, but for the reputation of the school, mentioning faculty, programs, students, and alumni as possibly pertinent considerations. This survey is exclusively about faculty quality. It is striking that most of the law faculties underrated by U.S. News are part of institutions that fare relatively poorly in the well-known U.S. News rankings of colleges, rankings which do much, one suspects, to shape the reputation associated with a schools name. (The U.S. News rankings of colleges, needless to say, bear little relation to faculty quality either, as a comparison with the National Research Council reports quickly demonstrates.) Yet when evaluators confront actual faculty lists--as opposed to merely school names--they assess these schools rather differently.</p>