KU Law School earns top-4 Best Value ranking
LAWRENCE – The University of Kansas School of Law is the No. 4 Best Value Law School in the country, according to National Jurist magazine.
The ranking highlights affordable law schools whose graduates perform well on the bar exam and have success finding law-related jobs. National Jurist ranked the top 20 schools and assigned a letter grade to 42 other honorees.
“These rankings reflect our outcomes-based approach to serving our students,” said Stephen Mazza, dean of the KU School of Law. “We support our students during law school with scholarships and free bar exam preparation, as well as summer stipends that allow them to craft a record that makes our students attractive job candidates. That support translates into outstanding post-graduation employment results.”
The rankings were determined by assigning grades to each school for cost, employment results and bar passage. A final GPA was then calculated with cost accounting for 55% of the final GPA, employment accounting for 30% and bar passage accounting for 15%. This was the first time that grades were assigned for each category in order to determine an overall GPA. In the past, each school was simply assigned an overall score.
With this change in methodology, cost is now given the most weight in the Best Value rankings. National Jurist examined financial variables such as tuition, cost of living and average indebtedness of graduates. KU Law is currently the best priced law school among the top 50 law schools ranked by U.S. News & World Report.
National Jurist considers employment success in their calculation for Best Value rankings. Nearly 94% of KU Law graduates in the Class of 2022 found full-time, long-term legal employment. KU Law ranks ninth among ABA-accredited law schools nationwide in the category sometimes referred to as “best jobs” – defined as full-time, long-term positions that require passing a bar exam or where a law degree offers an advantage.
Overall employment for the 2022 class was 97.9%. This is the ninth consecutive year that KU Law employment has exceeded 90%, including graduates who enrolled in full-time graduate school after completing their Juris Doctor degree.
The magazine’s Best Value methodology also looks at law schools’ bar exam passage rates for first-time test takers and those who passed within two years of graduation, giving more weight to the latter metric. Nearly 96% of KU Law students who graduated in 2020 passed the bar exam within two years of graduation. KU Law’s Free Bar Prep Program offers all students a post-graduation Themis Bar Review course to enhance their ability to succeed on the bar examination.
Read a complete list of Best Value honorees and review the ranking methodology.