Consumer Law & Policy Blog, The US News Rankings, Employment Statistics, and Consumer Protection, by Jeff Sovern (St. John’s):

In ranking law schools, US News takes into account the percentage of students who are employed at graduation and nine months after graduation. This has led to reports that are interesting, to say the least.  …  These reports may well be true. The numbers can be manipulated. …

[H]ere comes the consumer protection angle: US News should limit the jobs it counts in two ways: first, it should exclude jobs at the law school itself (either directly or indirectly to prevent imaginative ways around that restriction), and second, it should limit the jobs that count to those for which a JD is required or desirable.  That way, the rankings will reflect more accurately the value the law school adds to students’ employment prospects as of graduation and nine months afterwards and eliminate an avenue for manipulating the figures.  To be sure, some people graduate from a law school and are perfectly happy with a non-law job, but probably few go into law school with that expectation, and perhaps the numbers of such students are similar across law schools (if that is a real issue, perhaps US News could include a separate list of those numbers, as it does for diversity, for example, or include them in the rankings with a lower weighting).