Following up on my previous post, 2024 U.S. News College Rankings Released With Biggest Methodology Changes In History, Including First-Ever Measure Of Faculty Research: 

In the law school rankings released in May, U.S. News made the most significant changes in the methodology in the history of the rankings. Similarly, in the college rankings released in September, U.S. News again made the most significant changes in the methodology in the history of the rankings, including (1) graduate debt, (3) graduate salaries, and (3) faculty research:

Borrower debt (5%; up from 3%) assesses each school's typical average accumulated federal loan debt among borrowers only. Graduates who covered their expenses without borrowing did not help or hurt schools. New this edition, the data was sourced from College Scorecard instead of the U.S. News survey for all schools, and was of median debt instead of mean debt. The calculation averaged 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 data. …

2. College grads earning more than a high school graduate (5%, new) assessed the proportion of a school's federal loan recipients who in 2019-2020—four years since completing their undergraduate degrees—were earning more than a typical high school graduate salary, as determined by and reported in the College Scorecard. The website documented that the median wage of workers ages 25-34 that self-identify as high school graduates was $32,000 in 2021 dollars. This means the vast majority of jobs utilizing a college degree, even including those not chosen for being in high-paying fields, exceed this threshold. Schools were assigned a perfect score if at least 90% of graduates achieved this threshold, and the remaining schools were assessed by how close they were to 90%. The data only pertained to employed college graduates; meaning nongraduates, or graduates who four years later were in graduate school, working part-time or simply not in the workforce did not help or hurt any school. …

3. Faculty research (National Universities only):

To be grouped in the National Universities ranking, an institution must be classified in the Carnegie Classifications as awarding doctorate-level degrees and conducting at least "moderate research." In alignment with these schools' missions, U.S. News introduced four new faculty research ranking factors based on bibliometric data, such as publications and citations, in partnership with Elsevier. They each reflect a five-year window from 2018-2022 as well as the strength and impact of the faculty instead of the scale of the university.

• Citations per publication (1.25%) is total citations divided by total publications. This is the average number of citations a university's publications receive. The metrics are extracted from SciVal based on Elsevier’s Scopus® Data.
• Field weighted citation impact (1.25%) is citation impact per paper, normalized for each field. The metrics are extracted from SciVal based on Elsevier’s Scopus® Data.
• The share of publications cited in the top 5% of the most cited journals (1%). The metrics are extracted from SciVal based on Elsevier’s Scopus® Data.
• The share of publications cited in the top 25% of the most cited journals (0.5%). The metrics are extracted from SciVal based on Elsevier’s Scopus® Data.

Universities with fewer than 5,000 total publications over five years were discounted on a sliding scale to reduce outliers based on small cohort sizes, and to require a minimum quantity of research to score well on the factor. Each indicator is calculated at the school level. 

For more information on each of these three changes in the new college rankings methodology, see U.S. News, A More Detailed Look at the Ranking Factors. In a recent blog post, Derek Muller (Iowa; Google Scholar) calls these three metrics "on the whole, good … additions to the collegiate rankings" and discusses the likelihood of U.S. News adopting them in the law school rankings to be released in Spring 2024:

1. Graduate debt.

The College Scorecard is publicly available. It offers this debt data for USNWR to use. Will USNWR incorporate it in next year’s rankings? It remains a distinct possibility, as the note above suggests. …

2. Graduate salaries.     

This is something like the flip side of the debt question, which I’ve also written about, again from publicly available data. And it would solve some of the problems that USNWR has in conflating a lot of job categories into one, or weighting them by some arbitrary percentages. …

3. Faculty research.

USNWR’s willingness to engage with scholarship for national universities suggests it might consider doing the same for law schools. …