St. Thomas School law school loses national ranking after reporting errors in employment rates of its graduates
Star Tribune
March 29, 2012
For a few shining moments, the University of St. Thomas School of Law ranked 16 spots higher in the U.S. News and World Report than it had last year, a significant leap.
Today, it has no ranking at all.
After St. Thomas announced that it had reported an incorrect percentage of its 2010 graduates who had jobs at graduation, the magazine stripped the school of its No. 119 spot on its "Best Law Schools" list, banishing it to the category of "unranked."
Employment statistics for new lawyers are an increasingly scrutinized measure of a law school's quality. Class-action lawsuits have been filed against more than a dozen law schools for intentionally inflating data to recruit students and land a higher perch on U.S. News' influential list of "Best Law Schools."
St. Thomas has stressed that its error was an honest mistake, reported immediately after it was spotted in an advance copy of the rankings published this month.
In an open letter to the magazine, Dean Thomas Mengler slammed the decision to unrank the school, saying that it will "create a disincentive for law schools to promptly report mistaken or erroneous data."