Class of 2013 Profiles: Who Gets In

Graduate School Law School
1

<p>Law schools are beginning to release the statistics for their newest 1L classes (entering 2010). You can find the information on the websites of the respective schools. Here are some snippets:</p>

<p>Harvard Law:
7610 applications, 833 admission offers, 561 enrolled
GPA 75/25 - 3.96/3.78
LSAT 75/25 - 176/171
12% hold advanced degrees
72% at least one year out of college
52% 2+ years out of college</p>

<p>Columbia Law:
9012 applications, 404 enrolled
GPA 75/25 - 3.82/3.61
LSAT 75/25 - 175/170
11% hold advanced degrees
33% began law school directly from college</p>

<p>NYU Law:
476 enrolled
GPA 75/25 - 3.9/3.6
LSAT 75/25 - 175/169
9% hold advanced degrees
28% enrolled directly after college
10% out of college 5 or more years</p>

<p>Penn Law:
6022 applications, 252 enrolled
GPA 75/25 - 3.90/3.56
LSAT 75/25 - 171/166
12% hold advanced degrees
29% come straight from college</p>

<p>Georgetown Law:
12404 applications, 470 enrolled full time
GPA 75/25 - 3.82/3.42
LSAT 75/25 - 172/168</p>

<p>Northwestern Law:
(accelerated JD class profile)
135 applications, 46 admitted, 31 enrolled
Median GPA - 3.5
Median GMAT - 720
Median LSAT - 170
45% hold advanced degrees
Median years of work experience - 5</p>

2

<p>based on TLS discussion site- Cornell median stats are 3.7/168 for class of 2013. The law school website is still showing stats from class of 2009 (graduating 2012) which were 3.63/167.</p>

<p>as a very interested observer over the past 2 years or so, it seemed like many schools may have bumped up their medians this year. As I followed trends at Cornell a bit more closely than the other T-14 schools, it was apparent that the Cornell gpa/lsat medians increased this year.</p>

3

<p>NYU also had an LSAT median bump from 171 to 172</p>

4

<p>Berkeley Law:</p>

<p>Profile of the Class of 2013
Number of Applicants: 8,313
Number in Class: 287
Median LSAT: 167 (170 = 75th percentile, 163 = 25th percentile)
Median GPA: 3.80 (3.89 = 75th percentile, 3.64 = 25th percentile)</p>

<p>• Mean age: 25
• 7% are age 30-38
• 59% women
• 54% people of color
• 27 different birthplace countries</p>

<p>Academics
113 undergraduate schools represented. Most predominant are UC Berkeley, UCLA, Stanford, Harvard, UCSD, USC, Brown, Yale</p>

<p>77 undergraduate majors. Most predominant are political science, history, English, economics, international relations, philosophy, sociology</p>

<p>15% have a graduate degree (35 M.A.; 9 Ph.D.) Ph.D.s or candidacies are in: Biomedical Engineering, Mathematics, Philosophy, Jurisprudence & Social Policy, Chemistry, Neurobiology, Electrical & Computer Engineering, History, Anthropology</p>

<p>Before Law School - A Sample of Past Positions Held and Passions Pursued
From the Financial World: Securities and financial analysts and economic consultants</p>

<p>From Journalism: News reporters and editors of mainstream and campus papers, magazines, blogs, web sites, and journals</p>

<p>From Science and Technology: Software engineers, scientists, and biomedical researchers who hold 7 patents among them</p>

<p>From the Art World: Aspiring thespians, artists, photographers, dancers, vocalists, and musicians, including an opera singer, a member of a gamelan orchestra, 3 professional ballet dancers (one a principal with the San Francisco Ballet), members of at least 3 different touring and recorded bands, 3 professional actors, a radio commercial voice-over performer, a lead performer from the Broadway production of “Stomp”, a concert pianist, a fire performance artist, and a member of the LA Lakers dance team</p>

5

<p>I’m absolutely shocked Berkeley maintains its status as a top law school considering its GPA and LSAT statistics.</p>

6

<p>Cornell updated its website.<br>
The median info from TLS was correct: 3.7/168
applications: 6,270 Enrolled: 205
40% were admitted directly from UG institutions</p>

<p>FH- Berkeley always seemed to have quirky admission policys. It seems to be more than just LSAT/GPA. One’s backround, life experience and even state residency etc. may play a bigger role in admission than at other Top schools. I don’t think that’s something to be shocked about–</p>

<p>In fact some people might find it refreshing that a school looks beyond just LSAT and GPA.</p>

7

<p>I’m well aware that Berkeley has been doing this for years. And I’ve been shocked about their status as a top law school for a while now.</p>

<p>Anyway, from what I know, firms treat the school accordingly. It ranks at the bottom of the T14 in most recruiting lists, sometimes even lower.</p>

8

<p>“Berkeley always seemed to have quirky admission policys.”</p>

<p>It’s not a good enough school to pull off this sort of masochistic nonsense.</p>

<p>FFS, look at that gender ratio, that shameless social engineering.</p>

9

<p>Awesome link:
[Do</a> You Love to Argue? Are You a ‘Law Zombie’? Yale Law School Is Not Impressed - News - ABA Journal](<a href=“http://www.abajournal.com/weekly/article/do_you_love_to_argue_are_you_a_law_zombie_yale_law_school_is_not_impressed]Do”>http://www.abajournal.com/weekly/article/do_you_love_to_argue_are_you_a_law_zombie_yale_law_school_is_not_impressed)</p>

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10

<p>Let’s compare Berkeley’s stats to Penn’s. (They’re tied in the USNWR rankings this year.)</p>

<p>Penn’s 75th percentile LSAT score (171) is one point higher than Berkeley’s (170); Penn’s 75th percentile GPA is virtually identical to Berkeley’s (3.9 vs. 3.89).</p>

<p>At the 25th percentile, Penn has a 3 point edge in LSAT (166 vs. 163), and Berkeley has the edge in GPA (3.64 vs. 3.56).</p>

<p>So, Berkeley emphasizes GPA more than LSAT, particularly in the lower reaches of its class. Scandalous!</p>

<p>UVA’s LSAT scores are the same as Penn’s at the 75th and 25th percentile levels (171, and 166); for GPA, it’s 3.92 (75th percentile), and 3.51 (25th).</p>

11

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<p>There is a huge difference between a 3-point LSAT score gap and a .08 GPA gap. Don’t even try to pretend like Berkeley’s emphasis on GPA makes up for it.</p>

<p>Again, I’m not complaining. Students who enroll there pay the price when it comes to recruiting. And, financially speaking, the degree is no longer the steal it used to be–even when in-state.</p>

12

<p>Flowerhead,</p>

<p>I try to be better clear about what I know, and what I don’t know. </p>

<p>I do know is that the difference between a 166 and a 163 on the LSAT is the equivalent in percentiles of 93.4 versus 88.5.</p>

<p>I don’t know (and never pretended to know) the difference on GPA percentile among the pool of applicants that is represented by 3.64 and a 3.56. I’m sure that there is a difference. But I don’t know whether it’s larger or smaller than the 4.9 point difference in percentiles represented 166 vs. 163.</p>

<p>Do you have any basis for your assertion that a difference of 4.9 percentiles on LSAT scores is huge compared to a .08 GPA gap? Or is this something you’re pretending to know?</p>

13

<p>Now you’re just pleading ignorance for the sake of defending your alma mater.</p>

14

<p>The difference as treated by USNWR is far more relevant than a percentile analysis. And USNWR rewards +3 LSAT points significantly more than they do +0.08 UGPA. In this economy, Boalt’s “quirky” admissions policy–as well as its inane HH/H/P/F system–is run to the detriment of its students.</p>

15

<p>I have no particular axe to grind regarding my law school alma mater. I graduated long enough ago that Berkeley’s current position in the rankings promulgated by a moribund magazine says little about the quality of the education I received, and has negligible influence on my job prospects at this point in my career. It also happens that when I was admitted to Berkeley, they were weighing LSAT scores about twice as heavily as GPA.</p>

<p>Berkeley’s admissions policies may strike some of you as “quirky,” but public law schools in California were faced with a dilemma following the enactment of Proposition 187, which forbade their admissions committees to assign the sort of weight to racial diversity that was permitted by the U.S. Supreme Court under the Bakke decision. The first year after Proposition 187 was enacted, the first year class at Berkeley had a single African American student (who had deferred admission from the year before); UCLA’s first year class had no African American students. California public laws had a choice of either adjusting the relative weight they placed on LSAT and GPA, or having a student bodies that looked kind of like restrictive country clubs from the 1950s. </p>

<p>They may not have made the choice some of you would have made. I think it was a wise one. I suspect that an “all white” reputation would have made California’s public law schools less desirable to most white applicants, as well, and all of these schools would have tumbled in the rankings. (Scalia suggested in oral arguments in the Michigan affirmative action cases that there was nothing “requiring” Michigan to have an elite public law school, and they were perfectly free to give up that status in exchange for diversity, if they so chose.)</p>

<p>One of the reasons I think Berkeley made a reasonable decision is that an LSAT of 163 doesn’t strike me as shockingly low. It was the median score achieved by law school applicants with undergraduate degrees from Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Penn, and MIT a couple of years back. It seems to me that a law school with a 25th percentile LSAT score that matches the undergraduate median for that collection of schools isn’t going to have to water down its curriculum unduly for its students.</p>

16

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<p>Of course, this is not anyone’s concern. The issue is that the low LSAT scores, including what is easily the lowest 25th percentile score of any T14, hurts their ranking and their reputation with employers. Especially since, as was mentioned, they have a grading system that makes distinguishing between students difficult.</p>

17

<p>So Berkeley’s USN&WR ranking should be higher than it is today (tied for 7th with Penn),? I don’t ever recall it being higher than tied for 6th. </p>

<p>Do you have any data pointing to its relative decline in employer reputation, or are we dealing with hunches?</p>

18

<p>I actually don’t think Boalt’s taken a reputation hit with employers quite yet (those things take some time). Rather, employers are simply unwilling to deal with Boalt’s grading system. Boalt does not report class rank, and the HH/H/P/F grading system (for which no GPA is calculated) obfuscates students’ class standing further still. The very top of the class still stands out, but Boalt’s efforts to shield the bottom half of the class now works against most of those in the top half. When students themselves don’t know whether they are in the top 30% or below median, don’t expect employers to know (or to put in the effort to find out).</p>

<p>In better times when below median students were landing Biglaw jobs out of Boalt, this wasn’t an issue. But since the economic meltdown, employers are demanding higher grades. And if Boalt won’t tell them who has higher grades, they’ll just go to UVA or Michigan. Indeed, here’s a Boalt 2L describing this year’s OCIP:</p>

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<p>Boalt’s Office of Career Services reported about ~30% of 2Ls landed a BigLaw summer associateship in 2009. Michigan and Virginia’s (and Penn’s and Duke’s and Northwestern’s) numbers are considerably better.</p>

<p>Even UChicago–a higher ranked school–is being punished for its unorthodox grading. Compared to its peer schools–Columbia and NYU–UChicago’s OCI this year was very disappointing. In this economy, the only schools who can afford to not rank students are Yale, Stanford, and maybe Harvard.</p>

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<p>1) Chicago’s performance was due to factors other than their grading system.
2) The grading system is actually lauded by firms, as it provides a highly precise method of comparison between students.</p>

20

<p>Berkeley’s grading policies haven’t changed in more than three decades.</p>

<p>If there was a larger than typical downturn in Berkeley’s hiring rates, it may have had more to do with California’s 12.4% unemployment rate than a latent reaction to a long-standing grading system.</p>