<p>Yale Law is arguably the most prestigious professional program on the planet and one whose alumni have disproportionate control over the American justice system and the rarefied world of legal academia.</p>
<p>It turns out that its admission process is about as prestige-obsessed as a selective process which is supposed to be primarily based on objective credentials can get.</p>
<p>HLS operates a more meritocratic and egalitarian business… a finishing school for HY UGs, like YLS, but at least most everyone has a chance to be admitted to HLS. What’s more, YLS practices a unique admissions process, making admission to YLS a different accomplishment from admission to every other law school.</p>
<p>“the most prestigious professional program on the planet…”</p>
<p>I don’t find this list too surprising. The only things that I noticed was that Swarthmore, Wesleyan and Pomona did better than I would have guessed, given their size.</p>
<p>Is the admission committee “prestige obsessed”? Maybe. However, there is a simpler explanation that does not require mind-reading. Students at HYPS etc. have some of the highest average LSAT scores. This is not surprising, since they were admitted to college with some of the highest average SAT scores. LSAT scores count for a lot in law school admissions. </p>
<p>If anyone is prestige-obsessed, perhaps it is the applicants. Students at HYPS etc. may be choosing to apply in disproportionate numbers to the most prestigious law schools, for the same reasons they chose to apply to the most prestigious colleges. Ability to pay may be a factor as well.</p>
<p>Williams sent 4. I’m not sure that is statistically different from the 6 sent by Pomona or the 7 sent by Wesleyan or Amherst.</p>
<p>I think RML is right, percentage of applicants accepted out of number of applicants who applied from a school would be more meaningful than raw numbers.</p>
<p>“And why would you adjust the schools by size? Shouldn’t you be adjusting the schools by the number of their applicants?”</p>
<p>Data on the number of applicants to YLS from each school are hard to come by. However, we can adjust schools by the total number of law school applicants form each school.</p>
<p>UG; # at YLS; # of total LS applicants for Fall 2010; index number adjusted for total LS applicants (not only at YLS)
Yale; 89; 373; 0.238605898
Harvard; 80; 410; 0.195121951
Princeton; 35; 261; 0.134099617
Stanford; 37; 276; 0.134057971
Dartmouth; 18; 235; 0.076595745
Brown; 22; 292; 0.075342466
Amherst; 7; 111; 0.063063063
Wesleyan; 7; 117; 0.05982906
UChicago; 16; 268; 0.059701493
Columbia; 17; 300; 0.056666667
Duke; 18; 368; 0.048913043
Penn; 14; 493; 0.028397566
Northwestern; 7; 383; 0.018276762
Cornell; 11; 629; 0.017488076
UC Berkeley; 16; 962; 0.016632017
UMichigan; 8; 829; 0.009650181
UNC-Chapel Hill; 6; 669; 0.00896861</p>
<p>Top public schools such as Berkeley does really well compared to Cornell.</p>
<p>Also, the level of interest in law school at top public UG is comparable to that at top private UG:</p>
<p>UG; # of total LS applicants for Fall 2010; # of students in each class; percent of LS applicants/class size
Brown; 292; 1579; 0.184927169
Stanford; 276; 1720; 0.160511777
UC Berkeley; 962; 6383; 0.150724638
UNC-Chapel Hill; 669; 4645; 0.144033586
UMichigan; 829; 6552; 0.126526252</p>
<p>Exactly. And since the LSAT is 50%+ of admission to law school…Doh!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not surprising since the Cal gives less weight to the SAT than the other top 20 colleges. And since great test-taking ability is required for admission to YLS…Moreover, I wouldn’t be surprised if Yale loses a few west-coasters to Stanford. (It’s a geographical thing…)</p>
<p>IvyPBear, I would take your analysis a step further and break it down according to the percentage accepted from each university. </p>
<p>Below are the admissions statistics into Yale Law school from several universities:
Emory University: 27 applied, 2 admitted (7% acceptance rate)
Georgetown University: 49 applied, 1 admitted (2% acceptance rate)
Princeton University: 77 applied, 15 admitted (20% acceptance rate)
University of Michigan: 50 applied, 2 admitted (4% acceptance rate)</p>
<p>Even that would not necessarily be entirely telling since:</p>
<ol>
<li>it would not take into account the average strength or ethnic makeup of each university’s applicant pool to Yale</li>
<li>although Yale is excellent, so are Harvard and Stanford Law Schools, as well as any of the top 10 or 15 Law schools in the US</li>
</ol>
<p>At any rate, those sorts of exercises often miss the mark because there is not sufficient data availlable to give them the required credibility.</p>
<p>Good thing you ran that out to so many decimal places! Wouldn’t it have made more sense just to keep it at two decimal places so we could see the rate easily?</p>
<p>And dividing the # of students at YLS by the total # of law school applicants from that college completely misses the mark, because the proportion of law school applicants that applies to YLS differs from school to school. It’s an analytical flaw that I would think a quant would pick up on immediately.</p>
<p>Consider Yale and Wesleyan for a moment:
Yale; 89 going to YLS; 373 total law school applicants; 23% of its total law applicants go to YLS
Wesleyan; 7 going to YLS; 117 total law school applicants; 6% of its total law applicants go to YLS</p>
<p>You would conclude that Yale is superior because 23% > 6%.</p>
<p>However, for all you know, all 373 Yale UG’s applied to YLS and only 23% got in;
whereas only 7 Wesleyan UG’s applied to YLS and all 7 (100%) got in.</p>
<p>It is faulty and flawed logic to look at the data any other way, because the only relevant correction is the % who get into a school based to those students who desired to attend that school in the first place. Who cares about students who didn’t want to go to YLS in this example? If, in this hypothetical, all 7 Wesleyan UG’s who were interested in YLS applied and got in (100% acceptance rate), it is irrelevant whether they were the only law applicants in the class or whether they had 100 classmates who sought out and got into other law schools.</p>
<p>^It doesn’t take a MMSS alum like Pizzagirl to recongize the obvious flaw yet so many on CC just love pushing similar kind of faulty “analysis” over and over on CC. ;)</p>
<p>IvyPBear wrote: “Data on the number of applicants to YLS from each school are hard to come by. However, we can adjust schools by the total number of law school applicants form each school.”</p>
<p>Pizzagirl,</p>
<p>Thanks for pointing out a weakness of the analysis that I conceded before even presenting my analysis. I’m just trying to make it more precise by adjusting for the # of LS applicants than just adjusting for the size of the UGs. If you have the time to write such a long response pointing out a weakness that I think most people realize simply by looking at what I wrote, why don’t you go find specific data on the number of applicants to YLS from each UG.</p>
<p>Sam Lee,</p>
<p>It’s not a faulty analysis. It’s imprecise, but I would like to see Pizzagirl digging up specific data on the number of applicants to YLS from each UG and doing a more precise analysis.</p>
<p>I’d guess the level of interest in YLS is not all that different across peer schools.
So yes, “imprecise” is probably a more precise (and fair) characterization than “faulty and flawed”.</p>
<p>The list in #10 roughly mirrors the mean LSAT ranking, which roughly mirrors the mean SAT ranking. HYPSM at the top, top publics lower down, other T20 private universities and LACs in between. Not very surprising.</p>
<p>There are so many more acceptances to Yale law school from Yale and Harvard than from Princeton and Stanford. If this is typical of a year it looks bad. I can see why Yale might favor its own undergraduates but it does look like they give a nudge to a Harvard undergraduate just because they came from Harvard.</p>
<p>(I can’t think of any argument to be made that in general a Harvard undergraduate is typically more qualified that an undergraduate from Princeton or Stanford.)</p>
<p>^ Harvard’s mean LSAT scores are a couple points higher than Stanford’s, just as Harvard’s (and Yale’s) 75th percentile M+CR SAT scores are about 50 points higher than Stanford’s. Add to that the fact that Stanford has its own excellent law school. Plus, Stanford students go to school (and form ties) a continent away from YLS. For all these reasons, I don’t find it surprising that Stanford sends fewer students to YLS.</p>