Does anyone know how many total law applicants in that year?
So 72 listed here. If you assume that the other schools in the Top 14 got maybe one to three admits each, since they are not listed here, maybe another 20 to 25 got into the other schools. Let’s take an even number, say 100 admits. 84% admit rate would mean around 120 applicants.
Hold on there, @denydenzig . That’s a list of acceptances, not enrollments. The six schools you listed could have represented as few as 24 unique applicants. It was probably somewhat more than that, but nowhere near 72. Maybe about half that number.
Law school admissions are rolling, and there’s no early decision. I can almost guarantee that the four students who got into Yale (the most selective school) represent at least 12-20 of the other acceptances. The 21 students who were accepted at Chicago itself probably include almost all of the Harvard-Yale-Stanford-Columbia acceptees.
We have no idea how many UChicago applicants applied to law school. It could have been 300, with 250 accepted, but only 50 or so to upper-tier schools. That doesn’t seem too likely, but the six law schools listed give one pause. Where’s Michigan, a highly ranked school that traditionally takes a bunch of Chicago graduates? If they had posted a big number there, I suspect it would have been on the list. If they had posted a big number at any other schools arguably in the top 10, I suspect they would have been on the list.
By any analysis this is very impressive. No need to see the glass half empty.
@JHS: I interpreted the word “Acceptances” different from “Admits”. I interpreted “Acceptances” as “Number of students who have accepted offers for admission from these schools”. You may be right. But I think my number for applicants is probably pretty accurate, given that we do have number of students who apply each year from UChicago to Medical school and the number is between 120 to 160 students each year. I suspect Law school is similar.
Also my guess is that Chicago only listed Law schools which it considers its peer private institutions? This is a prestige signal, given that they have just recently become focused on pre-professional.
Highly unlikely that 300 applied. If you compare it to the Medical school data, around 10%-11% of the class applies to Med school every year from Chicago. Chicago is not yet a premed factory like Duke where 25% of the class applies to Medical school.
Why are we speculating on the number of Chicago applicants to law school? That data is available here:
http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/ (click drop-down menu entitled “More Data,” and then click “Top 240 Feeder Schools - PDF”)
For the past few years, the number of Chicago applicants to law school has been consistent - about 160 applicants a year.
Now, here’s some conservative speculation:
Harvard, Yale, and Stanford Law Schools have extremely good yield rates. If Chicago had 4 accepts at Yale, 6 at Stanford, and 8 at Harvard, that means the 4 accepted at Yale will probably go there, the ones who got into Harvard but either didn’t get in or didn’t apply to Yale (probably around 4-6 applicants) will go to H, and a couple that got into S but not H and Y would go to S. So, it looks like a total of around 10-15 Chicago applicants go off to H, Y, S a year.
We can safely assume that there are around 15 Chicago applicants a year who have the credentials to get into H,Y,S. (A bulk of those 15 apply to H,Y,S, and eventually will go to one of those schools. Maybe a few of those 15 with similar credentials will instead apply early to Chicago or Columbia or maybe NYU.)
So, of the 160 Chicago applicants, maybe 9-10% (15/160) have the credentials to get into the top 3 law schools. We could be more liberal and say maybe 20 applicants a year have top-3 law school credentials. Even if viewed very optimistically, tops 12-13% of Chicago’s law applicant pool has these credentials.
Now, let’s use Yale undergrad as a comparator.
At Yale, per the LSAC data, about 200 Yale undergrads apply to law school every year. Of those 200, 25-30 MATRICULATE at Yale Law School every year! Source: http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2013/11/07/yls-attracts-yale-undergrads/
Using the same extrapolation we used above, it’s safe to say if 25-30 matriculate at Yale Law alone (and probably another 10-15 at least go on to H, and another 5-10 go on to S), Yale has a pool of 50-60 law applicants who have the credentials to get into the top 3 law schools.
This means that, at Yale, maybe 25-30% of their undergrad applicant pool have the credentials to get into a top 3 law school!
So, at Chicago, 9-12% of the pool has the cred to go to H, Y, S. At Yale, a whopping 25-30% of the pool has that ability. That’s a fairly big gap.
(And yes, it is possible that Chicago’s top undergrad talent is doing other things - like applying to PhD programs or going to quant-focused jobs. But Yale undergrad’s PhD placement rate is actually quite similar to Chicago’s, and it has plenty of other students pursuing other impressive things.)
All this data tells me that, top to bottom, there’s still a gap between Chicago’s law placement and the big dogs.
(Of note, Chicago’s [scant] placement data compares quite well to, say, U of Penn’s, which is nothing to shame. Penn’s pre law data is available here: http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/20142015lawstats.php.
Of course, Penn is more transparent, and they list the MATRICULANTS at a given law school, but, through extrapolation, the numbers seem quite similar. Penn’s undergrad applicant pool to law school is almost 45% larger than Chicago’s [160 applicants from Chicago, about 230 from Penn], but Chicago seems to have, proportionally, about the same or even more anticipated numbers of matriculants to top schools. Specifically, Chicago and Penn send similar numbers to Yale, which is impressive for Chicago - only about 1.5% of Penn undergrad applicants have Yale Law credentials. At Chicago, that number looks closer to 3%.)
I didn’t mean to suggest that 300 kids applied to law school from Chicago, that was just an extreme illustration of facts that would be consistent with the material presented but tell a rather more negative story.
However, I would not assume that the number of law applicants is as low as the number of medicine applicants. Acknowledging that any major can be a pre-law or pre-med major – my future daughter-in-law is an MD Sociology major, and I know plenty of JD science majors – there are lots more students at Chicago in traditional pre-law majors like Economics, Public Policy, or Political Science, than there are in traditional pre-med majors.
Also, it’s worth noting that all these statistics include people who graduated several years ago but are applying to law school or medical school this year. The success rate of people applying to law or med school during their last year of college may be meaningfully lower than the published figure.
I wrote the above without seeing @Cue7 's excellent analysis, with which I substantially agree. I do however have a couple of comments.
- Not everybody chooses Yale or Harvard Law over Stanford, or Yale over Harvard. For example, me. People who are accepted into two or more of those three schools tend to be pretty confident about themselves, and not to care about what others think of their choices.
- It's a little bit shocking if Yale Law School enrolls 25-30 Yale graduates every year. That's not only ~15% of Yale's applicant pool, it's over 10% of the Law School class. That seems very high. And that implies even more are accepted, since (as I said) not everyone accepted enrolls, even at Yale Law School.
- Let's acknowledge that home grown candidates get some preferential treatment by law schools, and that Chicago's law school is also very high quality. The 21 Chicago students accepted there are probably very impressive, and stand comparison with the 25-30 Yale students enrolled at Yale.
Yale has historically had the Number 1 law school in the country, and it traditionally has been seen as the Number 1 school for preparing undergraduates for pre-law. As such, for anyone who aspires to go to YLS, attending Yale as an undergrad is an attractive option. In other words, there likely is selection bias in those figures.
If you want to know which college gives you the best chance of getting into Yale Law School, the answer is it’s the college at Oxford where you did your Rhodes, or the Cambridge college where you did your Gates. In my generation, at least, most of the Yale undergraduates I knew who went to Yale Law School stopped at Oxford on the way.
Yale Law School wants “different” types of students. They like more mature folks or those with other advanced degrees or other experiences. All Law schools clearly give some preferences to their undergraduates. Getting into any of the top 6 law schools listed in the report is a ticket to a big time job at a leading firm, if so desired. But Yale tends to attract students who take a different path such as Judiciary, politics or academia. relatively little big law.
The hard numbers at Yale further back up my previous assertion.
See p. 168 of this pdf: http://bulletin.printer.yale.edu/pdffiles/law.pdf
Of the 614 JD candidates, 69 (69!) went to Yale College. That means that almost 12% of Yale Law’s class went to ONE college (Yale undergrad).
As the JD is a three year program, this means that, roughly on average, Yale undergrad sends about 25 students a year to Yale Law (69/3 = 23).
That’s an absurdly high number, and eclipses the “feeder college” phenomenon found at most other top law schools. From what I’ve heard, about 6-7% of Penn Law’s class hails from Penn undergrad, and similar percentages can be found at Chicago, UVA, Michigan, etc.
(Addendum: here are UVA Law’s numbers, for example: https://content.law.virginia.edu/admissions/class-2019-profile - as seen there, 22 of 296 first year law students went to UVA undergrad - or about 7%. If UVA practiced Yale’s level of incest, 35 UVA college alums should be in the UVA Law class.)
I didn’t question the accuracy of your numbers. I was expressing some shock at the extent of the nepotism. (I wouldn’t call it “incest.”)
Now, it may be the case that Yale College grads are somewhat more willing to go to law school at Yale than graduates from elsewhere, New Haven not being much of a draw (unless, perhaps, you are coming from Bridgeport). So maybe they accept a more moderate percentage of Yale graduates, but get a higher yield from them. However, having turned down Yale Law School in part because I wanted to see what some place that wasn’t New Haven was like, my instinct tells me the opposite. In any event, there aren’t that many people who turn Yale down; it can’t make a big difference.
Agreed - nepotism is the word I should have used!
And yes the factors you mention are marginal - Yale Law is a fairly big draw from anywhere, and their yield numbers bear this out.
Interesting move by Harvard on the LSAT