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Thanks for the links. I read through all the replies as well, and there is certainly compelling evidence to suggest that in the past couple of years, Penn has greatly outperformed NYU. But trying to interpret what exactly that entails without knowing all the factors at play for the discrepancies is nigh impossible. Are we looking at sustainable (at least semi) long-term changes or anomalies based on year-to-year idiosyncrasies? I need me some clairvoyance >.>

The issue is we cannot compare anything outside of NLJ and federal clerkship placement because the schools do not report the OCI attempt/success rate. Honestly, I think that employment outcomes are the most important indicator for big law chances, as it includes all of the real students that actually received big law. Here, Penn has consistently outperformed NYU since 2005 in NLJ firm. Does NYU swing PI? Sure, but it cannot be fairly taken into account because we will never know if the people who received PI could have gotten big law. Thus, if a student gets into both, it makes sense to go to NYU if you want PI and Penn if you want big law.

Also, NYU feeds into V10 firms in a way that Penn does not, however, Penn provides you with a much higher chance of getting a V100 firm to begin with. So if you go to NYU and get a V10 firm congrats, but I imagine a lot of people around median and below who struck out would have killed to have any big law firm (Vault or NLJ).

Aberzombie1892 wrote:The issue is we cannot compare anything outside of NLJ and federal clerkship placement because the schools do not report the OCI attempt/success rate. Honestly, I think that employment outcomes are the most important indicator for big law chances, as it includes all of the real students that actually received big law. Here, Penn has consistently outperformed NYU since 2005 in NLJ firm. Does NYU swing PI? Sure, but it cannot be fairly taken into account because we will never know if the people who received PI could have gotten big law. Thus, if a student gets into both, it makes sense to go to NYU if you want PI and Penn if you want big law.

Also, NYU feeds into V10 firms in a way that Penn does not, however, Penn provides you with a much higher chance of getting a V100 firm to begin with. So if you go to NYU and get a V10 firm congrats, but I imagine a lot of people around median and below who struck out would have killed to have any big law firm (Vault or NLJ).

I mean, if you want to base a $250k decision on not trusting numbers that are reported to students but not the public, sure. There is less accountability to those numbers for sure. But I'd say I have at least some trust of the statistics that students at NYU and CLS compile from the data that OCS provides them regarding OCI results. It is not as if these schools go around bragging about these numbers publicly nor do they receive a detriment or benefit by lying about them. Hell, it seems that the percentages are what the students calculate themselves with some spreadsheet math. So I say it's fairly trust worthy. So to say Penn has a much higher chance of V100 is not accurate unless Penn has a much higher than 80% success rate for students who participate at OCI, which I think any reasonable person will say is probably not true.

Crowing wrote:Thanks for the links. I read through all the replies as well, and there is certainly compelling evidence to suggest that in the past couple of years, Penn has greatly outperformed NYU. But trying to interpret what exactly that entails without knowing all the factors at play for the discrepancies is nigh impossible. Are we looking at sustainable (at least semi) long-term changes or anomalies based on year-to-year idiosyncrasies? I need me some clairvoyance >.>

If NLJ numbers are all we take into consideration, then there is evidence that Penn outperformed NYU not in the past couple years, but 3-4 years ago. Remember, NLJ numbers lag by at least 3 years as those class of 2011 numbers recruited in Fall 2009. That was over 3 years ago when the market was perhaps very different than it is today. And different markets have recovered at different rates (Cali vs Chicago vs NYC). This is why it might be more helpful to dig through each school's OCI threads for hints on how their cycles are playing out, as those are the most recent indicators of current market trends. Remember, there is data and then there is proper interpretation of that data. That all said, I believe Penn will keep out performing NYU in NLJ250 numbers as the school seems more biglaw focused for sure.

I don't get how nyu feeds more into v10 but penn places more in v100. The only explanation i can think of is:

Nyu does better, thus places those who want biglaw into v10. Others go the PI route. Thus, there are less overall who intend to go to biglaw, making the overall percent lower then penn's. If the same percentt of people wanted biglaw at nyu, they would have more V10 and V100 numbers.

Can anyone qualify this statement? It would be great to get some feed back from NYU students since they probably understand this better.

Aberzombie1892 wrote:The issue is we cannot compare anything outside of NLJ and federal clerkship placement because the schools do not report the OCI attempt/success rate. Honestly, I think that employment outcomes are the most important indicator for big law chances, as it includes all of the real students that actually received big law. Here, Penn has consistently outperformed NYU since 2005 in NLJ firm. Does NYU swing PI? Sure, but it cannot be fairly taken into account because we will never know if the people who received PI could have gotten big law. Thus, if a student gets into both, it makes sense to go to NYU if you want PI and Penn if you want big law.

Also, NYU feeds into V10 firms in a way that Penn does not, however, Penn provides you with a much higher chance of getting a V100 firm to begin with. So if you go to NYU and get a V10 firm congrats, but I imagine a lot of people around median and below who struck out would have killed to have any big law firm (Vault or NLJ).

How you get from "we don't know the effect of this factor" to "this isn't a factor" is beyond me.

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Re questions about v10: I think rayiner has said something to the effect of NYU still being a core recruiting school among v10 NYC firms, whereas Penn isn't. This could resolve some of the discrepancy between Penn and NYU's relative v100 and v10 placement with Penn still having better v100 placement while NYU has better v10 placement (assuming you ignore any PI bias).
That said, it seems a little suspect to me that v10 firms would have NYU as a core recruiting base, but v20, v30 etc NYC firms would not, but that doesn't mean this isn't the case. (maybe v10 NYC are more prone to care about NYU/CLS prestige bump than lower ranked vault firms? no idea).

The only on-ground info I can offer as a 1L who hasn't done EIW is that the PI bunch do seem to be everywhere at NYU and many of the other 1L's I spoke to took NYU over other schools (including HYSCCP) because of the PI network and reputation for PI placement. I'm not defending anyone's choice of one school over another; there do, however, seem to be grounds for thinking that PI oriented students are more likely to choose NYU over other peer and higher ranked schools and that this likely has an impact on how many students actually gun for biglaw and consequently the number of students who end up working in biglaw.

Aberzombie1892 wrote:The issue is we cannot compare anything outside of NLJ and federal clerkship placement because the schools do not report the OCI attempt/success rate. Honestly, I think that employment outcomes are the most important indicator for big law chances, as it includes all of the real students that actually received big law. Here, Penn has consistently outperformed NYU since 2005 in NLJ firm. Does NYU swing PI? Sure, but it cannot be fairly taken into account because we will never know if the people who received PI could have gotten big law. Thus, if a student gets into both, it makes sense to go to NYU if you want PI and Penn if you want big law.

Also, NYU feeds into V10 firms in a way that Penn does not, however, Penn provides you with a much higher chance of getting a V100 firm to begin with. So if you go to NYU and get a V10 firm congrats, but I imagine a lot of people around median and below who struck out would have killed to have any big law firm (Vault or NLJ).

Dude, you go to Tulane?

JWalker wrote:

Aberzombie1892 wrote:The issue is we cannot compare anything outside of NLJ and federal clerkship placement because the schools do not report the OCI attempt/success rate. Honestly, I think that employment outcomes are the most important indicator for big law chances, as it includes all of the real students that actually received big law. Here, Penn has consistently outperformed NYU since 2005 in NLJ firm. Does NYU swing PI? Sure, but it cannot be fairly taken into account because we will never know if the people who received PI could have gotten big law. Thus, if a student gets into both, it makes sense to go to NYU if you want PI and Penn if you want big law.

Also, NYU feeds into V10 firms in a way that Penn does not, however, Penn provides you with a much higher chance of getting a V100 firm to begin with. So if you go to NYU and get a V10 firm congrats, but I imagine a lot of people around median and below who struck out would have killed to have any big law firm (Vault or NLJ).

Dude, you go to Tulane?

Yeah he does. Since he's not at a T14, I personally think he's too stupid to analyze employment data.

rad lulz wrote:

JWalker wrote:

Aberzombie1892 wrote:The issue is we cannot compare anything outside of NLJ and federal clerkship placement because the schools do not report the OCI attempt/success rate. Honestly, I think that employment outcomes are the most important indicator for big law chances, as it includes all of the real students that actually received big law. Here, Penn has consistently outperformed NYU since 2005 in NLJ firm. Does NYU swing PI? Sure, but it cannot be fairly taken into account because we will never know if the people who received PI could have gotten big law. Thus, if a student gets into both, it makes sense to go to NYU if you want PI and Penn if you want big law.

Also, NYU feeds into V10 firms in a way that Penn does not, however, Penn provides you with a much higher chance of getting a V100 firm to begin with. So if you go to NYU and get a V10 firm congrats, but I imagine a lot of people around median and below who struck out would have killed to have any big law firm (Vault or NLJ).

Dude, you go to Tulane?

Yeah he does. Since he's not at a T14 T13, I personally think he's too stupid to analyze employment data.

FTFY

Aberzombie1892 wrote:The issue is we cannot compare anything outside of NLJ and federal clerkship placement because the schools do not report the OCI attempt/success rate. Honestly, I think that employment outcomes are the most important indicator for big law chances, as it includes all of the real students that actually received big law. Here, Penn has consistently outperformed NYU since 2005 in NLJ firm. Does NYU swing PI? Sure, but it cannot be fairly taken into account because we will never know if the people who received PI could have gotten big law. Thus, if a student gets into both, it makes sense to go to NYU if you want PI and Penn if you want big law.

Also, NYU feeds into V10 firms in a way that Penn does not, however, Penn provides you with a much higher chance of getting a V100 firm to begin with. So if you go to NYU and get a V10 firm congrats, but I imagine a lot of people around median and below who struck out would have killed to have any big law firm (Vault or NLJ).

Man, what? I know tons of people who have BigLaw-friendly grades but want PI or Government. They come to NYU because they want that. I've yet to hear of any horror stories from middle-third at NYU, which makes sense because you can look at NLJ+A3+Fed+JAG+ADA+so on and that alone is like 2/3rds of the class.

To believe otherwise is to think two things: 1.) That Yale and Harvard are running into serious problems placing many of their better-performing graduates into any market-paying BigLaw job, and 2.) that there are BigLaw firms out there that actually think 45th percentile at Penn is better than 45th percentile at NYU. To my knowledge (and limited conversations with BigLaw partners prior to picking my school), nobody outside of maybe thirty firms actually sees any distinction at all. And of those, the non-Philly/Delaware ones* give a slight edge to NYU. While I agree that NLJ 250 numbers are a helpful way of explaining to your relatives why Notre Dame isn't actually better than Virginia, sometimes it's okay to look past them when comparing T14s. Because if we don't, we'd have to assume that Cornell is T6 or something.

Anyway, in addition to the obvious People At The PI School Self-Select Into PI point, I have another theory on why Penn wins on NLJ250: NYU is in New York. I figure that NYU and Georgetown are similar in the sense that people who go to both schools tend to be dead-set on staying in the city after graduation (whether for personal preference or marriage). So if they don't get BigLaw there, their next option is to do some other LRAPable thing. In DC, that means the Hill or think tanks or lobbying or JD-preferred whatever. In NY, I suspect there's more of a lean toward the grittier end of the PI spectrum. At other schools, people who don't get NY BigLaw might try their school's target market or their home market as a backup. But I don't seem to run into very many other people here with the same goals.

Now, do I think NYU is better than Penn for BigLaw? Nah. But I think to say that it's actually worse is crazy.


Edit: *Or at least the ones in the four markets I have any interest in working in. Penn's "Ivy Status" is totally meaningless in two of them, where both NYU and Penn are equally impressive to lawyers and draw blank stares from almost everyone else.

DaleCooper wrote:I came to NYU in part because of the LRAP and in part because everybody in my intended weird career path agreed that it's a YHC>SN>CVDG>PMBNCT kinda thing.

Just out of curiosity, in what career path is YHC>S?

ITT people strain mightily to pretend that there is a strict linear ordering of schools applicable to all firms and all markets.

Yes, there are firms that are more amenable to hiring from Penn than NYU. Note that this is distinct from thinking that Penn is better than NYU (whatever that means anyway). There are tons of Penn graduates at Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware firms. Favoritism is huge in law firm hiring. Also, I don't know why you'd assume that because V10 firms prefer NYU, lower-ranked firms would prefer NYU. If you ask an attorney in California what the top firms are, they'd probably mention WSGR in the same breath as Latham. Why do you think law school reputations are any different? Lower V100 firms in NYC are often outposts of out-of-town firms, and I find it totally believable that whoever is in charge of recruiting for e.g. Jones Day is more impressed by Penn's Ivy status than NYU's 1-2 point higher USNWR ranking.

Moreover, Penn is a lot smaller and has a more geographically-diverse student body than NYU. NYU has a lot more bottom 1/3 people to place than Penn does, and more of them are from NY and want to go back to NY. This increases competition and reduces the probability of someone being able to work secondary-market ties to get a job.

rayiner wrote:ITT people strain mightily to pretend that there is a strict linear ordering of schools applicable to all firms and all markets.

Yes, there are firms that are more amenable to hiring from Penn than NYU. Note that this is distinct from thinking that Penn is better than NYU (whatever that means anyway). There are tons of Penn graduates at Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware firms. Favoritism is huge in law firm hiring. Also, I don't know why you'd assume that because V10 firms prefer NYU, lower-ranked firms would prefer NYU. If you ask an attorney in California what the top firms are, they'd probably mention WSGR in the same breath as Latham. Why do you think law school reputations are any different? Lower V100 firms in NYC are often outposts of out-of-town firms, and I find it totally believable that whoever is in charge of recruiting for e.g. Jones Day is more impressed by Penn's Ivy status than NYU's 1-2 point higher USNWR ranking.

Moreover, Penn is a lot smaller and has a more geographically-diverse student body than NYU. NYU has a lot more bottom 1/3 people to place than Penn does, and more of them are from NY and want to go back to NY. This increases competition and reduces the probability of someone being able to work secondary-market ties to get a job.

People who haven't gone through the recruiting/hiring process don't realize how regional legal hiring is outside of HYS. They are fixated on US News.

DaleCooper wrote: While I agree that NLJ 250 numbers are a helpful way of explaining to your relatives why Notre Dame isn't actually better than Virginia, sometimes it's okay to look past them when comparing T14s. Because if we don't, we'd have to assume that Cornell is T6 or something.

I'm fine with that.

thelawyler wrote:

Aberzombie1892 wrote:While there does appear to be some truth to it, we don't know how many people who didn't participate could have landed big law. Because we don't know tha number (and it cant be found out), it's impossible to quantify NYU's true placement relative to peer schools. Also, we don't know the number of Penn students that opted out either. Thus, it's almost pointless for someone seeking big law to try to take into account participations rates as (1) we don't know the rate for all schools and (2) no one can determine if people who isn't participate could have received big law. As a result, if I were seeking big law and was looking at non-HYS t14s, I would lean Penn and Columbia over other schools. The NLJ charts since 2005 will support that conclusion.

There's some truth to the PI bias. But the fact that NYU places very well for students who actually participates in OCI is not "some truth" but a statistical fact. To imply that the PI focused students at NYU are less competitive grades-wise than the 85%~ of the school that participates in OCI is an assumption not grounded in facts and is merely pure unjustified speculation. Until proven otherwise, it is better to just assume a normal grade distribution of those students.

That said, either one is probably fine for a person seeking big law.

My opinion is that people who do poorly grades-wise are more likely to participate in EIW because when you're in that position, you are more likely to be willing to pass up whichever career path you prefer in order to get a jerb. Further, and this is just a completely out there observation, the PI contingent seems to be more hard-working and focused here. I have a feeling that the kids who don't do EIW are going to have disproportionately high grades.