already ad nauseum but... NYU vs UVA $$$ vs Duke $$ Forum

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laotze

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Re: already ad nauseum but... NYU vs UVA $$$ vs Duke $$

Post by laotze » Mon Jul 08, 2013 3:24 pm

dixiecupdrinking wrote: 1. Actual placement ≠ placement power.
Please elaborate.
2. Biglaw placement is irrelevant to someone who doesn't want it.
So what does that have to do with UVA placing 3x (almost 4x) more students per capita into clerkships than GULC, or with GULC's troublingly high overall unemployment rate? All it sounds like here is that UVA students have more freedom of career path than GULC students.
3. Living in Charlottesville for three years is vastly inferior to living in D.C. for getting practical experience during law school, which is very important for public interest jobs.
I'm with you in that I'd personally much rather spend three years in DC than Charlottesville (though COL is certainly lower in the latter), not that that has anything to do with OP.
But isn't most "practical experience" acquired during summer positions as opposed to the school year? I suppose clinics would be the exception.
4. I don't know where you're getting your data but LST says UVA has 19.8% public interest with 15.1% school-funded, so you're really looking at something like 4-5% "actual" public interest jobs. GULC has 25.6% public interest with 13.3% school-funded, so 12-13% "actual" public interest jobs. I think the utility of the data is limited when it comes to public interest work, because self-selection is hard to capture, but to the extent the numbers say anything, they don't say what you're claiming they do.
Aggregate data from LST, ABA, NALP, and school reports.

http://abovethelaw.com/schools/universi ... employment
http://abovethelaw.com/schools/georgeto ... employment

dixiecupdrinking

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Re: already ad nauseum but... NYU vs UVA $$$ vs Duke $$

Post by dixiecupdrinking » Mon Jul 08, 2013 3:58 pm

I'm not going to go point by point here. The upshot is that, in my opinion, for someone who wants to do public interest work in DC, going to the best school in DC with a full-tuition scholarship is better than going to a small college town in Virginia. You don't get all, or even most, of your practical experience from your summers, or even clinics. Being in a big city lets you get involved with student groups and term-time internships and get hundreds of hours of actual experience and demonstrated interest. The fact that UVA places more people in biglaw and clerkships is nice as an indirect measure of placement ability in the jobs that OP wants, but not really all that relevant.

My caveat is that OP's career hopes are going to be competitive to accomplish from any school, but GULC is the better option if DC public interest is his plans A through Z.

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Monochromatic Oeuvre

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Re: already ad nauseum but... NYU vs UVA $$$ vs Duke $$

Post by Monochromatic Oeuvre » Mon Jul 08, 2013 5:06 pm

laotze wrote:
dixiecupdrinking wrote: 1. Actual placement ≠ placement power.
Please elaborate.
Something that bears repeating: LST percentages are only a floor, not a ceiling, which makes the correlation between them and placement power only moderate rather than strong. Just because GULC placed a higher percentage of its class into Biglaw than Yale does not make it easier to get Biglaw from GULC.

So yeah, we've got to stop treating LST like a maximum when it's really a minimum.

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laotze

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Re: already ad nauseum but... NYU vs UVA $$$ vs Duke $$

Post by laotze » Mon Jul 08, 2013 7:23 pm

Monochromatic Oeuvre wrote:
laotze wrote:
dixiecupdrinking wrote: 1. Actual placement ≠ placement power.
Please elaborate.
Something that bears repeating: LST percentages are only a floor, not a ceiling, which makes the correlation between them and placement power only moderate rather than strong. Just because GULC placed a higher percentage of its class into Biglaw than Yale does not make it easier to get Biglaw from GULC.

So yeah, we've got to stop treating LST like a maximum when it's really a minimum.
That's perfectly true, but if anything it only strengthens my concern over GULC's high unemployment rate relative to UVA's total placement. Sure, UVA places fewer students per capita into PI than does GULC, but like Penn I would be inclined to think that's probably more of a self-selection, whereas I have a feeling that 27% of GULC grads do not "choose" to be unemployed in the legal field.

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Re: already ad nauseum but... NYU vs UVA $$$ vs Duke $$

Post by dixiecupdrinking » Mon Jul 08, 2013 8:38 pm

laotze wrote:
Monochromatic Oeuvre wrote:
laotze wrote:
dixiecupdrinking wrote: 1. Actual placement ≠ placement power.
Please elaborate.
Something that bears repeating: LST percentages are only a floor, not a ceiling, which makes the correlation between them and placement power only moderate rather than strong. Just because GULC placed a higher percentage of its class into Biglaw than Yale does not make it easier to get Biglaw from GULC.

So yeah, we've got to stop treating LST like a maximum when it's really a minimum.
That's perfectly true, but if anything it only strengthens my concern over GULC's high unemployment rate relative to UVA's total placement. Sure, UVA places fewer students per capita into PI than does GULC, but like Penn I would be inclined to think that's probably more of a self-selection, whereas I have a feeling that 27% of GULC grads do not "choose" to be unemployed in the legal field.
Self-selection into PI results in higher unemployment, unfortunately.

Look, you're absolutely right that UVA is a better school with better employment prospects. For most people it's the better option. But the people who are successfully getting jobs in public interest fields are the ones who are out there networking and getting experience from day one, and they are not predominantly hanging out in Charlottesville, hours from the nearest major city that has any sort of public interest legal office other than a DA or PD office. This is part of why the numbers are a starting point, not the end of the discussion, as MO alluded to.

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