Pretty much. Not a particularly informed judgement, but just from scoping out TLS it seems like the V5/10/25 whatever are the most highly sought after places and are also basically the biggest firms (?). Plus, practically everyone from Yale in a firm job is in a 501+, so I assume that's overwhelmingly where people want to go if they can. Plus, I've read on TLS that the 101-250 category includes a lot of firms that wouldn't really be considered "biglaw" in the traditional sense of market salary, bonuses, etc.jbagelboy wrote:What is your rationale for the weights you assigned different firm sizes there? Just random?cotiger wrote: I don't think the self-selection thing totally holds water. The rest of the lower T14 have unemployment/ST/PT scores that are 10+ (except for B at 8.3). Penn's is 3. I'm assuming people aren't self-selecting into underemployment. To be fair, last year was particularly good for Penn, but even taking a 3 year average it's Penn 6.7>Michigan 9.1>Berkeley 9.9>Cool fellowships, UVA. CCN, though, are significantly better at 3-4%.
If we just focus on placement power within firms (and federal clerkships), which takes away self-selection issues, and assign 1 point to 101-250, 3 points to 251-500, 10 points to 501+, and 10 points to federal clerkships (zero points to 100 and below), the average scores are Penn 7.8>UVA 7.4>Berkeley 7.3>Michigan 6.8. CChiN come in at 8.6, 7.6, 8.4.
Looking at it now, it does seem that Penn is closer to MVB than to CCN. Still, it's definitely inching up there, and I would hope that discussion of the relative placement of schools isn't such a sacred cow that we need to be careful about looking into it without incurring the wrath of said loungers.
Changing up the weights to, say, 10:5:3 or 10:7:5 doesn't affect the ordering of the schools, although weighting the smaller biglaw categories more does move Penn a bit closer to CN.
