So I thought I might use
this document to calibrate some of this a little. On page 4, it indicates that 24,146 applicants for Fall 2010 had applied as of 12/3/2009, whereas 21,615 had applied for Fall 2011 as of 12/3/2010. Obviously, these numbers differ somewhat; the number of applicants was down 10% this cycle, as of 12/3. Still, they're in the same ballpark.
Now, according to LSAC's volume summary, 87,500 people applied for Fall 2010, which means that 27.6% of people had applied by 12/3. (Kind of eye-opening, isn't it? Nearly 3/4 of people who apply send their apps in well after Thanksgiving.) Anyway, the publication linked above mentions that 2,479 people with a 170 or above had applied as of 12/3. If 170+ scorers don't apply disproportionately early or late (more on that in a sec), then we'd expect 8,983 applicants with a 170 or above on the full year.
That number is ridiculously higher than the number that I considered early (around 4,000) — which was drawn from applying the percentile to the number of test-takers, which is an absolute upper limit for the number of applicants with a 170+ (no more than about 4,000 scores of 170+ were handed out to different people in that cycle, so there could not possibly have been more applicants with those numbers — unless there were sizable numbers of applicants who'd been sitting on a 170+ score for more than a cycle but didn't retake, which I guess is possible but unlikely to occur in droves).
In any case, apparently 170+ scorers
do apply disproportionately early, and specifically, over half of them apply before 12/3. This makes some sense, because people who are with it enough to study hard enough to get a 170 or above on the LSAT probably are not by and large just realizing in late December that they want to go to law school and then taking the February test and applying at the very last second. The 170+ crowd probably has wanted to go to law school for some time, and the 170+ score is an indication of commitment to studying and practicing to get a really competitive score, which a last-minute applicant is significantly less likely to have the time to do.
From that, there's another interesting test we can run. What about the 175+ crowd? LSAC says that there were 567 of them who had applied as of 12/3 last cycle, and from the above estimation, we'd expect about 1,000 total for the cycle. Looking at percentiles, I see that 175 is 99.5 percentile, so 0.5% of test-takers get 175 or above. Now, 171,500 administrations of the LSAT took place, which suggests that 857 scores of 175 or above were handed out. According to LSAC's repeater data, 18 people with a 175 or above retook the test; one person got a score in the 160's, but everyone else got a 170+ score again, so that's 17 duplicates; thus, we get 840 different people with 175 or above. That fits with previous estimates of around 1,000 (and suggests that 175+ scorers apply even more disproportionately early than 170+ scorers do; roughly 62% of 170+ scorers had applied by 12/3, but roughly 67.5% of 175+ scorers had applied by the same date).
So what happens to
them? Using the same data as in the OP, I can say three schools take a sizable number of them:
Yale (75th %ile: 176) takes at least 53 of them (which is about 6.3% of them).
Harvard (75th %ile: 176) takes at least 139 of them (which is about 16.5% of them).
Columbia (75th %ile: 175) takes at least 100 of them (which is about 11.9% of them).
That accounts for 292 of them, which is about 35% of them. Just to fill out the third quartile (between median and 75th percentile), Yale and Harvard must take a few more with exactly a 175, although it's hard to say exactly how many. It's probably no more than 10-20 to Yale — given that the median is 173, probably no more than 1/3 of the people in the third quartile have exactly a 175 — and no more than 40-50 to Harvard by the same reasoning, which would account for maybe another 50 people, give or take, which is about another 6%. That is, of the people who score 175 or above, about 35%-40% go to Yale, Harvard, or Columbia.
What about the other 60%-65%? Well, presumably some go to Stanford, but as Stanford's 75th percentile is 172, it's impossible to know how many (other than to say that it's under 45). Likewise, under 47 go to Chicago, and under 112 go to NYU. This suggests to me that the rest of the 175+ scorers scatter throughout the top tier as well, just as 170+ scorers do, although maybe a little more concentrated at the top.
Strikingly, over 200 people claimed to have a 175 or above on LSN last cycle, which, if true, means that about a quarter of all people with a score that high were on LSN. I don't immediately see how to search where they ended up going, though, at least not without going through one-by-one.