nbatty wrote:
I see. I've got a fat ticket for hunting big game over supplemental feed in Georgia. May be enough to keep me in the "RCDP" pile for the rest of my life...
Woah, that's wild. Bambi's (or Smokey Bear's) revenge.
JCougar wrote:
Take a look, though, at the number of other schools the applicants that have been accepted to UF this year compared to last year. It's not scientific, but I looked at about a dozen "accepted"s from last year, and about half of them applied to only a handful of schools. I randomly clicked on a dozen profiles from this year's acceptances, and found almost everyone had applied to a dozen or more schools (some even three dozen). The only one who applied to less than 10 that I clicked on was already accepted to Texas and currently lives in Austin, so there's a high probability that he/she will withdraw from UF.
I'm just saying...Florida can't afford to be that much more selective this cycle because the number of applicants hasn't increased that much. It already looks like they've tried to raise their median a point this year, which would account for the greater selectivity. I seriously doubt they're going to be able to do much more than that.
There are many more than a dozen accepted UF applicants for both this year and last listed on LSN. Your study was not just unscientific; it was so limited that it should be considered entirely unworthy of consideration.
Even if the "results" could be extrapolated, what did the results tell you, besides that prospective students are applying to more schools? You note that one individual included in your survey was accepted to UT and lives in Austin, and will therefore probably not attend UF. However, why shouldn't any of the other individuals not attend UF? UF may be the best option for them - if not for its rank, then for its value.
Oh, and by the way - I just randomly brought up the LSN profiles of 3 prospective students accepted by UF this year and last. Last years' showed 13, 9, and 4 schools applied to. This year's showed 6, 5, and 3 schools applied to.
JCougar wrote:
I don't think the people who apply to law schools are the ones that are financially suffering right now. Nevertheless, I give law school applicants more credit than that. A few dollars right now could turn out to be a very wise investment if you get accepted into somewhere and get surprised with a scholarship offer that you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Even if you don't want to go to the school, being admitted gives you leverage to get more money from schools you really do want to go to. People are smart, and they're not limiting their options this year.
You don't? Shall we take a poll? People fresh-out-of-college (the group most law school applicants find themselves in) are always financially suffering, and they are especially bad off when they've been forced to go without any/a reduced income for a while due to an economic downturn taking what little work they can normally get away from them. Maybe TLSers with time to blow online don't feel the pinch like most people do, but there is a pinch. People tend to do what they can to avoid the pinch. They possibly get more conservative in their choices of schools to apply to, and/or they possibly apply to fewer schools. They don't apply to more reaches. As for using admissions as leverage for scholarship money - I have yet to hear of anyone successfully doing that this year, and I doubt if anyone outside TLS seriously believes that it can be done - at least to the point at which they'd be willing to put money (any amount) on it.
JCougar wrote:
Early acceptances going up doesn't mean jack squat, especially if they have better numbers. Maybe these are people that applied to an extra safety or two. The fact that they have better numbers means that they were also likely to have been accepted to better schools, and ITE, better schools seem to be the way to go. You're confusing accepted students with people who actually matriculate. And LOL at my purported lack of logical reasoning skills. The rest of your paragraph is a mess of discombobulated statements with little to no logical cohesion or emperical support at all. Your "evidence" for there NOT being an increase in applications (with respect to applicants) is even worse than hearsay. It's complete speculation.
Early acceptances increasing to the point of late acceptances (the traditional last batches prior to acceptances off of the waitlist) being entirely unnecessary certainly means more than "jack squat". Before you try and identify flaws in my thought processes (which are generally non-existent), JCougar, find the many in your own. We don't need to consider whether or not the applicants matriculate here. The question being asked is one regarding application patterns, not matriculation patterns or yield results. And though you may not be sufficiently equipped to see it, it is true that the increase in early acceptances could point to applicants applying more conservatively, to fewer law schools, just as easily as it could point to applicants applying to more safeties. Remember that LSN is very skewed in that, generally speaking, only those who apply to many law schools will bother creating a profile there. Given that LSN has shown no change in UF applicant numbers this year, and that acceptance rates possibly indicate a large increase in UF applicant numbers, it could well be that many non-LSN users - people who applied to few schools - applied to UF this year. Hence, people on average applying to fewer schools this year.
In any case, your main point - the "physical certainty" of a decrease in yield this year for UF - which I showed to a be preposterous one using a physically plausible scenario that you curiously and prudently found laughable and perplexing enough not to challenge - would be just as absurd were you not to take it to such extremes. Unless we have a concrete reason to believe that the applicants' behavioral patterns will change from last year to this (that they will, for some reason, matriculate more or less), then we have to assume that an equal number of acceptances will likely yield a similar number of matriculated students. Can't understand quite what that means for you? Here, I'll make it simple:
you have to prove that a greater percentage of applicants who get accepted by UF will withdraw this year than last year (and that waitlistees won't make up for any difference) else you don't have an argument. And guess what? You can't do that.
Posted: Thu Mar 18, 2010 9:57 pm 
