beachbum wrote:WhirledWorld wrote:Columbia/NYU are superior to Duke/Mich, but I don't think they're THAT much better.
Why yes, I DO have data for that! (In case anyone wants the full set/any lurking 0Ls want explanation.)
Prompted by the Chicago vs. Penn thread, I decided to try taking the average of placement in (1) BigLaw, proxied by the top 250 firms according to the NLJ (2) prestigious federal clerkships (which lead to BigLaw or whatever else you want). %s are "number of students going to (1) or (2) divided by number of JDs awarded in the corresponding year".
2007-2010 NLJ 250 + 2007-2009 Article III:
School Total (all years available)
Chicago 74.1%
Stanford 73.4%
Columbia 72.8%
Penn 71.4%
Harvard 71.1%
Northwestern 67.1%
NYU 65.7%
Duke 64.3%
Cornell 64.3%
Michigan 62.3%
UVA 61.1%
Berkeley 60.8%
Vanderbilt 54.0%
GULC 50.4%
USC 45.2%
UCLA 44.3%
These schools bounce around year-by-year, but on average, if you start at the "top" school and go down to the bottom of the T13 (excluding GULC), this index has only decreased by maybe 10-15%. I've tried multiple versions of this (e.g. 2007-2009, 2008-2009, most recent three years of each ... ) and it's always about the same. (If you're curious: most schools have about 10% clerkships, outside of HYS.)
Using this average (including all available data-years), Chicago had about 74% of graduates in BigLaw or clerkships while Columbia had about 73%, Duke had about 64%, Michigan had about 62%.
I don't think you should feel compelled to go to any of these schools (or to not go to any of these schools) based on job placement prospects.
Then again ... you say you're debt averse; imagine that you're standing before the Great Temple of OCI and a guardian spirit makes you the following offer:
You may choose either:
(1) to go from a 50% shot at BigLaw to a 60% shot at BigLaw
or
(2) I will give you $100K (more than you'd likely save working BigLaw for a year, given taxes, expenses, and profound existential sadness)
(on the other hand: if you go PI, the $100K might mean less, because you'll LRAP)
(You could argue that NYU means you get neither, but that's perhaps unfair.)
I think this gets even stronger when you consider that the 20-30% of students at these schools not going to BigLaw or clerkships are probably not all starving on the streets. I could definitely believe that there are more diehard PI people (I know some with top GPAs who refused to even do OCI because they didn't want the temptation) at Berkeley, Mich, and NYU than at Columbia, Chicago, or Penn.
