Columbia ($) vs. NYU ($$) Forum

[somethingElse]

Joined NYU class of 2019.

CONGRATS!

[Glacial]

Oooh wow, lots of interesting statements here. I'm tempted to say it's not worth it to go over them with you since you are probably an 0L and you will learn, but for posterity's sake, a few points on your entirely vacuous faculty and placement aspersions. First, last year Chicago produced a higher % of 9-mo federal clerks than Harvard (although Harvard produced more alumni clerks and CLS alumni clerk numbers were roughly Chi's average 9-mo due to post-plan hiring practices and heavier transactional preference at CLS and to a lesser extent HLS). It's extremely rare for HLS to send >20% clerk at 9-mo. HLS and CLS EIP's are the closest in result to any school, although HLS places better into non-NY selective firms. Take a look at summer class composition and you'll see H/C are always proportionally aligned to school class size, while Chi/SLS are more idiosyncratic. HLS always sends far more than 60% of its class into biglaw, and its EIP success rate figures are very similar to Chi/CLS (~90%+). So your rhetorical questions actually have answers to support the opposite premise, and the three schools have very comparable placement, but HLS has certain advantages over each in different ways.

CLS, Chicago, and HLS all do look a lot like Penn and NYU in many years, so I'd say the schools are all pretty comparable. Underneath the ABA data, however, lie some more nuanced conclusions when you look at more discrete information like OCI success rates, firm class composition and hiring at the most selective shops, alumni clerk placement, fed honors placement, skadden fellows and other elite fellowships, ect. I can't aggregate all this information for you here, but it's irrefutable that there's no way CLS resembles Y or to a lesser extent H/S more than it resembles UChicago--and UChicago and CLS resemble each other more than either compares to Penn when you add a year-on-year granular approach.

Lastly, your faculty point is entirely unsupportable along any metric of evaluating faculty quality. YLS, Chicago, HLS, CLS, and NYU have very strong, roughly equally eminent professors. YLS and Chicago probably have the most eminent scholars per capita, while HLS and NYU have the most prized faculty in absolute terms. Columbia sits somewhere in the middle with a deep back bench of highly regarded and prolific permanent faculty and an eclectic and dynamic group of visiting professors. But I still think out of these five, the Columbia argument is in many ways the toughest to make.

You sure have quite an unorthodox approach to stats and quantitative criteria.

First, your "very comparable" argument is based merely on last year employment stats and summer class composition. I invited you to look at the ABA reports over a longer period (5+ years).

Then, you suggest that beyond the ABA data, there's a range of quantitative and qualitative criteria that actually differentiate the schools as follows: Y>H/S>CSL/Chi>NYU/Penn. I agree with this point.

Finally, you claim that my faculty point is "entirely unsupportable along any metric of evaluating faculty quality" but provide an equally non-metric evaluation of the faculty at Y/H/C/Chi/NYU. Are you an 0L casting "entirely vacuous faculty aspersions"? I don't know, and frankly I don't care. You need to be fairly familiar with the trends in legal academia, nationally and internationally, to make a meaningful assessment of faculty quality at those schools. Meanwhile, why don't you stop patronizing those who disagree with you?

[rpupkin]

You need to be fairly familiar with the trends in legal academia, nationally and internationally, to make a meaningful assessment of faculty quality at those schools.

Are you "fairly familiar with the trends in legal academia, nationally and internationally"? If so, please enlighten us.

[jbagelboy]

Oooh wow, lots of interesting statements here. I'm tempted to say it's not worth it to go over them with you since you are probably an 0L and you will learn, but for posterity's sake, a few points on your entirely vacuous faculty and placement aspersions. First, last year Chicago produced a higher % of 9-mo federal clerks than Harvard (although Harvard produced more alumni clerks and CLS alumni clerk numbers were roughly Chi's average 9-mo due to post-plan hiring practices and heavier transactional preference at CLS and to a lesser extent HLS). It's extremely rare for HLS to send >20% clerk at 9-mo. HLS and CLS EIP's are the closest in result to any school, although HLS places better into non-NY selective firms. Take a look at summer class composition and you'll see H/C are always proportionally aligned to school class size, while Chi/SLS are more idiosyncratic. HLS always sends far more than 60% of its class into biglaw, and its EIP success rate figures are very similar to Chi/CLS (~90%+). So your rhetorical questions actually have answers to support the opposite premise, and the three schools have very comparable placement, but HLS has certain advantages over each in different ways.

CLS, Chicago, and HLS all do look a lot like Penn and NYU in many years, so I'd say the schools are all pretty comparable. Underneath the ABA data, however, lie some more nuanced conclusions when you look at more discrete information like OCI success rates, firm class composition and hiring at the most selective shops, alumni clerk placement, fed honors placement, skadden fellows and other elite fellowships, ect. I can't aggregate all this information for you here, but it's irrefutable that there's no way CLS resembles Y or to a lesser extent H/S more than it resembles UChicago--and UChicago and CLS resemble each other more than either compares to Penn when you add a year-on-year granular approach.

Lastly, your faculty point is entirely unsupportable along any metric of evaluating faculty quality. YLS, Chicago, HLS, CLS, and NYU have very strong, roughly equally eminent professors. YLS and Chicago probably have the most eminent scholars per capita, while HLS and NYU have the most prized faculty in absolute terms. Columbia sits somewhere in the middle with a deep back bench of highly regarded and prolific permanent faculty and an eclectic and dynamic group of visiting professors. But I still think out of these five, the Columbia argument is in many ways the toughest to make.

You sure have quite an unorthodox approach to stats and quantitative criteria.

First, your "very comparable" argument is based merely on last year employment stats and summer class composition. I invited you to look at the ABA reports over a longer period (5+ years).

Then, you suggest that beyond the ABA data, there's a range of quantitative and qualitative criteria that actually differentiate the schools as follows: Y>H/S>CSL/Chi>NYU/Penn. I agree with this point.

Finally, you claim that my faculty point is "entirely unsupportable along any metric of evaluating faculty quality" but provide an equally non-metric evaluation of the faculty at Y/H/C/Chi/NYU. Are you an 0L casting "entirely vacuous faculty aspersions"? I don't know, and frankly I don't care. You need to be fairly familiar with the trends in legal academia, nationally and internationally, to make a meaningful assessment of faculty quality at those schools. Meanwhile, why don't you stop patronizing those who disagree with you?

I've been through three years of law school, at one of those five schools. Have you?

The origins of the major American schools of legal thought (or continental ones) and their rough schools of association don't dictate the strength of elite law school faculties in 2016. Columbia doesn't have a monopoly on legal realism or internationalism, Harvard doesn't have a monopoly on feminist legal theory or the legal process school, Yale doesn't have a monopoly on CLT or legal positivism, Chicago doesn't have a monopoly on law and econ, and certainly no school now could be said to be the base of doctrinal formalism. I could name a Harvard or Columbia professor prominent in each of these fields; the reality is that each school has had a dominant set of faculty in one of these schools at some point over the last 50 years, and whether law & econ or CLT or ect. is more important or prominent at any given time is far, far beyond the scope of this conversation. Nor do I find Leiter's singular measure of proliferation of scholarship per faculty member convincing on its own, so I've tried to reason with you without getting bogged down in specifics.

[Rigo]

Joined NYU class of 2019.

CONGRATS!

Good choice!

[jbagelboy]

Joined NYU class of 2019.

CONGRATS!

[Nebby]

Joined NYU class of 2019.

Good choice!

[dabigchina]

http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... 1&t=206299

Need more info bro.

177/3.96
Got into Harvard and UChicago but practically won't be options. Columbia's more need based aid was a factor in not receiving a higher scholarship offer.
Have a slight preference for CLS and worried if NYU lacks some of the prestige that CLS has that could hurt me in my career

Christ how did u not get more money. You made the right call with nyu tho.

[Rigo]

Yeah also very confused by the cycle but I guess he has to play the hand he's been dealt.

[kingpin101]

Yeah also very confused by the cycle but I guess he has to play the hand he's been dealt.

Not really. He can always choose not to go to law school or reapply.

[cavalier1138]

Joined NYU class of 2019.

Congrats! See you there.

[landshoes]

for students, faculty "quality" would probably best be represented by some kind of equation that took into account:

reputation among academics
reputation among educated/professional class
willingness to talk to law students who are similarly situated to you
collegiality (not many or no faculty "teams" that you have to choose between)
potential for further scholarship
ability to teach larger classes and smaller seminars
connections with judges
connections with employers
willingness to advise you about your chosen career
willingness to help you pursue your research interests
knowledge of PhD programs/academic hiring

etc. I could go on but you get the idea.

Just looking at faculty quality in terms of a relatively abstract measure of research production is...not meaningful to potential JD students once we're at the level of these faculties. Most JD students are going to care much more about teaching than research, if they even care about teaching at all.

[Tiago Splitter]

Yeah also very confused by the cycle but I guess he has to play the hand he's been dealt.

Not really. He can always choose not to go to law school or reapply.

Agree seems like it might make sense to run it back.

[Rigo]

He's not really saying what went wrong though. It's not like he applied late.

[Tiago Splitter]

He's not really saying what went wrong though. It's not like he applied late.

Yeah who knows. Hopefully he isn't paying back 200k debt on his own.

Also does Columbia have good professors? I spent three years there and figure you'd get the same types at a few dozen other places.

[Nebby]

He's not really saying what went wrong though. It's not like he applied late.

Yeah who knows. Hopefully he isn't paying back 200k debt on his own.

Also does Columbia have good professors? I spent three years there and figure you'd get the same types at a few dozen other places.

The professors in the T14 are largely fungible

[jbagelboy]

He's not really saying what went wrong though. It's not like he applied late.

Yeah who knows. Hopefully he isn't paying back 200k debt on his own.

Also does Columbia have good professors? I spent three years there and figure you'd get the same types at a few dozen other places.

The professors in the T14 are largely fungible

Columbia has a lot of very prolific and esteemed professors; not all of them are "good" from a student's perspective (but some are)

[TheoO]

Yea CLS has a lot of esteemed professor

*This was typed while in the middle of class*

[GreenEggs]

He's not really saying what went wrong though. It's not like he applied late.

Yeah who knows. Hopefully he isn't paying back 200k debt on his own.

Also does Columbia have good professors? I spent three years there and figure you'd get the same types at a few dozen other places.

The professors in the T14 are largely fungible

Columbia has a lot of very prolific and esteemed professors; not all of them are "good" from a student's perspective (but some are)

Yeah, but a bunch also left in the last decade:

http://columbiaspectator.com/2006/04/18 ... -positions

[Tiago Splitter]

Can't believe I ever attended a school that had recently lost Jeremy Waldron and Samuel Issacharoff. How embarrassing.

Also who are those guys?

[Nekrowizard]

Can't believe I ever attended a school that had recently lost Jeremy Waldron and Samuel Issacharoff. How embarrassing.

Also who are those guys?

What part of "WORLD RENOWNED" didn't you understand?

[jbagelboy]

He's not really saying what went wrong though. It's not like he applied late.

Yeah who knows. Hopefully he isn't paying back 200k debt on his own.

Also does Columbia have good professors? I spent three years there and figure you'd get the same types at a few dozen other places.

The professors in the T14 are largely fungible

Columbia has a lot of very prolific and esteemed professors; not all of them are "good" from a student's perspective (but some are)

Yeah, but a bunch also left in the last decade:

http://columbiaspectator.com/2006/04/18 ... -positions

ronald dworkin was obviously a huge deal, but NYU lost him to death in 2013.

[dixiecupdrinking]

Almost universally, the best profs I had in law school were the ones no one has heard of. "Famous" professors often are not really there to teach, and it shows.