Top Law Schools

sprezz wrote:any data is better than none. and this is interesting. plus it's a better use of time than any 3L class (op a 3L?).

i'm interested in seeing the transfer #'s. do they get screwed? anecdotally it seems so. one class year + linkedin culling is a small sample size but iirc GULC lets a lot of them in

Gray wrote:lol the spreadsheets are worth a look for the commentary alone.

Hikikomorist wrote:

Gray wrote:lol the spreadsheets are worth a look for the commentary alone.

I'm sad I missed the LinkedIn profiles based on some of the descriptions.

bananatopia wrote:

lulzsec54 wrote:Section 3 (Curriculum B, the non-standard section) is obviously the big outlier here. My assumption is that a majority of the section didn't go for biglaw during EIW (which I've captured in the spreadsheet by designating "Unknowns" as "Willful poverty seekers"). From all appearances, it's a third-tier law school embedded within an otherwise decently placing T14. Prospectives should treat it as such and join one of the normal sections instead.

You've almost proven exactly the point that you're trying to argue against. Admittedly, this does tend to show that PI self-selection is real. If you treat non-school-funded ftlt pi/gov as a "successful outcome" and add it to GULC's bl + fc stat for c/o 2015 you get 58.1%. As a comparison, isolate the pi self-selectors by taking all of the full-time/non-transfer sections except section c. I'm excluding the transfer/part-time sections since they probably have their own pi self-selectors. In sections 1, 2, and 4, students for whom we can confidently say that the almost none are pi self-selectors, 56.9% got bl + fc. Compare that to the 58.1% you get if you just take GULC's c/o 2015 bl + fc + pi + gov - sf. Your data implies that GULC's true biglaw success rate is 56.9% for students targeting biglaw, which is a hair lower (1.2%) than the estimate provided by bl + fc + pi + gov - sf. That stat serves as an indicator of a school's true biglaw success rate. Its accuracy in this case weighs against claims that it systematically overcounts the success rate of schools with significant pi/gov representation, and weighs in favor of the claim that the generic go-to biglaw stat, bl + fc (which gives GULC 44.1%), systematically undercounts the success rate of schools like GULC. The self-selection position looks a lot stronger than the anti-self-selection position.

However, Georgetown's outcomes still lag considerably behind the rest of the t-14 even if we account for self selection. Here's a metric that counts pi/gov on parity with biglaw. (It also partially counts 51 - 100 firms, 101-250 firms, and, to the extent that the following two categories are published, non-biglaw jobs that pay 80k+ and SSC clerkships. These jobs aren't worthless to students targeting biglaw, they're just worth less, so they should be counted, but at a discount. There are also a bunch of one-off minor decisions, like subtracting NU's JD/MBA class from its numerators and denominators and counting YHS school-funded jobs as equivalent to non-school funded pi/gov jobs.)

Good Outcomes% averaged across the last 5 years -
Yale: 83.41%
Harvard: 81.84%
Stanford: 86.92%
Chicago: 78.25%
Columbia: 83.77%
NYU: 77.81%
Penn: 80.71%
Berkeley: 74.82%
Michigan: 70.59%
UVA: 72.10%
Duke: 74.84%
Northwestern: 75.93%
Cornell: 73.47%
GULC: 59.34%

Alternatively, you could go with a school's law related jobs%. Essentially, this is ftlt bpr/jda subtract school funded jobs (except for YHS). I like this stat because the inherent implication of outcome based metrics is that some outcomes have a consensus preference over other outcomes. You can spin a yarn about why someone might choose to work in a lower paying small firm job (getting a foothold in a competitive practice area/market, or bonus potential and income growth potential that aren't showing up even in the salary data), but it's far more difficult to rationalize outcomes that aren't even related to law. We are talking about law schools, after all. For this reason, law related jobs% likely has the fewest inversions of any metric relative to a perfect sorting of actual student preferences.

Law related jobs% averaged across the last 5 years -
Yale: 88.26%
Harvard: 93.40%
Stanford: 93.47%
Chicago: 87.90%
Columbia: 87.74%
NYU: 84.81%
Penn: 92.16%
Berkeley: 84.81%
Michigan: 85.29%
UVA: 83.14%
Duke: 89.63%
Northwestern: 84.52%
Cornell: 84.13%
GULC: 72.85%

On either of these metrics, Georgetown is >10% lower than the next lowest t-14 school. Counting pi/gov has the effect of helping the schools ranked 12, 13, and 14 on bl + fc to catch up the the rest of the t-14. In the case of Berkeley and Michigan, the effect is enough that the two schools are fundamentally comparable to other lower t-14 schools. GULC gains just as much ground on the rest of the lower t-14, but that still leaves it 10% behind the pack. If that isn't evidence enough, its law related jobs% is also about 10% behind. So, contrary to your claim that, after accounting for the selection bias in section 3, GULC is a decently placing T14, there's still a big difference in value, even after accounting for pi/gov self-selection. And your spreadsheets don't do anything to counter that conclusion. They end up producing approximately the same percentage that GULC gets on bl + fc + pi + gov - sf.