The point was more about ABA numbers clerkship being woefully misleading. But I get what you are saying.dabigchina wrote: We should compare apples to apples. I'd be curious what the total number of michigan grads clerking in any given year is.
Regardless, the question is not whether Michigan is a better school than CLS (they are about equal, with a slight edge to CLS because of biglaw placement). The question is whether (i) CLS is worth the extra cost and (ii) whether it would open any doors that michigan would not . I believe the answer to both are no.
For the record, I paid an extra 60k a year to go to CLS. Personally, I felt like this was not really worth it, but to each his own.
For those who are curious, Michigan self reports their 2015-2017 numbers here: https://www.law.umich.edu/careers/clerk ... 5-2017.pdf. They don't have a convenient summary, but doing a keyword search, you get 65 hits for "U.S. Court of Appeals" and 136 hits for "U.S. District Court." The same time-frame at Columbia you had 100 Court of Appeals clerkships and 183 District court clerkships.
You can make a "fair" comparison by adjusting the numbers based on class size (since Michigan has about 300 students/class and Columbia has about 400). Running the numbers, if Michigan was the same size as Columbia you would expect about 86 appellate clerks and 181 district court clerks. This suggests Michigan has similar placement power in district courts, and slightly less placement power for appellate clerks.
Suffice to say that that the average kid isn't losing out on much by going to Michigan. It's certainly not worth a ~$160k difference in price if clerking is your end-goal.
