gprime

It seems to me we're a bit screwed. WashU students seem to be underperforming as far as law school admissions go. Two things really hammered this point home to me recently:

1) Harvard Law's overall acceptance rate is somewhere between 12 and 13% according to the stats I saw most recently. Whether there have been more recent numbers that I've missed, I can't say. What I do know, because this was covered at their law school admissions panel earlier this month, is that last year we had 59 HLS applicants. Only five were accepted. That is a mere 8.47%.

2) Yale also just had a law school admissions event here. But, instead of sending an associate/assistant director of admissions who is actually involved in making admissions decision and is a full time paid staff member, they sent a second year Yale Law school student. Evidently, they've decided we're not worth the time of their higher ranking staff.

All of this has me a bit concerned. I'm curious to hear what others think.

IvyLongShot

I believe we are screwed with law school admissions as well. It's more about timing than anything else. When the economy is bad, people go back to (or stay in) college. Too bad I didn't figure out I wanted to go to law school about 5 years ago!

vbball90

i don't think Yale's lack of sending an actual admissions dean/counselor reflects poorly on Wash U:
1) we don't know who they usually send to these things, and who they sent to Wash U's peer schools
2) does Yale really need to "recruit" more kids from top-tier schools like Wash U? it seems that we're already sending them lots of applications.... if we sent 59 to Harvard Law, then it stands reasonable to assume that we probably sent a similar amount to Yale Law. considering Wash U isn't a pre-law magnet school (we're pretty good, but Wash U is not THE destination for pre-law like it is for pre-med and other areas here), I think that 59 applications to Harvard is rather a lot. instead, why not send an actual Yale admissions dean to lower-tier colleges to encourage a greater amount of kids apply. if I was on the Yale Law admissions committee, I think my recruitment efforts would be much more effective and productive if I went to either a big state school of lesser-populated states (like North Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, South Carolina, etc etc), a smaller regional public school like Northern Arizona University, or a smaller private school far away from the east coast like Occidental in California. I'm just naming schools to illustrate my point, that how much more headway can Yale Law School make at schools like WUSTL/Harvard/Northwestern/Princeton/etc? I dunno, just my point of view.

vbball90

Another thing I just thought of... we also don't know the quality of the 59 applicants who applied to Harvard Law. Maybe 54 of them were REALLY reaching, and the 5 that got in were like the only amazing ones in that applicant pool? clearly it's not going to be that extreme, but we really don't know what kind of kids applied. it could have been a bad year, and maybe a bunch ended up accepted to Stanford or Yale or Chicago or other great schools?

One thing I've noticed about Wash U's advisors, is that they don't tell kids where you can or can't apply. I know that at other colleges, the advisors basically say to kids "if you have this GPA and this test score, you can't apply to medical or law school" (or, "you can only apply to this tier of schools").