Law school admission and elite colleges

Data10
Mon, 28 Jun 2021 20:23:35 +0000

CU123:

In your own analysis you mention geographical references, but then why is UCB overrepresented and Stanford underrepresented (identical in geographic location). You fail to take into account that UCLA is #14, a significant step down from Yale or Stanford

To start with, you need to consider the different applicant pool sizes. There were 109 law school applicants from Stanford (all law schools, not just UCLA). 6 matriculated to UCLA, so 6/109 = 5.5% of law school applicants. Berkeley had 524 law school applicants. 20 matriculated UCLA, so 20/524 = 4% of law school applicants. When you control for sample size, law school applicants who attended undergrad at Stanford were slightly more likely to matriculate to UCLA law than law school applicants who attended Berkeley for undergrad. This makes sense when you consider that undergraduates who attend Stanford average much higher LSAT/GPA stats than undergraduates from Berkeley. A much larger portion of Stanford kids have stats in the range for which admission to UCLA law is likely.

That said, if you review my original post, you’ll see I mentioned several contributing factors including UCLA being a step down from Yale or Stanford, and how that influences matriculation decisions. Distance is one of many contributing factors – not the only factor that has any influence on matriculations besides favoritism of law schools towards particular undergrad colleges.