<p>Actually, Cue7 hasn’t given us the relative admit rates for Chicago. He has speculated that they are low because the data isn’t available. I know it must be higher than the 2-3 per year to Top 3 schools, because I personally know that many myself, and I’m relatively certain I don’t know every Chicago grad who was admitted to a Top 3 law school.</p>
<p>I don’t want to get into a nickpicky debate or a personal back-and-forth, but I want to set the record straight on the size of Top 14 law schools, since someone called the credibility of my earlier post into question based on that.</p>
<p>According to the Yale placement document attached to this thread, the Top 10 Law Schools (using US News rankings, for the purposes of this situation, with ties) have the following class sizes:
Yale (189); Stanford (170); Harvard (556); Columbia (384); NYU (448); UC Berkeley (Boalt) (240); University of Chicago (184); University of Pennsylvania (250); University of Michigan (361); Duke (205); Northwestern (242); Virginia (370)</p>
<p>So there are 4 of the Top 10 at around 200 or lower (Cue7 omitted Duke at 205). The average class size at a Top 10 Law School is 299.92 students. That’s closer to 200 than the 450-550 range mentioned by Cue7. And 8 of the 12 are smaller than 300 students per class. So for me to say “most of the Top 10” admit fewer than 200 was an exaggeration, but not by that much. Saying that the majority admit fewer than 300 would be correct in every objective sense of the statement. Citing 450-550 as a common class size is far more misleading – only one Top 10 school falls in that range. Adding in Georgetown (585) and Cornell (198) moves the average up to 312, but also adds another sub-200 student school. I don’t mind having the exaggeration called out, but please don’t use even more inaccurate information to make the exaggeration seem much greater than it actually was. </p>
<p>On a more substantive matter with respect to this thread, there are only a limited set of students at any school who have a chance for admission to Top 10 law schools, based on GPA and LSAT scores (or the reasoning aptitude to get an outstanding LSAT score). Does the comparative grade inflation of some schools help? Maybe a little, but it also puts more pressure on other parts of an application. Still, in my experience Chicago grads with solid records and a excellent LSAT scores don’t have trouble with law school admissions. I don’t know the GPAs of my acquaintances, since it’s pretty rare to share that info at Chicago, but their general success rate suggests that Chicago grads who have adequate stats have no trouble gaining admissions. Of the 20+ personal acquaintances I know who were admitted to Top 7 schools straight from undergrad, only one other one was a Student Marshal, and a some weren’t even Phi Beta Kappa (~Top 10%). So we are talking about sub-3.8 GPAs. I know this is very anecdotal, but its the most substantive data about Chicago’s law school placement rate anyone has offered on this thread.</p>
<p>And the constant calls for raw numbers wouldn’t necessarily settle anything. If fewer outstanding Chicago grads apply to law school, then fewer students will be admitted. There is a lot more nuance to how well a college builds the path to law school than the simple quantity of graduates it sends to given law schools. </p>
<p>I’ve offered a plausible explanation for why the raw numbers could be lower – fewer Chicago grads apply to law school. I don’t know if that explains the entirety of the lower total placement (if Chicago’s placement even is all that low), but I’m sure it accounts for some of it. Chicago is very well-known for producing an inordinately large number of graduates who go into academia, as well as being decidedly non pre-professional. It’s not that you can’t take a route into a professional school. It’s that fewer students choose to do so (in fact, many students choose Chicago precisely because the focus is on education and intellectual challenge rather than finding a job/profession). And there are certainly plenty of Chicago graduates moving on to very good law schools in any case.</p>