@spayurpets: There’s no causation mistake here. That’s very easy to control for. You simply need a data set where one factor varies among a population. Spend some time on LST looking at numbers (e.g., [here[/url] is last year’s UPenn admissions). If there were other, important factors, you’d expect to see people with low numbers nevertheless gaining admission based on those factors. The only time you see that, however, is for URMs.
As I mentioned above, another easy way to tell what law schools care about is to see what they pay for. If law schools really did care about amazing softs, you would expect them to offer scholarships to attract those students. Instead, scholarship money goes directly to the students with the best numbers.
You also have the problem of answering why law schools would care about softs (or, to HappyAlumnus, undergrad name). Law schools are well aware that consumers are totally rankings-driven. Rankings depend primarily on GPA/LSAT (and more recently, employment stats). Why would schools trade for things that consumers don’t care about in exchange for something they do? Obviously there’s some marketing potential in extolling how well-rounded your students are, but any student body of sufficient size will come with plenty of that (especially when it comes to law students, who tend to be overachievers).
I think maybe the root of your mistake is in your conception of how much competition there is. There are not thousands of 173 LSAT scores. A 173 is the [url=<a href=“http://www.cambridgelsat.com/resources/data/lsat-percentiles-table/%5D98.9th”>http://www.cambridgelsat.com/resources/data/lsat-percentiles-table/]98.9th percentile](Recently Updated J.D. Profiles | Law School Numbers). There were [url=<a href=“http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/lsats-administered%5D21,803%5B/url”>http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/lsats-administered]21,803[/url] tests administered in June 2014. That means 240 people got a 173 or better. Just for reference, Harvard’s class size alone is more than [url=<a href=“http://www.law.harvard.edu/prospective/jd/apply/classprofile.html%5Dtwice%5B/url”>http://www.law.harvard.edu/prospective/jd/apply/classprofile.html]twice[/url] that. Add to that your assumption that they have 3.9s, and you cut that that population in half (at the very least). Competition for students with those scores is fierce. Schools can’t afford to care about anything besides the numbers because good numbers are so scarce.
The term “T14” came about because the same 14 schools have stayed in the top 14 places since USNWR began ranking them. The T14 have moved within the top 14, and every so often UT or UCLA will tie for 14th, but the T14 remain in those spaces. As it happens, employment figures drop significantly upon leaving the T14, so it’s a doubly useful term.
Perhaps you can explain something to me though, as I am a bit confused. For all your claims that my data doesn’t count, you haven’t actually elucidated any particular issues with it. I tend to avoid disregarding data based on the fiat of internet people, so do you have anything substantive supporting your claims? This is the same problem HappyAlumnus has. He talks a lot about what law schools allegedly care about, but when it comes time to demonstrate he is singularly silent. I am curious whether you fall into the same pattern.
For example, how is it “nonsense” to say that BigLaw hires [url=<a href=“http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/02/nlj-law-school.html%5Ddifferentially%5B/url”>http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/02/nlj-law-school.html]differentially[/url] from different schools, particularly the T14? That is clearly reflected in all the data I’ve seen (and what I’ve just linked). Do you have any hiring statistics showing otherwise, or is this just another “trust me, I’m a lawyer”?