The most selective law school in the country isn’t Yale, Stanford or Harvard. It isn’t Chicago or NYU either. Actually, they haven’t even held a class yet. Yesterday UC-Irvine issued a press release announcing that it was the most selective law school in the country, surpassing all the top law schools, as UC-I admitted only 4% of their applicants for their first class, the class of 2012.
A couple of caveats though. First, UC-I’s incoming class is only 68 students. That makes it significantly easier to be selective when you’re filling less than 70 spots. Just to think of the numbers, to maintain a 4% acceptance rate with 200 admitted students, you need to get 5,000 applications. And if you’re filling 200 seats, you would admit even more students (since some go elsewhere), so that’s even more applications you have to receive.
Second, Irvine is offering free tuition in a state where even the public law schools cost over $30,000 for California residents. I would say that’s largely the reason for the high number of applicants for a school that isn’t ABA accredited yet (you must be in the second year of operation to even start the process).
How meaningful is selectivity, after the jump… Anyone who’s taken even a small amount of time to dig into the US News rankings will see that some of the numbers are subject to a great deal of manipulation. Two of the easiest are selectivity (the number of applicants who are admitted) and yield (the number of admitted students who actually enroll). The theory goes that the best law schools will attract more applicants than they know what to do with and that everyone they admit will come.
Manipulating these numbers are very easy. All you have to do to increase selectivity is to increase the number of applications submitted. So schools offer fee waivers and encourage people to apply even though there might be no spots left open. Yield is manipulated through the waitlist. Instead of accepting everyone who makes the grade, some students, including those that would be near the top of the class in terms of GPA and LSAT, are waitlisted and then their interest is gauged to see if they would come or what they need to be offered. Then they are admitted off the waitlist.
Because these numbers are so easily manipulated, they don’t mean much. Being the most selective law school in the country is a nice press release, and Irvine did get a pretty high quality of applicant, but does that mean the school is better than Yale or Stanford? I think we would agree that it doesn’t. That said, does the fact that Irvine (intentionally or unintentionally) manipulated the numbers mean it isn’t a high quality law school? Absolutely not. The measurements don’t make the law school. There are plenty of schools that rank very high on a lot of meaningless metrics, just like there are 7-foot tall people who are awful at basketball. UC-Irvine is like a raw prospect right now, and it remains to be seen if it can develop into a polished product.
Offer of Free Law School Allows UC Irvine to be Choosy [ABA Journal] UC Irvine School of Law – More Selective than Yale? Zot! [WSJ Law Blog]
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