LSAC and Predicting Applicants for 2016-17, Part 2

The LSAC has posted its second report of this admissions season on applicants for fall 2016.  The LSAC is reporting that "As of 12/11/15, there are 92,708 2016 applications submitted by 16,817 applicants for the 2016–2017 academic year. Applicants are up 3.4% and applications are down 0.5% from 2015–2016.  Last year at this time, we had 29% of the preliminary final applicant count."  Based on this preliminary data, one would predict that there will be around 57,990 applicants for fall 2016.

I think it's too early to tell what's going to happen next fall, but this seems to confirm my speculation from earlier in the year that we've at least leveled off in applicants.  Whether there will be much of an improvement remains to be seen; I'm skeptical of this.  Applicants need to be very attentive to the quality of the law school education they're going to receive and their employment prospects.  Along those lines, here's a link to a paper I put up last summer that ranks law schools using median LSAT scores of their entering class in fall 2014, along with the percentage of their class of 2014 employed in full-time, JD-required jobs nine months after graduation, and recent citations to their flagship law reviews.

The first post in this series is here and the next post in this series is here.  Also, a post on the most recent data on LSAT administrations is here.

Comments

[Circular Rankings Skeptic]

Al, we love you, but for crying out loud, please stop promoting that ridiculous paper. Seriously, citations to the flagship law journal?

[anon]

Hyper privileged over paid (white?) failed academic Paul Campos writes: "Of course there's a long tradition in American culture of hyper-privileged white males lecturing women and ethnic minorities about what policies are actually good for women and ethnic minorities, and then claiming that any disagreement with the views of the former is "really" motivated by racism or sexism."

He knows whereof he speaks having declared that the black leaders of Black Lives Matter are too privileged to be the victims of racism: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/11/identity-politics-and-the-erasure-of-class-from-american-political-discourse

And who can forget his snidely implied suggestion that the alleged imbalance between supply and demand in the new JD market could be solved by keeping women out of law school?

[Al Brophy]

Thanks for the kind words, generally.

I know that a lot of people don't like the use of law journal citations. Need I remind everyone that they're highly correlated with US News peer assessment scores? (I also have a ranking in that paper of schools based on two variables -- LSAT median and employed at nine months in full-time, bar pass required jobs -- for those who just can't stand the thought of looking at a school's intellectual output as a measure of the intellectual life at the school.)

And on a more serious note, I need to blog some more about journal citations and school quality in the spring. I think there are a couple of key grounds for opposition. Some (I'm guessing not you, circular), is based on generalized opposition to use of scholarship as a measure of quality. Other opposition is based on the idea that this doesn't measure quality of the school -- for instance because it reflects on what the students pick and are able to recruit as scholarship rather than the articles of faculty and students on campus.

[anon]

Things do seem to be slowly rebounding. However things proceed, the admissions drop likely was beneficial, in the same way that recessions are sometimes good for the macro economy. In this case, the curriculum, transparency, tuition, emphasis on practice/experience, and hiring/retention all will experience marked and beneficial change.

[Derek Tokaz]

Al,

I'm not sure being a good proxy for the US News peer assessment score is a very good defense of a ranking criteria.

It's not even a measure of the school's "intellectual output." It's a measure of the intellectual output of professors at other schools, since you're measuring cites to the school's journal, not cites to the papers of the school's professors.

[Jeff Lipshaw]

All of these rankings are proxies for "brand," a subset of goodwill, which in turn is the value of the enterprise that exceeds its tangible assets. I have sneaking suspicion (ooh, here's an idea for a study) that you could list all of the ABA accredited law schools, give the names to a general population of college educated people (not just lawyers) and end up with a ranking that is closely correlated with US News.

[Derek Tokaz]

Jeff,

The value of an enterprise exceeding its tangible assets would be interesting if a law school were up for sale. But, it doesn't seem like a useful thing for prospective students to know about.

[Jojo]

Jeff,

Of course the Emperor has no clothes. Law school rankings are pretty much meaningless, but that has more to do with law school than with ranking criteria. At the end of the day all law schools deliver basically the same product -- a Langdellian socratic inquiry for 3 years. It's a commodity, and the research that occurs there is neither scientific nor valuable to the market so it has little objective value to those outside of law schools. Note that I did not say it has no value -- only that it has no commercial or scientific or broad value and much of it has little value to the practicing side of the legal profession.

Your point is well taken that ranking or perceived quality is based on brand, exclusivity, status, prestige, alumni, etc. But so what? The broader reading would be that the reason for is not that everyone is overlooking your diamond in the rough that given the chance would shine like Cardozo, Frankfurter, and Darrow combined. Rather it is that there are no diamonds in the rough because they're all the same. And if a diamond is rough, then it is not exclusive or prestigious, which is all law school offers anyway. No one leaves law school practice ready these days. No one leaves law school with so much value-added insight that they take government or law or politics immediately by storm. No one has break out research in law school that fundamentally alters the way we view law or changes the way it is practiced. There is no there there in law, the way that there is in the sciences or in other professions. That's a reflection on both law and law school. It's just the facts.

[Matt]

I'm curious where your prediction of 57,990 applicants for this cycle comes from, considering last year there were only 37,000 matriculants. That seems like a massive jump.

[Jeff Lipshaw]

Derek, I think goodwill in the form of brand is unquestionably a factor in how prospective students make up their minds, how firms decide where to interview, where judges decide to hire their clerks, etc. Why buy Advil rather than CVS ibuprofen? People do, and Advil as brand has value. Sometimes the brand actually signifies a quality difference in the product. (I always buy the generic ibuprofen, but I didn't choose a law school that way.)

To somebody's point, do you really get a better legal education at - let's pick a couple places randomly - Yale or Stanford versus, say, UNLV or Marquette? Nevertheless, is there any question that the brand values of the former are greater than the latter, and that people choose based on it? Yale and Stanford are going to say there really is a difference - you are buying a Rolex versus a Seiko (if in fact Rolexes are better than Seikos - I'm not a watch guy so I don't know).

[Paul Campos]

Matt: Matriculation totals at present can be estimated by multiplying total applicants by .8 and then multiplying that figure by .87. This is because the overall admissions rate for applicants is hovering around 80%, and 86% to 88% of people who are admitted to at least one school end up enrolling somewhere. So these very preliminary numbers suggest the 2016 class will have a little less than 40K matrics, i.e., the same number as in 2013, after totals of 38K and 37K the previous two years.

[anon]

Hyper privileged over paid (white?) failed academic Paul Campos writes: "Of course there's a long tradition in American culture of hyper-privileged white males lecturing women and ethnic minorities about what policies are actually good for women and ethnic minorities, and then claiming that any disagreement with the views of the former is "really" motivated by racism or sexism."

He knows whereof he speaks having declared that the black leaders of Black Lives Matter are too privileged to be the victims of racism: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2015/11/identity-politics-and-the-erasure-of-class-from-american-political-discourse

And who can forget his snidely implied suggestion that the alleged imbalance between supply and demand in the new JD market could be solved by keeping women out of law school?

[confused by your post]

Prediction: In the end the total applicants for this cycle will be up by a bit over 5% from last year. Schools are getting much better at recruiting late in the admissions cycle.

[Paul Campos]

CBYP: I think that's a good estimate.