A few articles of interest to law school applicants have come across my desk in the last few days, and I wanted to share them with you.

• CollegeJournal has an excellent article on choosing law school, especially if you are not headed towards the top 10.  Touching on several of the points that I have raised in the past, "How to Get a Better Job,Reduce Law-School Debt" takes a strategic, long-term view of choosing a school.
  
• UCLA's Daily Bruin gives stats in "Number of law school applicants on the decline" a topic that I have also written about here previously. The article predicts that this will be the third straight year of decline in law school applicant numbers. Ironically, however, that decline has not led to reduced numbers of applications submitted to most law schools. According to the Bruin, "79 percent of the law schools surveyed by Kaplan reported that the shrinking applicant pool has no effect upon the competitiveness of their admissions process." In fact the UCLA School of Law reports "an increase of 11.5 percent in its number of applicants," a one point increase in the median LSAT score of students who enrolled  to 167, and also a hike in its median GPA to 3.72.
• The New York Times reports in "In Students’ Eyes, Look-Alike Lawyers Don’t Make the Grade" that a group of Stanford law students has set up a site ranking and grading law firms for diversity in both associate and partner ranks.  The site, building a better legal profession, allows you to compare firms on geographic, diversity, and quality of life criteria. The group, which has an annoying preference for all lower case in its copy, is "a national grassroots movement that seeks market-based workplace reforms in large private law firms. by publicizing firms' self-reported data on billable hours, pro bono participation, and demographic diversity, we draw attention to the differences between these employers. we encourage those choosing between firms — students deciding who to work for after graduation, corporate clients deciding who to hire, and universities deciding who to allow on campus for interviews — to exercise their market power and engage only with the firms that demonstrate a genuine commitment to these issues."

 

Two years ago I attended Tuck's first Conference of International Educational Advisors. I went with the purpose of  learning more about Tuck. And I did learn a lot about Tuck, as expected, but I discovered that I enjoyed meeting my competition and professional colleagues much more than I anticipated. The networking was great! 

I have also watched the educational advising industry explode over the roughly 13 years that I have been in it. When I first started Accepted, most people thought I was crazy. Today, new "consultancies" are popping up like mushrooms after it rains. This growth has fueled  concerns about quality and integrity in the industry.

As an outgrowth of the Tuck conference and the growth of the admissions consulting industry, in late 2005 I proposed to GMAC that it host a panel about admissions consulting. GMAC accepted my proposal, and last June I was part of a panel presentation at the GMAC Conference entitled "Admissions Consultants: Love 'em, Hate 'em, Use 'em." On the panel with me were Ricardo Betti of MBA Empresarial, Maxx Duffy of Maxx Associates, and Graham Richmond of Clear Admit.

In response to feedback at the conference and in recognition of a need for a professional graduate admissions consultant association, the four panelists from the GMAC conference have founded the Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants (AIGAC):

• To establish standards of practice for top graduate admissions consultants.
  
• To create a recognized emblem of professional quality and integrity -- AIGAC's Stamp of Excellence -- for applicants and the larger admissions community.
  
• To provide a forum for member networking and professional development.
  
• To offer schools a convenient conduit for communication with consultants and a means for distinguishing between consultants who adhere to the standards and those who don't.

On behalf of the AIGAC board, I am proud to announce that AIGAC is open for business. As its first president, I join the other board members in inviting admissions consultants who share its vision, meet its requirements, and adhere to its standards to become members. Join the board, other AIGAC members and me in taking our industry to improved levels of service and professionalism. If you have any questions about AIGAC, please feel free to call me at the AIGAC office (916) 446-3670. If I am not available, please leave a message and some times when I can call you back. Please also feel free to email me with your questions.

I also invite applicants, as you approach the 2008 season, to look for AIGAC's Stamp of Excellence. Those  consultants who display it have met AIGAC's membership requirements and agreed to operate in accordance with AIGAC's Principles of Good Practice. That emblem means professional quality for you.

Schools, in general, are supportive of our efforts. Here are a couple of responses that we have received:

• From Rose Martinelli, Associate Dean for Student Recruitment and Admissions, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business: "candidates may need guidance in exploring career options, identifying appropriate programs and determining the best way to position their candidacy. An organization like AIGAC assures both schools and candidates that there are industry standards in place and consulting firms linked to this organization are following ethical practices."
• From Dawna Clarke, Director of Admissions, The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth: "At Tuck, we embrace relationships with educational advisors around the world. The advice they provide to prospective students is mutually beneficial to the students as well as the schools they represent....I applaud the current effort of this group to come up with ethical standards of behavior."

For more on AIGAC's birth, please see the press release and the post on Clear Admit's blog.

A few disparate items of interest to law school applicants and students:

• Associate salaries are going up, but the summit differs based on location. NYC first year associates at top firms will be cashing in $160,000  a year. California firms will stick to the meager $145,000 paycheck. Many assume that California firms will also maintain their slightly more modest billable hours requirement when compared to NY law firms. For details, please see "Associates React to Jones Day and Weil Gotshal Salary Raises."
• I was recently interviewed by a reporter for the National Jurist and decided to check out the magazine. Its articles were informative, and I recommend it for law school applicants and students. This month's issue had articles on study abroad options during law school, the influence of the rankings on law school admissions practice, and legal clinics and their role in legal education at different schools.
  
• Fox in "Public Service Post" lays out the pros and cons of attending UCLA Law School after his first year there.
• For those of you who are curious about the Daily Journal article on law school admissions consultants and don't have access to those articles, you can have some sense of it from the Daily Trojan article, "Law applicants look online for help"  which draws extensively from the original piece.