Law School Admissions: Application Decline, Choosing Schools, Diversity

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.”