Today the ABA published the disclosures that all ABA-accredited law schools have made this year under Standard 509:
https://abarequireddisclosures.org/Disclosure509.aspx
Read all about your (least) favorite law school. Feel free to post analyses here.
Let's recognize these "disclosures" for what they really are: elaborate fiction designed to keep the ABA in its role of accrediting law schools. In any real sense, who goes to law school to get a "JD preferred" job, or other "professional" job? And how have the law schools padded their numbers this year; any more 12 month temporary JD required jobs, anyone?
ReplyDeleteAnd why are law schools required to publish this "information"? The correct answer: because of the serial lying engaged in by so many law schools about job statistics and salaries. Who can forget the 99% employment rate at over 100K/year?
And here's the brutal reality-no other profession requires its schools to prepare and publish documents like this; can you even imagine a medical school touting its "MD preferred" jobs?
Simply put, these are more proof of how rotten the profession is.
What the law skules admit in their "disclosures" is more worthy of attention than what they try to cover up. Notice things like low enrollment (anything below 75 or so spells trouble) and piss-poor LSAT scores.
DeleteI'd always wondered how their claimed statistics weren't fraud. They're absolutely material omissions or misleading statements that a reasonable person would rely on. Further their targets are younger people, the profession itself insists clients are always unsophisticated and must be protected, but law students are clearly not lawyers yet and clearly the schools themselves have an advantage in information.
DeleteAfter the scam was exposed, the average to above average prospective students opted out and the quality of student collapsed for most schools. The elite law schools, all 5 or so of them, can still fill seats with quality students. Everyone else simply reaches very far down the barrel, scraping the bottom. But we are told it wasn't material and reasonable people never cared.
I remember some graduates did file lawsuits, the courts were busy engaging in the same ridiculous "stretching the truth" nonsense that Obi-wan was fond of. Somehow the career doc reviewer was a gainfully employed attorney that could be on partner track. The law schools would simultaneously laugh at the graduates while talking up their outcomes. I'd have to say the whole of law is shady and perhaps lay people have the right idea with their distaste of all lawyers, which I take to include these idiotic judges as well. No intelligent person should have one iota of faith in the legal system.
Quick look - Appalachia is somehow gaining students. Florida Coastal didn't even bother to fill out the form. They are closing down but still have students.
ReplyDeleteStill, Appalachian got only 62 students this year, which is well under Old Guy's estimated sustainable minimum of 75. And the LSAT scores were 146/147/152.
DeleteSimilarly small is Ohio Northern, with 63 new students (146/148/153).
Odious Cooley, still ridiculously listed as "Western Michigan University" even though the right to use that name is approaching its end, got 184 new students. But it has two campuses—one in Lansing, one in Tampa Bay.
Glad to see my Toilet (Chicago-Kent) is now charging $50,000/year in tuition. Remember, Chicago-Kent is one of about 8 law schools in the Chicago area and the graduates have to compete with both the U of Chicago and Northwestern for jobs.
ReplyDeleteGood luck with that, C-K grads, and good luck paying off $200,000+ in student loans as you're busy filling that order of fries!
Yes, there are eight in the Chicago area, if your idea of the Chicago area extends down to Urbana-Champaign—and until a few years ago there was one in Valparaiso, Indiana, sort of on the periphery of Chicagoland. Of those, Chicago-K[u]nt is one of a half-dozen weaklings, all handily eclipsed by the U of Chicago and Northwestern, and even by the U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (not to be confused with the "U of Illinois at Chicago", which is just hell-pit John Marshall under a new signboard).
DeleteOld Guy will put it starkly: in all of Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, and Kansas combined, the only law schools worth attending are the U of Chicago and Northwestern, both of which are located in the Chicago metro area. Note that that list of states covers the entire Midwest outside Michigan (which has one law school that is worth attending—and no, Cooley, you ain't it).
Drake:
ReplyDelete2021: 537 Applications, 357 Accepted, 119 Enrolled. LSAT 158/155/152
2020: 447 Applications, 309 Accepted, 100 Enrolled. LSAT 158/155/152
Applications up 20 Percent over 1 year, BUT:
2011: 1,026 Applications, 557 Accepted, 142 Enrolled. LSAT 158/156/153
Applications are DOWN 47 percent from 10 years ago.
U of Iowa meanwhile had a 40 percent increase in applications from last year (1,461 compared to 1,061) and LSAT scores SOARED from 163/161/156 up to 164/163/160 in 2021.
Creighton actually fell a bit.
Iowa is about 30th ranked, Drake is 100-something ranked. The word is out, avoid the Third Tier Toilets, in law school it's 50 and up or don't go.
Last year saw a big increase in applications to law schools, unfortunately. So did this year: first-year enrollment went up 12% from 2020. Lambs to the slaughter.
DeleteDreck and Cretin are nasty dumps—not quite über-toilets, Old Guy admits, but still very much to be avoided. Note that both of them buy the top end of their classes: one student in eight at Cretin gets "more than full tuition", according to our friends at Law School Transparency, and a similar fraction at Dreck gets the same or at least full tuition. Of course, "more than full tuition" is a polite way to say "a bribe". Students who take the bribe should understand that they are being used for their LSAT scores (to a smaller extent for their undergraduate GPAs).
As for fourth-tier Iowa (recall Old Guy's seven-tier scale), last year it gave a fifth of the class a discount amounting to full tuition or "more than full tuition" (a bribe). People who get that much just might consider going to the U of Iowa. I still advise caution, but it cannot be said that Iowa is totally hopeless. Rather, it's one of those rare non-élite schools that combine good figures for employment (mainly in Iowa and the surrounding area) with reasonable standards of admission and the possibility of attending free of charge (or even with a bribe) if one hits the mid-160s on the LSAT. Indeed, Iowa is a better choice than faux-prestigious Vanderbilt.
So if you were foolishly thinking of attending Dreck or Creighton, get your LSAT score up to the mid-160s and try for a bribe at the U of Iowa.
Creighton:
ReplyDelete2021: 693 Applications, 460 Admits, 146 Students. LSAT 157/153/150
2020: 772 Applications, 486 Admits, 130 Students, LSAT 157/152/150
2011: 1,214 Applications, 705 Admits, 135 Students, LSAT 155/152/150
Southern Illinois-Carbondale:
2021: 456 Applications, 270 Admits, 87 Students. LSAT 151/149/147
2020: 456 Applications, 277 Admits, 91 Students. LSAT 152/150/147
2011: 699 Applications, 353 Admits, 120 Students LSAT 156/153/151
(Note the dangerously low LSAT numbers)
Northern Illinois:
Delete2021: 118 students, LSAT 152/148/146
2020: 123 students, LSAT 151/149/147
2011: 103 students, LSAT 155/152/150
So I went into this list thinking "I know these job numbers are all inflated by the law schools, so they can't be that bad." I looked at one local school, and over 1/3 of the class appeared to be unemployed. That shocks the conscience. I think that more and more "law students" are simply college grads who don't want to work, and would rather spend 3 more years living large off of student loans that they will never repay than working an actual, you know, "job".
ReplyDeleteJust a sample:
DeleteWestern State University: 36.8% unemployed, 17.2% employed outside law; total 54.0%:
https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/schools/westernstate/jobs
Western New England Univerity: 31.8% unemployed, 21.6% employed outside law; total 53.4%:
https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/schools/westernnewengland/jobs
Western State University (are you detecting a pattern among schools named "Western"?): 36.8% unemployed, 17.2% employed outside law; total 54.0%:
https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/schools/westernstate/jobs
Cooley (continuing the pattern, if we note that it still goes by "Western Michigan University"!): 26.2% unemployed, 25.6% employed outside law; total 51.8%:
https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/schools/cooley/jobs
Golden Gate University: 27.4% unemployed, 33.1% employed outside law; total 60.5%:
https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/schools/goldengate/jobs
North Carolina Central University: 27.6% unemployed, 48.3% employed outside law; total 75.9%:
https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/schools/nccu/jobs
Appalachian School of Law: 46.2% unemployed, 19.2% employed outside law; total 65.4%:
https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/schools/appalachian/jobs
Southern Illinois University: 40.6% unemployed, 7.9% employed outside law; total 48.5%:
https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/schools/siu/jobs
Texas Southern University: 33.5% unemployed, 22.5% employed outside law; total 56.0%:
https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/schools/texassouthern/jobs
Old Guy does not claim that these are the worst.
People go to these and other über-toilets only to end up more likely than not unemployed or else employed in a capacity unrelated to the legal field (at least one that doesn't require a JD—and "employed outside law", especially in the über-toilet context, is much more likely to mean gathering shopping carts than occupying a corner office). And they pay for the ill-fated venture with hundreds of thousands of dollars borrowed through federally guaranteed loans. Cherchez la mother-fucking erreur.
Texas Southern nearly doubled, from 112 new students last year to 194 this year. LSAT scores: 149/151/153. As is mentioned above, 33.5% of the last graduating class were unemployed ten months after graduation, and 22.5% were employed outside law.
ReplyDeleteTo summarize:
ReplyDeleteClasses are bigger, not all that better, the trashcans are still dipping into low LSAT score territory, and more than half the graduates aren't getting real jobs at garbage-tier law schools. So, it's officially "Law School Bubble 2.0"
Even at the "better" law schools, employment is often shockingly poor. I chose Boston College haphazardly as a non-élite school that many would consider prestigious: 9.8% of last year's graduates were unemployed after ten months, and 13.4% were employed outside law, for a total of 23.2% that were not getting real jobs in the legal profession. That's nearly a quarter of the class.
DeleteI'm confused. When I pull up BC it says no one is unemployed and 195 out of 203 are in full time long-term bar passage required jobs. It doesn't have salary data, but firm size is a good proxy for that and 110 out of the 203 graduates are in firms of at least 100 lawyers, with 82 of those at firms of 500+ lawyers. And 4 fedclerks.
DeleteWhen I look at your BC example, I'm not seeing the same data? Cuz thhis looks like pretty much everyone gets a job, and that the odds of a GOOD job are a little better than 50/50.
There's also government/public interest which adds another like 30 people. Of course there's a big difference between DOJ and your local PD office, but still government and public interest tend to have benefits, stability and loan forgiveness that can offset lower salaries. If if we count biglaw and government/public interest then the odds of a good outcome seem to be on the order of 70/30.
Much as I hate the scam, unless I'm somehow reading this wrong it looks like BC is doing pretty good?
Sorry, I got the data on Boston College here:
Deletehttps://www.lawschooltransparency.com/schools/bc/jobs
I think the numbers are even worse. Let's take a crop of 100 law students at a school that places 50 percent of them in legal jobs, as described above. So, 10 percent of them are going to be in the top 10 percent of the class, there goes the first 10 of those 50 jobs for 100 JD's. Say, 15 of the students had a job lined up before starting law school, often taking over Dad's law practice, or simply working directly for one or both parents who run a firm. That's 15 more jobs. We now have a pool of 75 JD's fighting for 25 jobs. Seriously, if you enroll in law school and either 1) Don't graduate in the top ten percent of your class and 2) don't have a job lined up before you graduate, you are likely to have great difficulty securing a job as a lawyer after graduating. I think that too many modern applicants a) all delude themselves that they will grade into the top 10 percent of their class, something which is mathematically impossible, and b) don't understand that when a law school says "over 50 percent of our grads quickly found lawyer jobs) that a statistically large number of those folks had jobs lined up before they set foot on the law school campus. The school didn't "place" these grads in jobs at all, the jobs those grads got had nothing to do with where they went to law school or how well they did there.
ReplyDeleteThat's mostly correct. It is important, however, to note that some of us are damned by a factor such as age-based discrimination, even if (like Old Guy) we finish at or near the top of the class at an élite law school. Also damned, of course, are those who never pass a bar exam.
DeleteOld Guy actually showed up in the data as having found a job—a federal clerkship, to be specific. Once the clerkship was over, however, he was out on his ass. Not even a federal clerkship will overcome the obstacle of age-based discrimination. Indeed, it only marks the recipient as a pointy-headed intellectual and therefore as being undesirable.
Well, isn't not being able to practice law due to not passing a bar exam the way the system is supposed to work? And most bar exams are not particularly difficult compared to most law school curriculums.
DeleteThe bar exam was once the major deterrent for many for attending law school. The fear that they would put the time and money into it and be thwarted at the end by the bar exam. Now the major deterrent is that despite crossing all the hurdles, that employment, legal or otherwise will be denied.
Yes, it's appropriate to keep people out if they cannot pass a bar exam. But many law schools regularly see huge numbers of students fail, mainly because the students never should have been admitted in the first place.
DeleteTo summarize: you can't rely on job placement numbers, as they are skewed by academic all-stars and people who had jobs lined up before starting law schol. If you don't graduate at the very top of your class, and if you don't have a job lined up before starting law school, a very different, much worse, set of numbers govern your job prospects post-graduation.
ReplyDeleteDrake University has turned into quite the Degree Mill generally over the last 10 years. The proliferation of worthless master's degrees in Leadership, or a Master's in Jurisprudence, or an online MBA or MPA program all proclaiming "No Admissions Tests Required!" so you know they're highly rigorous.
ReplyDeleteThey opened an Associate's Degree college called the Bright College, offering a "group-project oriented seminar-style student-centered" program of schlock that teaches nothing.
The undergrad program got rid of Gen Ed requirements and replaced it with the "Drake Curriculum," so instead of a Foreign Language requirement there is a "Global Cultures" requirement, which can be satisfied by sludge like:
EDUC 164/264: Perspectives on Race, Gender, and Culture
EDU 189 Spain and Morocco: Exploring the Intersection of Ethics and Culture
WLC 148: Intercultural Communications
SCSR 114: Rhetorics of Race
HIST 156: Sex, Power, and War in the Aztec Empire
Is it any wonder why college students are too stupid to avoid law school?
One could, and probably would, attend those courses without learning a single thing about any culture in the world today. (The Aztec culture continues in modified form among the Nahua peoples but has been heavily influenced by that of the Spanish invaders who destroyed the Aztec Empire five hundred years ago.) The "Drake Curriculum" looks like yet another attempt to dumb things down and dilute ejookayshun to a fare-thee-well.
DeleteInstead of Chemistry, you can take "Science and Math for the Informed Citizen: Nutrition"
DeleteWhen Old Guy was an undergraduate, courses were mocked as "Physics for Poets" or "Clapping for Credit". Now such cotton-candy bullshit seems to constitute most or all of the "Drake Curriculum".
DeleteLOL I can relate! At my undergrad, there were three requirements: General education, requirements specific to whichever "college of X" you were in as part of the overall university, and requirements for your major. Satisfy all three and you get a degree.
DeleteThe gen eds got you basically a couple college writing courses plus math to the precalculus level, science up to a couple basic biology courses with labs, and it ensured that even the STEM kids had to take at least a couple of humanities courses.
The requirement of my specific college within the university, though, was "global education." This was 6 credits of a foreign language and 9 credits of basically anything with a global or foreign perspective, which included some really soft stuff. I had one called avante garde film where we literally just watched foreign and very old movies, for example. The prof never even bothered to show up, he just recorded his lectures in his living room in advance which we watched before the movie and then his TA would grade a short paper we had to write about each movie regurgitating the points the prof made in the recorded lecture.
On the plus side, the school had an actual full-scale movie theater in which you would watch these movies, which made this "class" kinda fun. But yeah, except for the 2 actual language classes you had to take, the global ed requirement was pretty much a joke.
Law schools lie about everything. I don't believe anything in a 509 disclosure.
ReplyDeleteIf law schools were honest, they wouldn't have told so many lies about employment prospects of their graduates for so many years that they were forced to publish these employment stats in the first place. Other schools, like med schools, don't do that. And no, you should not believe what is in those disclosures, as grim as the numbers are for some schools, the reality is even worse. The problem is, dim bulbs who never should have gone to college in the first place end up working minimum wage jobs with their degrees in "philosophy" "film" etc. So they see an opportunity to party on for 3 more years, all funded by student loans (that they will never pay back) and they take it. It's short term thinking, based on perceived immediate gratification and avoidance of responsibility, avoidance of the need to work at a job and pay their bills, for another 36 months.
DeleteThomas Jefferson Skool o' Lawl ISN'T ON THE LIST. Their site is still up, they are still supposedly at 701B in downtown San Diego. HOW?!?!?!
ReplyDeleteThomas Jefferson School of Law retains its ABA accreditation only for the limited purpose of enabling the existing students as of December 2019 to finish their (Mickey Mouse) degrees. That limited accreditation will be lost by the spring of 2023.
DeleteNew students are being admitted only under state accreditation. Apparently the über-toilet isn't required to file a 509 report because it is not admitting students.
Man it'd be weird to be in the same class where the person in one seat is getting an ABA degree and the person next to them is not, just cuz of timing. Neither is likely getting a job of course, but at least person A can get a license in other states and can thus broaden their search.
DeleteHow often does that happen? The students getting ABA-accredited degrees are in their second year or beyond, so they probably wouldn't be in the same classes as first-year students in a state-accredited program. Perhaps those first-year students, upon moving into second year, would find themselves in some of the same classes as third-year students in the other program, and then the inequality would be felt deeply.
DeleteAs you said, however, neither group stands much chance of getting a job in law, so maybe the point is moot.
Would the new non-ABA students be paying a reduced tuition? That might be the justification in their minds, for enrolling in that school.
DeleteIt'd happen all the time. Let's say you are a 1L when the school loses accreditation. You will stay on for two more years and get an ABA degree at the end. The new 1Ls come in behind you post the decision and are in a non-ABA program.
DeleteThey are mostly separate from you during your 2L year because as you said, they're taking 1L classes and you're taking essentially all electives.
But then the next year comes along. You are now a 3L and the people with the non-ABA enrollment are now 2Ls. Second and third-year students all select from the same set of electives, rarely are there classes for 3Ls only. So basically anyone who was a 1L when they lost accreditation is probably going to sit next to some people in many of their classes come 3L year.
There must, essentially, be at least one year where the 3Ls are getting an ABA degree and the 1Ls and 2Ls are not, and it's the 2Ls that the 3Ls will have a classmates or moot court teammates or law review/journal co-editors, etc, who are unlike them in that they are not grandfathered in to accreditation. Awkward year that'd be.
The law review at a dying über-toilet must be among the first casualties. I wouldn't expect a hell of a lot of moot courts either.
DeleteYeah any extracurricular that state authorities do not require and which represents an expense will be on the chopping block, probably in favor of stuff that either helps with bar prep or teaches people how to run a solo practice.
DeleteBut main law review? Expense seems pretty modest and you do want the top of the class to have some way of distinguishing themselves. Try to get maybe 1 or 2 kids a year to get a real law job so you can put glossy articles about them in the viewbook or whatever.
Glossy articles about the semiliterates who edit the Indiana Tech Review of Law 'n' Hip-Hop? Well, maybe. There was, after all, a glossy article about that pig of an employee whose favorite meal was a fried bologna sandwich with mayonnaise and who read nothing but trashy magazines…
DeleteWell we all know that no one cares about the journal of law & hip hop. But MAIN law review is something employers do care about. Not because of what you actually do on it, but just because it's reserved for the top of the class so being on it is a differentiator. Every other journal is a waste, but they might want to keep main law review.
DeleteOf course, getting onto law review at an unaccredited school just means you're the cream of the crap, but a few kids might be able to get a boost from it.
The catalogue at Indiana Tech still lists a "practicum" for the Indiana Tech Law Review. I haven't seen any evidence that this "law review" ever saw the light of day.
DeleteBottom-end law schools don't always have flagship law reviews. Indiana Tech managed to put out a couple of issues of a bullshit newsletter about its allegedly esteemed gutter-grade faculty; that's it.
Law school grading is so arbitrary I don't even think it truly means anything. Law Review is primarily from grading.
DeleteI think prospective students need to know that more than anything else. Law is probably the only schooling that functions that way. Most other fields, with the only other exception being B-School, the rank of the school might have some impact especially early on but in the long run it's fairly meaningless, and successful completion of study as well as grades reflect your effort and understanding, and allow you entry into the field to then continue learning and improving on the job.
For law you need a top school for the most part, and it's almost like a lottery even there. Intelligence and understanding of the material have virtually nothing to do with your grades, but employers, notwithstanding the reserved positions for the connected, will restrict their pool through grades. Even for the reserved, grades matter to an extent, it simply means they will be positioned initially somewhere along that, again the same for business. But this also means less opportunity at the very top since those are limited by design and there are more than enough connected high grade performers to fill those, and then the rest get shunted down and put more pressure on the unconnected. So a high performing non-connected that misses out will be tiered down, they won't displace a connected lower performer but will displace an unconnected lower performer that could have slotted in there.
So the pressure on the unconnected lower half or more is extreme. Those are horrendous odds because statistically that's the majority, and they are usually paying more and can afford it the least too. It's such an insidious trap for the unconnected, again because simple effort and ability aren't enough, afterwards all the unconnected, especially those that weren't lucky, are reframed as being unintelligent and inept. But if their undergrad grades and LSATs are indicators, they shouldn't be looked at in that way.
What the scam blogs and NYT article and Campos and others did was expose that reality to that group. The above average who performed well but are not geniuses, and who in a fair merit based system would likely occupy middle to upper middle positions, but could not break into that. This is also not just a law school issue but a macro trend for the US at large from Reagan onwards. One wonders if and when this will become mainstream understanding, create actual economic issues, and/or get real attention and attempts to fix. The advantage for the non-higher education is simply the lack of student loan debt at least.
I don't share the view that grades in law school are arbitrary. There's an element of arbitrariness, yes, as there is with any subjective endeavor. But if grades were strictly arbitrary, we wouldn't see striking differences in GPA. Somehow people like Old Guy consistently came in at the top and many other people consistently came in at the bottom. Unless you suppose a conspiracy that slates individuals for good or bad grades independently of the quality of their work, I don't see how you can say that grades are arbitrary to the point of meaning nothing.
DeleteExactly. I have long said that the 1L curriculum is the one thing about law school that is well-designed. At least, it is well-designed for its real purpose which is to be a tournament. The best employers hire the winners, with the definition of "winner" being more or less generous depending pretty much entirely on the selectivity of the school.
DeleteEveryone takes the same classes, the entire grade of which is a single test which is blind-graded and rigidly curved. And there is remarkable consistency class to class. Rarely do you see someone come in at the top of the class in torts and the bottom of the class in crim, for example, as they all test the same basic issue-spotting IRAC formula. That makes essays much less subjective to grade: The prof has a list of issues from a hypothetical fact pattern and each issue is one you either hit and discussed under the appropriate rule, or didn't. Depending on how many issues you hit or missed relative to everyone else on the curve, that's your grade. And since everyone in the school is usually within the same 3-4 LSAT point range to begin with, you're definitely only competing within your weight class.
However irrelevant to practice that may be, it is a level playing field. No one **in 1L** is getting better grades by sucking up to the prof or taking easy classes or whatever. And while it may only test your ability to take law school exams, it does measure that metric accurately.
It's like a sports game. Of course the rules of the game are arbitrary; the game itself is just a game. But sports are designed in such a way that whomever won generally won fair and square. I may not know who the better lawyer really will be, but I do know that the guy who came in at the top of the class is genuinely and truly better at writing issue-spotting essays than the guy at the bottom. The school is just hosting a tournament that gives biglaw firms a way to compare apples to apples on something at least somewhat relevant to them. That's all they really want: Pit the kids against each other in a fair fight and send 'em the winners.
8:02 - per TJ's website it's all $1100 per unit for JDs. So yes, same cost for a degree worth less, since it's only for CA.
ReplyDelete11:19 Thanks for checking.
DeleteWell it's not like the new enrollees didn't know what they were getting into so there shouldn't be any reason for being jealous of the ABA students.
5:26 - Yes, the new enrollees should know ... but then, if they did, and had any brains at all, they wouldn't.... oh, never mind.
Delete@Old Ruster 10:34
DeleteBut maybe Tom Jeff is considered the premier CA state accredited school at the moment due to retaining the aura of its former ABA greatness and is the top choice of students considering CA only schools.
Oh, Christ. I hadn't considered that former ABA accreditation might still bear some cachet…
DeleteWhat is going on with Harvard having a third of their first year enrollees not being from completed applications? They get to a low admissions rate of 6.9% this way. Are these people from prior years applications and are they definitely included in the GPA and LSAT numbers? Good way to game % admitted to make it look really hard to get in. Other top law schools have a smaller percentage of other applicants not from applicant pool.
ReplyDeleteI don't think that's what the data is saying. What it's saying is that 9933 people applied, 6.9% were offered admission, and 3.72% actually accepted those offers.
DeleteIn other words, what it's trying to get at is the "yield" AKA "enrollment rate from offers of admission" which for them is about 54%. It doesn't mean they're accepting people who didn't apply, it's just trying to tell you that about half of the people they offer admission to actually attend; the other half probably go to places like Yale or Stanford or they take a scholarship at somewhere marginally less prestigious like Columbia or Chicago.
While Harvard need play no games, some schools do try to game acceptance rates and calculating yield helps control for this. For example, a school might encourage people to apply knowing it will only reject them, in order to lower the acceptance rate, while offering huge scholarships to try and encourage people with better numbers who would normally go somewhere better to attend. But if a school does this too much and offers admission only to people with higher numbers who don't ultimately take it, then the school is obviously trying to goose its ranking by being more selective than its actual outcomes justify, and this will emerge in the form of a very low yield rate. So if you see a school with a low admission rate, but ALSO a very low yield, it tells you the school is trying to be more selective than it has any business being, like it's trying to bribe its way to a better class and thus a better ranking or what have you.
why are app numbers increasing? im in pharmacy and numbers have been cratering for ten years.
ReplyDeleteIt feels like you pharmacists are perhaps among the most under-appreciated and underutilized skillsets out there. I mean, you have to take pretty much all the same brutal prerequisites as med school and then you've got a grueling doctoral curriculum in which you prolly end up knowing more about the drugs than the docs prescribing them half the time.
DeleteBut then you end up working retail pharmacies and insurance companies won't give you "provider status" to bill for all that advice and whatnot, just the drug itself.
Pharmacists know so much about the drugs. In many cases, they probably could be prescribing them or adjusting dosages and stuff. But they don't get that respect, at all, and I wonder if that's why you see fewer apps.
Maybe its better for the ones that work hospital pharmacy or compounding or whatever, but overall I just think pharmacists' skills, knowledge and talents don't get anywhere near the value they should, and I wonder if that has anything to do with people being les interested?
In the days, i.e. when I was young, when pharmacists owned pharmacies there was a very good living to be made in the field. The druggist got the profits from the drugs, the OTC stuff and whatever non-medical merchandise he could fit in his store. While there are people making good money in the field by holding the "right" jobs the people at the drug chains, supermarket pharmacies and Wal-Marts are mostly just counting so many pills out of big bottles into small bottles and entering data. The training insures that they can be trusted to be careful and might now and then say: "Whoa, you can't take this when you're already taking that" because you got Rx's from two different providers. But as 4:09 said, no matter how valuable that is, the people in the chain stores get no reward for it. IMHO they are to a certain degree fungible, save for people who make more errors than the actuaries find acceptable. It's like these "captive" insurance defense law firms. If there are millions at stake the insurer gives it to outside counsel. The routine car crashes, dog bites and slip-and-falls are not rocket science and the people who handle them can be replaced. I know two people who had this experience and know of others who did. You've got your name on the door, "Law Offices of _________" and other lawyers reporting to you. But then one day the insurer that employs you decides, because of the annual raises you've been getting, that you now cost too much and that they can get some kid with less experience to do your job for a lot less. They give you a severance package in exchange for a general release and you are on the street. The two I knew both had significant private practice experience. One went solo and eventually became of counsel to and then a partner at a decent firm. The other wound up at another captive firm reporting to someone about ten years her junior and with nowhere near her resume. I grew up in a small New England town with two drug stores. People knew and liked the pharmacists. When I go to Walgreens or CVS I only interact with a minimum wage cashier and if the whole staff of pharmacists was replaced I wouldn't have a clue.
ReplyDeleteAnd OBTW, before my time many states did allow pharmacists to prescribe certain controlled substances. At least through WWII the navy rating now called "Medical Corpsman" was called "Pharmacist's Mate."