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Choosing the Right Law School / Re: Columbia and Public Service
« on: January 26, 2007, 12:48:15 PM »
Unfortunately, demingh is over-trolling here. The fact is that more NYU students do go into public interest work. If you break it down by law firms/clerkships/public interest/government/other, you get:
Most recent Columbia graduating class: 79/14/4/2/1
Most recent NYU graduating class: 76/13/6/4/1
Why the disparity? Both schools have very similar public interest programs and loan repayment assistance programs. I think the best explanation is that the schools attract slightly different student bodies. Slightly more NYU students want to go into public interest work directly out of law school, in part because the school does have a reputation among the sort of people who post on this forum as being more friendly to public interest work. This self-selection bias results in the difference between the two school's placements statistics. I'm not sure if this difference extends over a full career. It would be more informative to have data about what each school's alumni are doing ten years out of law school, but unfortunately these data don't exist.
Another plausible explanation is that some of the NYU students who go into public interest jobs do so as a fall-back because they don't get the most desirable firm jobs, and that fewer Columbia students have this problem. I don't think this is the case, but it would fit the data equally well.
Most recent Columbia graduating class: 79/14/4/2/1
Most recent NYU graduating class: 76/13/6/4/1
Why the disparity? Both schools have very similar public interest programs and loan repayment assistance programs. I think the best explanation is that the schools attract slightly different student bodies. Slightly more NYU students want to go into public interest work directly out of law school, in part because the school does have a reputation among the sort of people who post on this forum as being more friendly to public interest work. This self-selection bias results in the difference between the two school's placements statistics. I'm not sure if this difference extends over a full career. It would be more informative to have data about what each school's alumni are doing ten years out of law school, but unfortunately these data don't exist.
Another plausible explanation is that some of the NYU students who go into public interest jobs do so as a fall-back because they don't get the most desirable firm jobs, and that fewer Columbia students have this problem. I don't think this is the case, but it would fit the data equally well.