why are umd's numbers so much lower?

[PowaScorer]

seeing that umd is ranked so high, how come their numbers are lower relative to its ranking?

[jeb240]

there are more to rankings than lsat/gpa scores.  for instance, michigan and berkeley both take scores in the same range as school far below them...

[LawyersGunnersnMoney]

seeing that umd is ranked so high, how come their numbers are lower relative to its ranking?

i think the question is why is umd ranked so high.  their #s are low b/c the school is in the ghetto and doesnt place all that well.

[SuicideNixon]

there are more to rankings than lsat/gpa scores.  for instance, michigan and berkeley both take scores in the same range as school far below them...

I dont know why that is, but boalt really isn't any more selective than fordham

[Reaching]

Fordham is more selective than it would otherwise be b/c of its location in NYC. Top vault firms are in te city, and people apply there to have a better chance of working for one of those firms.

[SuicideNixon]

Fordham is more selective than it would otherwise be b/c of its location in NYC. Top vault firms are in te city, and people apply there to have a better chance of working for one of those firms.

you can make the same argument for boalt and california

[Temporary Relief Assistant Trailer Park Supervisor]

there are more to rankings than lsat/gpa scores.  for instance, michigan and berkeley both take scores in the same range as school far below them...

I dont know why that is, but boalt really isn't any more selective than fordham

Boalt has one of the lowest acceptance rates, and will not take high lsat/low gpa splitters.  I think Boalt could certainly choose a class with better numbers than it does, but for some reason they prefer a 3.8/162 to a 3.3/176. 

[Reaching]

Fordham is more selective than it would otherwise be b/c of its location in NYC. Top vault firms are in te city, and people apply there to have a better chance of working for one of those firms.

you can make the same argument for boalt and california

Not really. If you check the Vault rankings,  8 of the top 10 firms are in NYC.  In the top 40, 17 are in NYC.  For the Bay Area, there are only 3 in the top 40.

People may want to live in California (or the Bay area specifically), but I imagine that a comparable number dreams of a life in NYC. Law school is a professional school, and people want to be paid after law school. For firm employment, NYC has many more firms (at least firms ranked highly in the Vault rankings)

[SuicideNixon]

there are more to rankings than lsat/gpa scores.  for instance, michigan and berkeley both take scores in the same range as school far below them...

I dont know why that is, but boalt really isn't any more selective than fordham

Boalt has one of the lowest acceptance rates, and will not take high lsat/low gpa splitters.  I think Boalt could certainly choose a class with better numbers than it does, but for some reason they prefer a 3.8/162 to a 3.3/176. 

the reason is that they can't use race to pick URMs so they have to guess who is a URM and who isn't...they probably have to take 15 160/3.8s to get 5 URMs. in general they skew low LSAT/high gpa because statistically they know that there are hardly any URMs that score above a 170.

[SuicideNixon]

Fordham is more selective than it would otherwise be b/c of its location in NYC. Top vault firms are in te city, and people apply there to have a better chance of working for one of those firms.

you can make the same argument for boalt and california

Not really. If you check the Vault rankings,  8 of the top 10 firms are in NYC.  In the top 40, 17 are in NYC.  For the Bay Area, there are only 3 in the top 40.

People may want to live in California (or the Bay area specifically), but I imagine that a comparable number dreams of a life in NYC. Law school is a professional school, and people want to be paid after law school. For firm employment, NYC has many more firms (at least firms ranked highly in the Vault rankings)

what does vault have to do with anything? it's heavily biased to nyc firms that have high profits per partner because of their work in finance. and there's no reason to think that a comparable number of people dream of a life in NYC. New York is one of three states in the whole country that is losing population. *fewer* people live in new york than did 10 years ago. California, on the other hand, is growing faster than the nation as a whole and already has 3 times as many people as new york. all the demographic trends point to people prefering california to new york heavily.

further, stanford and boalt are the only top schools west of the mississippi. together they are smaller than NYU alone, to say nothing of Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, all of which place most of their graduates in the new york market. so even though there are more firms in nyc, there are a lot more top law students that fordham students have compete with.