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How can you measure a law school’s worth, aside from the employment statistics and bar passage rates of its graduates? Another telling sign of its success — or lack thereof — may be its acceptance rate. Generally speaking, law schools with low acceptance rates masterfully weathered the storm over the past decade, keeping their standards high during a time when applications plummeted and entering students’ qualifications sank, while law schools with high acceptance rates fared quite poorly, admitting almost anyone who applied in an effort to keep the lights on.
But which law schools had the lowest acceptance rates? Thanks to the Short List blog of U.S. News, there’s a ranking for that. According to the Short List, the average acceptance rate in fall 2019 was 45 percent. Among the schools with the lowest acceptance rates, the average rate was much, much lower, at 14.5 percent. As you may have guessed, the law schools with the lowest acceptance rates are some of the usual suspects, the elite schools found at the tippy top of the U.S. News rankings.
|
SCHOOL (NAME) (STATE) |
FULL-TIME AND PART-TIME APPLICANTS (FALL 2019) |
FULL-TIME AND PART-TIME ACCEPTANCES (FALL 2019) |
ACCEPTANCE RATE |
U.S. NEWS RANK |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yale University (CT) | 3,198 | 263 | 8.2% | 1 | ||||
| Stanford University (CA) | 3,908 | 380 | 9.7% | 2 | ||||
| Harvard University (MA) | 7,321 | 916 | 12.5% | 3 | ||||
| University of Pennsylvania (Carey) | 6,483 | 941 | 14.5% | 7 | ||||
| University of Virginia | 5,645 | 829 | 14.7% | 8 | ||||
| Columbia University | 7,193 | 1,141 | 15.9% | 4 (tie) | ||||
| University of Michigan—Ann Arbor | 5,629 | 936 | 16.6% | 9 (tie) | ||||
| University of Texas—Austin | 5,803 | 1,017 | 17.5% | 16 | ||||
| University of Southern California (Gould) | 5,648 | 999 | 17.7% | 18 (tie) | ||||
| Northwestern University (Pritzker) | 5,441 | 980 | 18.0% | 9 (tie) |
Eight of the 10 law schools with the lowest acceptance rates fall within the top 10 of the most recent U.S. News rankings, with UT-Austin (#16) and USC (#18) sneaking in to complete the list. Top 10 schools that didn’t make the cut here were NYU and Berkeley, with acceptance rates of 21.60 percent and 19.68 percent, respectively.
Where does your law school stand when it comes to its acceptance rate? Check out your school’s most recent Standard 509 Report to find out.
10 Law Schools That Are Hardest to Get Into [Short List / U.S. News]
Staci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.