Boalt Hall, Law Schools, Rankings

The Most Important Part of Law School: Social Life Rankings!

Where can you learn the law and party like a rock star at the same time? Let's find out!

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It’s about that time: law school tuition deposits are due in a few weeks, and the class of 2016 will soon be bilked out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for questionable promises of an improving entry-level job market. So obviously this is a great time for rolling out the latest set of dubious law school rankings.

You’ve seen the prized U.S. News rankings. You’ve seen the somewhat-ridiculous Princeton Review rankings. You’ve even seen the “What is this? I don’t even…” Cooley Law School rankings. But today, for your viewing pleasure, we present you with the GraduatePrograms.com rankings, because that’s apparently a thing now.

While GradPrograms ranked the top 25 student-rated law schools, as well as the best law schools for financial aid, we’ve decided to focus on one of the most important parts of the law school experience: your social life. Now let’s be perfectly clear, if these were colleges, they’d be called “party schools.” But because they’re law schools, there needs to be an air of highbrow prestige — hence these “social life” rankings.

Let’s find where you can go to law school and still party your face off….

GraduateProgram.com’s results were based on surveys completed by 4,000 students (including those currently enrolled and recent graduates) from more than 150 accredited law schools across the United States. The rankings cover a period from September 1, 2012, to January 28, 2013. For the purposes of this category, “social life” is defined as how easy it is for students to meet people, make friends, or date.

Given that your law school colleagues may not be social butterflies to begin with, these schools allegedly make it easier for the socially inept to interact with other human beings in a “normal” way.

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You shouldn’t have to apologize for party rockin’, so here are the top five law schools for Best Social Life:

1. Washington University in St. Louis
2. University of California-Berkeley
3. The University of Texas at Austin
4. University of Colorado at Boulder
5. Stanford University

WUSTL is the number one student-rated party school. This actually isn’t all that surprising. Brian Tamanaha, the king of depressing law school statistics (affiliate link), is a professor there. That’ll drive anyone to drink. In second place is UC Berkeley, and we know that Boalties can get down with the best of them. They party like animals — or animal killers, same diff, right? Our bronze medalist is UT Austin, because everything’s bigger in Texas, including the hangovers. Colorado is a no brainer: they can smoke pot there now, man.

But Stanford? The number two law school in the country (no, not you, Cooley) is on the Princeton Review’s list of schools that have the best career prospects, as well as its list of schools that are the toughest to get into. Perhaps they’re busy snorting Ritalin to study get high more efficiently. Either way, unless they’re doing something we don’t know about, this was a surprising inclusion.

Did your alma mater make the cut? Have at it in the comments, folks.

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Graduateprograms.com Announces Best Law Schools for Academic Competitiveness, Social Life, and Workload [GraduatePrograms.com]

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