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 and which ones had the highest 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 2017 was 48 percent. Among the schools with the lowest acceptance rates, the average rate was much, much lower, at 16.3 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 — well, except for one. Here they are:
| School name (state) | Full-time and part-time applicants (fall 2017) | Full-time and part-time acceptances (fall 2017) | Acceptance rate | U.S. News rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texas A&M University | 1,862 | 140 | 7.5% | 80 (tie) |
| Yale University (CT) | 2,862 | 240 | 8.4% | 1 |
| Stanford University (CA) | 3,952 | 392 | 9.9% | 2 |
| Harvard University (MA) | 5,711 | 900 | 15.8% | 3 |
| University of Pennsylvania | 5,601 | 986 | 17.6% | 7 |
| University of Virginia | 5,049 | 923 | 18.3% | 9 (tie) |
| Columbia University (NY) | 5,829 | 1,184 | 20.3% | 5 |
| University of Chicago | 4,459 | 958 | 21.5% | 4 |
| University of Michigan—Ann Arbor | 5,284 | 1,157 | 21.9% | 8 |
| Cornell University (NY) | 3,809 | 844 | 22.2% | 13 |
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Wait a second… how in the world did Texas A&M beat Yale? Because it didn’t. While the law school has become extremely selective in recent years, according to data from TAMU’s Standard 509 Report, its acceptance rate for fall 2017 was 27.28 percent, not 7.5 percent as the Short List claims. Oopsie. Even U.S. News is fallible sometimes.
Although this list is a bit flawed, 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 Cornell (#13) sneaking in to complete the list. The top 10 school that didn’t make the cut here was NYU, with an acceptance rate of 27.21 percent — which means that a school ranked #80 by U.S. News is almost as selective as a school ranked #6 by U.S. News.
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 With the Lowest Acceptance Rates [Short List / U.S. News]
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Staci Zaretsky has been an editor at Above the Law 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.