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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 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 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 2020 was 44 percent. Among the schools with the lowest acceptance rates, the average rate was 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.
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|
SCHOOL NAME (STATE) |
FULL-TIME AND PART-TIME APPLICANTS (FALL 2020) |
FULL-TIME AND PART-TIME ACCEPTANCES (FALL 2020) |
ACCEPTANCE RATE |
U.S. NEWS RANK |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yale University (CT) | 3,539 | 262 | 7.4% | 1 | ||||
| Stanford University (CA) | 3,807 | 399 | 10.5% | 2 | ||||
| Harvard University (MA) | 7,448 | 968 | 13% | 3 | ||||
| University of Virginia | 5,458 | 767 | 14.1% | 8 | ||||
| University of Pennsylvania (Carey) | 6,148 | 879 | 14.3% | 6 (tie) | ||||
| University of Michigan—Ann Arbor | 5,417 | 886 | 16.4% | 10 (tie) | ||||
| Columbia University (NY) | 6,986 | 1,166 | 16.7% | 4 (tie) | ||||
| University of Southern California (Gould) | 5,327 | 915 | 17.2% | 19 | ||||
| Wake Forest University (NC) | 1,808 | 322 | 17.8% | 41 (tie) | ||||
| University of Chicago | 4,971 | 888 | 17.9% | 4 (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 USC (#19) and Wake Forest (tied at #41) sneaking in to complete the list. Top 10 schools that didn’t make the cut here were Berkeley, NYU, and Duke, with acceptance rates of 21.53 percent, 21.58 percent, and 22.34 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]
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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.