In addition to its overall law school rankings, U.S. News has ranked the country’s 10 most popular law schools as well. This list was determined through an analysis of yield: “the percentage of students accepted by a school who opt to attend that school.”
Yale, #1 in the general law school rankings, topped this list as well, with a yield of 80.4%. Along the same lines, Harvard took the #3 spot in the popularity list, as it occupies #2 in the overall rankings.
However, the other three schools in the top five most popular don’t necessarily correlate with U.S. News’s general list: BYU Law at #2 (ranked 42 overall), and Southern University Law Center and Liberty University School of Law at #4 and 5, respectively (both in the “Rank Not Published” tier).
Above the Law sheds light on this seeming incongruity, specifically that these popular schools—not usually highly ranked—“have very distinctive characters and missions.” BYU offers a “legal education in the Mormon tradition,” SULC aims to provide “access and opportunity to a diverse group of students from underrepresented racial, ethnic, and socio-economic groups,” and Liberty teaches “in the context of the Christian intellectual tradition.” Therefore, those applying and committing to these law schools are students searching for a more specific academic environment.
Plus, as Above the Law points out, “the applicants they admit might not have many other options in terms of law schools. Yield doesn’t measure how many schools an applicant turns down; it just measures how many admitted applicants decide to matriculate.”
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