How Yale Law School Decides Which Applicants to Admit
Know someone who wants to get an edge in applying for a coveted place in Yale Law School’s entering class? Being among the first—or the last—would-be legal eagles to submit an application might help just a bit.
That’s because Dean of Admissions Asha Rangappa reads all law school applications in the order in which they are received, regardless of grades or test scores, reports the Yale Daily News in a lengthy article detailing the law school admissions process. It is, of course, conventional wisdom that coming in at the beginning, or the end, of a series of job interviews can help an applicant stand out in the memory of the interviewer, so that might be true, too, concerning law school applications, one might think.
At Harvard Law School, by contrast, applications are first grouped according to grades and test scores, and then read, the campus newspaper notes.
About 50 to 80 applicants are so outstanding, on first read, that Rangappa flags them as “presumptive admits” whose applications will be reviewed only by one faculty member. Concerning the rest of the 3,500 or so applications that the law school receives each year, she selects around 1,000 that are promising and sends them on to faculty readers for further consideration.
At this point, serendipity can play a role. Does the faculty reader know and admire one someone who wrote a reference for the applicant? Or does the application simply strike a positive chord with the prof? Does the applicant sound like someone he or she would enjoy teaching—or, better yet, eventually working with as a law school faculty colleague?
“Yale is the only law school that relies entirely on faculty readers, although some others do involve professors in the admissions process,” the newspaper reports. As a result, there is an “element of randomness,” Rangappa acknowledges, since faculty are free to use their own judgment and are not given set criteria to apply.
Because so many applicants are qualified for admission, though, “at some point it has to be arbitrary one way or another,” she says. “So why not let the faculty’s preferences play that role in shaping the composition of the class?”
