Where do the Law School Admission Procedures Leave You?

We've already seen that the law schools aren't exactly humble about their limitations in the application process. They claim to review all kinds of things, and to get to know you really well. This leads to the next claim, which The Official Guide to Law Schools puts this way:

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Nowadays, almost everyone admitted to law school survives to graduate. In fact, on average, less than 5 percent of law students drop out of school for academic reasons, so the admissions people must be rather accomplished at admitting academically qualified students.

I can think of two theories that may explain why the dropout rate would be only 5 percent. One is that law school is still as difficult, and the professors still try to drive away those who aren't cut out for it, but the dean of admissions, all by him/herself, has become exceedingly skilled at choosing just the right people. The other theory is that the dean of admissions gets no credit, because the law schools have made it easier for students to survive.
Perhaps the key phrase in that quote is "for academic reasons." The law schools probably keep track of the reasons that people give for dropping out of law school. We can assume that people always give accurate reasons - that, for example, the proud college valedictorian who doesn't understand the law isn't playing make-believe when she uses "family needs" as an excuse to bail out.

But I don't think that's so believable. I went to school with some pretty egotistical characters, and I'd be amazed to hear many of them say that they were having academic difficulty. The better approach here is, I think, not to rely on the self-description offered by these students as they run away; it is to look, instead, at the logic of the situation. The fact is that law schools have very good reasons not to push their luck. If they overdo it, they'll wind up with a bunch of underemployed professors commanding half-empty classrooms. As one model of legal statesmanship puts it - the economic realities of providing a quality legal education has mandated that schools accept qualified candidates who will continue through the three or four year program. The first year of law school is no longer a contest where only the fittest survive. The wimps, nerds’ and jerks will also survive.

Let me tell you a story. One semester, I was taking a course called "Corporate Taxation." I took it because I thought it would be useful in my future job. But, if you want to know the truth, I hated corporate taxation. I despised it. It was boring. It was for accountants. I didn't know what it was for, except that I knew it wasn't for me.

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Halfway through the semester, I went to the academic dean and told her that I was going to drop the course. She said, "You can't do that." I said, "Why not?" She said, "because then you'll have too few credits for the semester, and it won't count as a full-time semester in residence, as required by university rules. If you drop that course, you'll have to stay here another semester after your classmates have graduated."

Well, I went home, and I thought about it, and I said, "What the heck, I've got to hang around for another semester after law school anyway to finish my MBA. Maybe I can work out something between the law school and the business school. At worst, maybe it'd be just as well to stay that extra semester and take some courses I'd miss otherwise." I had spent six years getting my college degree, and had enjoyed it, so this seemed OK. It wasn't my first choice, but it would do.
I was so sick of corporate taxation I was green. I don't know why I disliked it so badly, other than possibly the fact that I was about five miles behind the rest of the class. But I was determined to bail out, come what may, so I went ahead and dropped the course.

When the academic dean found out, she summoned me to her office. Now you've done it, haven't you?" she said. "I see only one way out."

Hope fluttered in my breast. "I have a way out?" I asked. "Indeed you do," she replied. "You will have to take three extra units next semester, and I will have to 'deem' those three units to apply to this current semester, as though you were taking them now, so that you will get residence credit for both semesters."

Needless to say, this approach had all kinds of possibilities. During college, I had discovered that taking 20 or 25 credits in a semester made me get the most out of every minute. During those semesters, my grades actually improved. So now that I saw how much freedom the academic dean had, I was powerfully tempted to ask her if it would be OK to take a double load in the autumn semester and then spend the spring in Fort Lauderdale.

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More to the point, this experience told me that Columbia was going to see to it that I got through, one way or another, in my allotted three years. I had been thinking it was me versus them - the professors, the administration, and the maintenance men - but now it was turning out that they were all secretly rooting for me, even if I was sort of a screw up.

Here's how I see it. When you're a good child, you have a horrendous fear of what they'll do to you if you ever do something bad. And then, when you actually do something bad, you're surprised at how mild the punishment turns out to be. I mean, even if they wallop you, the pain is soon gone, but the joy of the forbidden lingers.

So here I'd gone into the dean's office, cringing with fear, only to emerge with a head full of new ideas. It seemed to me that there must be a whole subgroup of law students like me, and that some of them had medical problems and some had psychological problems and some just didn't like school all that much anymore, and yet most of them managed, with the dean's help, to graduate on time and in good standing. I'm not saying that she showed me a list of such rogues. It's just that the ease with which she handled my case made me think that it wasn't all that unusual.

Nor am I complaining. But after this experience, it's funny for me to read this stuff, in The Official Guide to Law Schools, about how the admissions people are so skilled at choosing academic winners. The fact is that, as one of my friends put it, even the best law schools have unselfish individuals who are willing to serve at the bottom of the class, so as to make "the average" more attainable for their peers.

Getting In: A Summary
After reviewing the evidence, I came to the conclusions that my classmates and I were almost guaranteed to survive law school if we just kept punching the clock, and that we had gotten in, in the first place, because of a couple of very simple items of data, namely, our LSAT scores and our GPA's.

In a way, this was depressing. You'd really rather believe that the admissions committee examined your life and your personality in great detail and reached the well-considered judgment that, from all the evidence, you are an obviously superior person; and that, once admitted, you survived against difficult odds. Being shooed on through merely because we had come out ahead by a few points on a standardized exam just didn't offer the same sense of self-importance.
It might have been to my advantage, though, that it worked this way. If they'd examined the other factors, I might not have gotten in at all. I hadn't been too focused on career goals in high school or college. I did not suffer the teenage experience common to my rich-kid classmates, in which "You feel like if you make one mistake, your future is gone." Some of my unfortunate peers had gone through decades of parental pressure, expensive prep schools, and deep anxieties, therapy - you name it - and here I, this hick, managed to wind up in the same prestigious law school as they.

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