Choice as Revelation: Using Students' Enrollment Decisions to Rank U.S. Law Schools

66 Pages Posted: 3 Feb 2022 Last revised: 21 Nov 2022

See all articles by Albert Yoon

Albert Yoon

University of Toronto Faculty of Law

Jesse Rothstein

University of California, Berkeley, The Richard & Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy; University of California, Berkeley, College of Letters & Science, Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Date Written: October 15, 2022

Abstract

Education is a credence good. While the virtues of education are widely embraced, its qualities are difficult to discern, even among its consumers. The sizeable and increasing cost of tuition – as in the case of U.S. law schools – only add to the stakes. In response, law school rankings have emerged, with the purported goal to help students make more informed choices. While these rankings have generated both interest and debate, an important question has remained unanswered: how do prospective law students perceive these schools?

Drawing upon data provided by the Law School Admissions Council (LSAC), we analyze the universe of law school applications for the period 1989 through 2017, creating a revealed preference ranking of law schools based solely on where applicants choose to matriculate given their offers of admission. We find that applicants strongly prefer Yale, Stanford, and Harvard, and to a lesser extent other schools in the top 20, but do not draw such sharp distinctions outside of these schools. For all but the very top schools, we cannot rule out that schools adjacent in the rankings are equally preferred by admitted students. We also separately analyze the application, admission, and matriculation stages of the law school matching process. Applicants apply broadly, we find, but that admissions and matriculation decisions hew closely to academic indicators.

Our revealed preference rankings are similar those of the U.S. News law rankings at the top but bear little resemblance for the remaining schools. Our rankings offer a compelling alternative to commercial rankings, which are opaque and highly manipulatable. Our analyses also highlight the limitations of ordinal rankings, which by themselves can suggest meaningful differences amongst alternatives where they do not exist.

Keywords: Law schools; Educational Rankings; Law & Economics

JEL Classification: D40, K31

Suggested Citation

Yoon, Albert and Rothstein, Jesse, Choice as Revelation: Using Students' Enrollment Decisions to Rank U.S. Law Schools (October 15, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4023587 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4023587

Albert Yoon (Contact Author)

University of Toronto Faculty of Law ( email )

78 and 84 Queen's Park
Toronto, Ontario M5S 2C5
Canada

Jesse Rothstein

University of California, Berkeley, The Richard & Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy ( email )

2607 Hearst Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94720-7320
United States

HOME PAGE: http://eml.berkeley.edu/~jrothst

University of California, Berkeley, College of Letters & Science, Department of Economics ( email )

549 Evans Hall #3880
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880
United States

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics

Downloads
615
Abstract Views
1,854
Rank
93,621
PlumX Metrics