The transfer game

This weekend I had a fascinating series of email exchanges with a Columbia 3L, regarding the transfer polices there and at law schools generally.  S/he also put together a bunch of eye-opening data.  In this person's own words:

My LSAT was around the 75th percentile for the bottom eight of the top 14 (it really is sad that these distinctions matter), and my GPA was slightly below the 25th. I applied to six schools -- five top 14s, and the local "safety" I ended up going to. I got into two of the top 14s. And, interestingly enough, the two that admitted me needed help on their 75th percentile LSAT, and the three that rejected me were lagging on their 25th percentile GPA. But of course all those admissions were done holistically and not according to some formula. ;)

My decision to go to my first law school actually came about organically due to price considerations. I thought that law school financial aid was like college -- a little bit of merit aid, but mostly need-based. So, when I ended up with two offers that would require me to pay c. $65k per year in tuition and COL, and another offer from a school that would pay all  my tuition along with a $3k stipend, I was shocked enough to take the money. I probably would've stayed too, but I saw that outside of the very top students -- and a few good ol' boys -- the vast majority of people didn't get jobs. And CCN seemed so safe . . .

Writing this also jogged my memory about another incident from 1L. Besides taking $200 from each of my classmates so they could receive the benefit of my marginally-qualified-for-Georgetown wisdom, my law school also generously decided to pay to sign us all up as ABA student members (for all three years in advance!). Which meant we got a boatload of ABA student division spam, including an "action alert" to write our members of Congress and ask for an increase in federal loan limits. I've attached the "sample letter" that the ABA included with the email alert.

I remember trying to explain to my friends why this was a bad idea ("the only thing keeping tuition down at all right now is our physical inability to get more money"), but they looked at me like I had suddenly devolved into glossolalia. Which is perhaps the most insidious aspect of the scam: the most vulnerable are also the most susceptible.

 I didn't incur any undergrad debt. I went to a state school and, as I said, worked my way through. I guestimated $155k in law school debt when I posted, but I looked up the actual number, and it's c. $170k. That interest really bites you in the ass.

I started law school at a school ranked between 150 and 100 in US News and had a class rank in the top 20, but not top 10 percent. This is actually not a rare occurrence -- they're willing to take anyone who doesn't embarrass them (no US News reporting), and LSAT is a much better guarantee in that regard.

 I knew how easy transfer admissions were because Northwestern offered me "conditional" transfer acceptance when they rejected me for 1L. Moreover, a friend who was accepted to Penn for 1L (same year) received a rejection letter from Harvard (Harvard!) that strongly suggested he reapply as a transfer: "If your interest in Harvard Law School continues into your first year at another law school, we would welcome your application as a transfer student in 2010." Incidentally, as more 0Ls are wising up, I hear the transfer market has gotten even softer.

So, I figured that transfer admissions were easy (they were). And everyone at a top 14 school had to get a real job, right?

Not quite. The general atmosphere at Columbia is surreal. Bubbles of panic amid an ocean of complacency. After looking over our (horribly inadequate) placement statistics, and doing a little extra digging on my own, I would say that 60-65 percent of my class -- but only around 40-50 percent of transfer students -- are (for now) comfortably employed. And the rest of us are living in terror, but under enormous social pressure not to reveal our distress.

As for the number of transfers, that is in the ABA law school stats. It turns out there were 78 transfers my year (and I heard "around 90" for the current 2Ls).

I was rather taken aback by the Columbia numbers, and did some quick calculations, which reveal the following:  Using a conservative estimate of 80  transfers in the current 2L class, transfer students -- who of course get no scholarship money -- are paying slightly more than eight million dollars in tuition at CLS this year.  This represents amount equal to about half of the total tuition being paid by the entire 1L class, based on the assumption that the 1L class is collectively paying 80% of sticker tuition price.  The money being brought in by transfers pays for around 40 tenure-track faculty salaries: it's 21% of all tuition revenue collected from all 2L and 3L students.

Columbia's practice of supplementing its finances with a large number of transfer students, almost all of whom, of course, were rejected for admission by the school a year earlier, is far from unique.  My correspondent collected the stats for the rest of the top 100 schools for 2010 (the most recent year available).  The stats are in the form of transfers in, transfers out, and total students in the relevant year, i.e., current 3Ls.  I've added percentage totals for all schools where at least 10% of the current 3L class consists of transfers, along with Georgetown, about which more shortly:

Yale	16	0	229
Harvard	29	0	585
Stanford	15	0	193
Columbia	78	2	476	16.4%
Chicago	27	6	211	12.8%
NYU	58	3	499	11.6%
Michigan	24	2	389
Penn	25	7	273
UC Berkeley	46	2	335	13.7%
Virginia	10	5	369
Duke	5	8	225
Northwestern	38	7	297	12.8%
Cornell	0	15	189
Georgetown	61	13	626	9.7%
Texas	9	8	376
UCLA	34	7	337	10.1%
Vanderbilt	16	7	201
USC	18	8	224
Washington St. Louis	32	22	270	11.9%
George Washington	97	16	580	16.7%
Minnesota	31	6	234	13.2%
Boston U.	16	15	269
Indiana	0	14	204
UC Davis	11	13	207
Illinois	6	6	227
Notre Dame	19	4	199
Boston College	7	6	261
Iowa	4	5	190
William & Mary	10	9	203
Emory	32	8	269	11.9%
Fordham	24	14	485
North Carolina	13	2	265
U. Washington	6	1	186
Washington & Lee	19	18	134	14.2%
Ohio State	11	6	228
Alabama	17	1	188
Georgia	5	1	237
Wisconsin	26	9	286
Wake Forest	17	5	164	10.4%
Arizona State	32	3	208	15.4%
George Mason	0	10	222
Brigham Young	2	2	145
Arizona	3	5	150
UC Hastings	22	23	465
Maryland	24	16	303
Utah	15	0	142	10.6%
Tulane	22	11	287
Colorado	13	1	177
Florida	37	14	330	11.2%
American	43	39	483
Florida State	74	7	303	24.4%
SMU	35	1	280	12.5%
Yeshiva	39	5	391	10%
Loyola Marymount	43	12	384	11.2%
Pepperdine	6	10	215
Baylor	0	1	180
Connecticut	20	3	191	10.5%
Houston	0	3	241
Tennessee	5	1	161
Penn State	8	8	187
Case Western	12	29	186
Georgia State	5	2	208
Chicago-Kent	22	9	288
Seton Hall	10	22	323
Temple	0	11	283
Cincinnati	9	1	142
Brooklyn	32	24	497
Lewis & Clark	17	5	234
Richmond	12	9	152
San Diego	19	5	317
Loyola Chicago	15	15	268
Northeastern	9	1	216
Kentucky	6	3	152
UNLV	6	5	152
Oklahoma	6	3	196
Pittsburgh	12	10	232
Denver	26	9	302
Miami	6	15	496
Catholic U.	3	23	245
Indiana, Indianapolis	25	12	307
Kansas	10	2	164
New Mexico	3	0	119
Oregon	1	10	167
Arkansas	5	1	134
Buffalo	28	12	219	12.8%
DePaul	18	12	349
Hofstra	12	30	359
LSU	5	4	223
Nebraska	2	2	135
Rutgers, Camden	38	13	283	13.4%
Rutgers, Newark	12	10	247
Santa Clara	42	13	301	14%
Seattle	14	6	321
Villanova	15	11	255
Hawaii	2	2	124
Marquette	23	7	226	10.2%
Michigan State	18	14	281
St. Johns	6	4	308
West Virginia	10	4	154
Syracuse	5	14	199
Louisville	4	2	129
San Francisco	0	7	238
Pacific	9	28	295

My correspondent's gloss on this fascinating little glimpse into the law school transfer racket market:

(1) Holy fucking fuck, Florida State (74, 7, 303). Thank God that Dan Markel is there to uphold their standards when the numbers aren't reported to US News. ;)

(2) The driving factors seem to be prestige, location, and prestige-within-market. Also, there are some interesting inferences to be made with revealed preference theory -- e.g., why do transfers find Arizona St. such a markedly better deal than statistically and geographically identical Arizona?

(3) What is the deal with Cornell? They do accept transfer applications, so are they actually being virtuous, or does no one want to move to Ithaca? [Ed. note: Cornell accepted between nine and 18 transfers in every year between 2006 and 2009 so the 2010 number is an anomaly]

(4) Note that the largest abusers (aside from GWU) are either among the elite or near the bottom edge of the first tier. These are, generally speaking, the common "reach" schools for strong and weak first-time applicants, respectively.  [Ed. note: There's a similar effect at the bottom of the second tier as well.]

There's some evidence that this practice of pumping up law school revenues by admitting hordes of transfer students -- nearly a quarter of FSU's 2Ls and 3Ls are transfers! -- has intensified over the past five years.  We don't have data for 2011 yet, but I checked the numbers for several schools for 2006-2010, and here are the number of transfers they admitted:

George Washington: 97 transfers in 2010; 51 transfers in 2009; 66 transfers in 2008; 61 transfers in 2007; 33 transfers in 2006.

Georgetown: 61 transfers in 2010; 81 transfers in 2009; 93 transfers in 2008; 93 transfers in 2007; 100 transfers in 2006.

NYU: 58 transfers in 2010; 22 transfers in 2009; 13 transfers in 2008; 42 transfers in 2007; 18 transfers in 2006.

Chicago: 27 in 2010; 24 in 2009; 22 in 2008; 16 in 2007; 18 transfers in 2006 (note that because U of C's entering class is less than half the size of Columbia's these numbers are in percentage terms not very different from CLS's).

FSU: 74 in 2010; 45 in 2009; 61 in 2008; 60 in 2007; 59 in 2006 

Northwestern: 38 in 2010; 37 in 2009; 59 in 2008; 43 in 2007; 40 in 2006

Berkeley: 46; 45; 39; 39; 37

Loyola:  43; 48; 37; 33; 35

Where are all these people coming from? At the elite schools, my correspondent's story is probably typical: somebody whose numbers weren't quite good enough to get into the transfer school goes to a lower-ranked school with the benefit of a big scholarship, and then transfers (note my correspondent's very good but not top of the class grades at a third tier school didn't deter CLS from accepting him/her and his/her money a year after the initial rejection).  Or in some cases, such as the Penn enrollee who got a letter from HLS, somebody who just missed HYS and went to a slightly lower ranked school for full boat will get accepted into Valhalla a year later, when their 170 LSAT won't sully the stats.

Obviously this isn't what's going on at places like Florida State.  Where in the heck is FSU finding 120 transfer students to fill out its 2L and 3L classes?  Who knows, but I looked up Cooley's transfer stats, and in 2010 188 [!] people transferred out -- which turns out to be a typical yearly number for them.

Some further notes:  These numbers indicate that the transfer market is much softer than the conventional wisdom at places like TLS suggests.  The T-14 are taking around 450 transfers a year -- thus creating the equivalent of a couple of extra elite law schools.  In DC GULC and GWU alone collectively take as many transfer students every year as the entire first year classes of some of the smaller law schools.

At lower ranked schools the remarkable number of transfers into some of them indicates both how desperate lots of people are to escape the bottom feeders, and how a lot of people end up confusing the fact that law school in general is pretty awful with their belief that the law school they enrolled at is unusually bad.

Finally, my correspondent's impression that somewhere in the neighborhood of 35% to 40% of the 3L class at Columbia is in a bad spot in re employment shouldn't be overlooked in all this, especially by people with full scholarships at lower ranked schools who even at this moment are dreaming of dumping $160K on spending their last two years of law school in Morningside Heights.

There's more to say about the ethics of law schools balancing their budgets via government-supplied loan money taken out by students they wouldn't accept in the first place, yet who they're happy to admit once those students' entrance qualifications won't affect the schools' precious rankings, but this post is already too long. 

Update: A commenter thinks I should point out that some commenters are disputing the correspondent's estimates regarding the employment situation at CLS for third years in general and transfers in particular. I disagree with the commenter that the referenced comments constitute a refutation of the correspondent's claims -- since Columbia doesn't deign to publish real employment statistics this is a war of anecdotes -- but I'm noting the existence of the dispute.