The U.S. News Short List, separate from our overall rankings, is a regular series that magnifies individual data points in hopes of providing students and parents a way to find which undergraduate or graduate programs excel or have room to grow in specific areas. Be sure to explore The Short List: College and The Short List: Grad School to find data that matters to you in your college or grad school search.
Several state schools enrolled more accepted students this year than last, elevating the institutions to the U.S. News list of 10 Most Popular Law Schools.
In an annual look at law school yield—the percentage of accepted students that ultimately enrolled in a given institution—the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill School of Law, the Georgia State University College of Law, and the University of Virginia School of Law posted among the largest increases and among the highest rates for the 2011-2012 school year. None of the three cracked the top 10 last year.
In total, 188 ranked law schools reported to U.S. News their acceptances and subsequent enrollments for the current school year—a data set that encompassed 175,085 offers of acceptance and 44,366 students who ultimately decided to attend. (The data include unduplicated applicants to both full-time and part-time law programs.) Among the 188 law schools, the average yield for 2011-2012 was 28 percent.
The law school with the highest yield is also the perennial front runner in the U.S. News Best Law Schools rankings. At Yale Law School, 81.3 percent, or 205, of the 252 students accepted for the 2011-2012 school year later enrolled. This is slightly higher than Yale's yield last year: 80.4 percent.
[Read more about this year's law school rankings.]
The year-over-year increase in accepted students who enrolled was much more pronounced at the University of Virginia. UVA Law's yield rate, 51.9 percent, leapt 12 percentage points from the 2010-2011 admissions cycle to 2011-2012, the largest year-over-year gain posted by any of the 188 schools that reported the data. UNC and Georgia State were also among the law schools with the biggest yield gains, propelling the schools onto the top 10 list below. (Georgia State Law tops this year's list of law schools that lead to the least debt, too.)
[See all the law schools with the largest increases in yield.]
In addition to the state schools that are new to this top 10, Stanford Law School makes the list this year with a yield of 48.4 percent. Several law schools that receive a Rank Not Published (RNP) denotation from U.S. News have among the highest yield rates, too, including the Southern University Law Center in Baton Rouge, La., and Liberty University School of Law in Lynchburg, Va. U.S. News calculates rankings for RNP institutions, which fall in the bottom quarter of law schools, but does not publish them. Unranked law schools, which do not submit enough data for U.S. News to calculate a rank, were not considered for this report.
These are the 10 ranked law schools with the highest yield rates for the 2011-2012 school year. Due to a tie, there are 11 schools on this list.
| Law school (name) (state) | Students accepted | Students enrolled | Yield | U.S. News law school rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yale Law School | 252 | 205 | 81.3% | 1 |
| Brigham Young University Clark Law School | 207 | 145 | 70% | 39 |
| Harvard Law School | 842 | 559 | 66.4% | 3 |
| Southern University Law Center (LA) | 403 | 258 | 64% | RNP |
| University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill | 462 | 248 | 53.7% | 38 |
| Georgia State University | 423 | 223 | 52.7% | 58 |
| University of Virginia | 688 | 357 | 51.9% | 7 |
| Liberty University (VA) | 200 | 99 | 49.5% | RNP |
| Stanford University (CA) | 372 | 180 | 48.4% | 2 |
| University of Memphis (Humphreys) | 302 | 144 | 47.7% | RNP |
| University of New Mexico | 237 | 113 | 47.7% | 69 |
Don't see your school in the top 10? Access the U.S. News Law School Compass to find data on admissions requirements, enrollment statistics, and much more.
U.S. News surveyed 199 fully ABA accredited law schools for our 2011 survey of law programs. Schools self-reported a myriad of data regarding their academic programs and the makeup of their student body, among other areas, making U.S. News's data the most accurate and detailed collection of college facts and figures of its kind. While U.S. News uses much of this survey data to rank schools for our annual Best Law Schools rankings, the data can also be useful when examined on a smaller scale. U.S. News will now produce lists of data, separate from the overall rankings, meant to provide students and parents a means to find which schools excel, or have room to grow, in specific areas that are important to them. While the data come from the schools themselves, these lists are not related to, and have no influence over, U.S. News's rankings of Best Colleges or Best Graduate Schools.
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