It tells you a Washington U graduate is 2.5X as likely to end up at Yale Law school, as stated. If someone told you there were 50X more graduates from one school than another school at Goldman Sachs, would you not think that data point is significant given Goldman Sachs is one of the most desirable destinations in finance? Yale Law is one of the most desirable destinations for law school, is it not? |
Ideally, we'd like to know the acceptance rate by school when the applicants have exactly the same LSAT and GPA. That way we could better control variables and isolate the impact of school reputation, if any. My guess is only Yale Law has that data in this case and they aren't sharing it. So we are left with other data points. |
No, it doesn't. Washington U graduates who don't apply to YLS have the identical likelihood (probability) of ending up at Yale as the UVA graduates who don't apply to Yale -- zero. Washington U sent 7 and UVA sent 6. So, there were 1.16X more graduates from one school. I am not objecting this data point. I am objecting to your "2.5X likely to get in or end up" assertion. |
I wrote the original statement. I think you are reading something into it different into it than I intended or than I think the wording implies. Let me rephrase and see if it is better: once you adjust for the size of the institution (# of undergraduate students) a graduate of Washington University is 2.5X as likely to be enrolled at Yale Law School as a UVA graduate. I originally said "likely to end up". I specifically did not mention acceptance rate because I have no information (and no one on this board seems to have any information) on how many applied or were admitted. If I said something like "a graduate of UVA is 4X as likely to end up in the Washington, DC metro area than a Washington U (Saint Louis) graduate", you probably wouldn't blink an eye. The math is the same. If you look at what I wrote, I went on to say that I did not think any difference between WashU/Emory/Tufts and UVA/W&M is significant. Given that Yale Law is a desirable school, I do think it is probably significant when we see that there are 12X as many Ivy graduates at Yale Law compared to UVA once you adjust for undergraduate population. |
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^^^ I don't think you will ever get it. Yes, it is basic probability and statistics. Your data points, the number of graduates enrolled in YLS, and the total number of undergraduates from each undergraduate school, are valid and important. They mean as such as what the metrics are -- the number of graduates enrolled in YLS, and the size of graduates from those colleges.
What you failed to understand is that you divided those two numbers to invent a third metrics and used it to compare "the likelihood of end up at YLS" from each school. That's wrong. Washington U's graduates are NOT 2.5 X as likely to end up at Yale Law as a UVA graduate. |
Sorry. Based on the data from that publication, a Yale graduate is 34X as likely to end up at YLS as a UVA graduate. A Harvard graduate is 26X as likely to end up at YLS as a UVA graduate. A Princeton graduate is 19X as likely to end up at YLS as a UVA graduate . . . If 50% of UVA graduates go on to graduate school and 25% of GMU graduates go on to graduate school, a UVA graduate is 2X as likely to end up at graduate school . . . |
Most sports metrics are derived the same way. Points per game, batting average, 3 point shooting percentage, passing completion percentage. They are then used to compare. Batting average is likelihood of getting a hit per at bat, etc. |
| UVA boosters can never acknowledge that it is not = to all elite schools in any metric.... |
No, they are not. 3 point shooting percentage is calculated by # of 3 point shots made divided by 3 point shots attempted. Likelihood of attending Yale should be calculated by # enrolled/ # applied. |
I am a serious UVA booster and I am not for the life of me going to pretend that UVA is Yale. But once you get below the top 10 or 15, unless you're independently wealthy you’re insane to even consider paying private school or out of state tuition your kid gets into UVA. |
+1 and I'd add W&M to that. If you want the smaller environment you get at some privates, that's probably a better option than UVA. Of course, neither one is Yale, but they don't require sacrificing my retirement so for us UVA/W&M > Yale. |
The point was a third metric is created and it is created all the time. I don't think anyone would disagree that it would be great to know admission rate by school, but that isn't available. Beyond that, what would really be ideal to know is, if you could control for all other factors, what the admission rate is by school. By that I mean if the applicants from all schools in the study had identical stats and applications, what would their admission rate be. That would give a better indication of the impact of the school on admissions. It is likely that only Yale Law admissions knows this. Reports do exactly what the PP did all the time. If you look at Poets and Quants, a site about business schools, they'll talk about "feeder schools" to top Wall Street firms by counting the number of graduates there. Now it could be that graduates of a certain school don't want to work for Goldman Sachs or other firms and don't apply, but we don't really have any information on that. Given that Goldman is prestigious and pays a lot, it isn't a stretch to think a lot of business oriented graduates would like to work there. So the metric has merit in the view of many people and they use it all the time. Lastly, there are many likelihoods. There is the likelihood a UVA graduate enrolls at Yale Law. There is the likelihood of an applicant from UVA (or another school) being accepted by Yale Law. There is the likelihood of a graduate of a given school being accepted by Yale Law with a specific set of stats (that would allow more precise comparisons). We just need to have progressively more information to know those likelihoods, and it often isn't available. |
| At a school like Yale, a lot of the applicants will have extraordinary stats (173 LSAT and 3.9 GPA are about average). The school becomes the tie breaker. In this sense it is an extreme case, because admission is so difficult, but also an informative one, because it shows which schools are more likely to pass that bar. That seems to weigh heavily to Ivy+. |
Sigh. AT YALE. Not at a school “like” Yale. As I have been screaming to deaf ears, Yale is in a league of its own completely. |
You write an offensive and irrelevant post because of your interpretation of one word? And when they said clearly "extreme case"? |