While there are several major flaws with Leiter's placement rankings, Harvard placing better than Yale is not one of them. Wachtell, Cravath, and Davis Polk are a very small subset of elite firms and it's inappropriate to make broad claims about national placement at elite firms only by looking at them.
If you're interested in a more in-depth analysis of national firm placement, you might want want to take a look at my recent article, available here:
Aun: Fascinating. The rankings purported to be a measure of the extent to which each law school places students nationally. You've attempted to disprove it by choosing three firms all located within one mile of each other.
For what it's worth Leiter has commented on the study referenced above about The Legal Employment Market here:
Anthony M. Ciolli, The Legal Employment Market, __ JURIMETRICS __ (2005). This is a quite interesting and informative study (though a bit awkwardly written), but the reader must approach with care what its results mean. Its regional placement results (the most interesting part of the study) are affected by the number of graduates of each school seeking to find work in that region; hence, for example, in the region that includes New York and Philadelphia, it turns out that North Carolina ranks ahead of Penn and Cornell! This plainly doesn’t mean a student looking to work in these Northeastern legal markets ought to go to North Carolina instead of Cornell or Penn; rather, the result is an artifact of the very small number of UNC students seeking work in these markets, combined with the fact that they will be a self-selected few with unusually good credentials (the average UNC student presumably doesn’t bother to try to land a job a firm in New York City). This limitation of the regional results, however, would be apparent to anyone who reads the ranking methodology carefully. More problematic is the way the author aggregates the regional results into a ranking of schools by “national placement,” the data on which Judge Posner relies. Mr. Ciolli opts to aggregate regional placement results based on each region’s share of the market for elite law firms. But since student geographic preferences play an enormous role in where students choose to work (as Mr. Ciolli elsewhere notes), any school located in a geographic region with fewer “elite” firms will fare less well by this aggregation method. Moreover, since “elite” firms are determined in part by revenues, and since revenues are, in part, a function of cost-of-living in different regions of the country (which affects fees charged), the results will also be skewed in favor of schools located on higher cost-of-living areas.
Sounds to me like these are just different kinds of rankings.
I'm also suspicious of the inflated rankings for George Mason (no offense Todd). By staking out a position as a "conservative alternative," some of the faculty quality/citation rankings are skewed since the faculty shows up in places where people are attempting to be provocative instead of scholarly.
I did not have the time, this morning, to type up all the data , but the numbers from those three firms are no different that what one sees when one looks at 99.9% of all the firms that interview at both schools (including Williams &Connoly, Covington &Burling D.C., Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale &Dorr D.C., Ropes &Gray, Arnold &Porter, Kirkland &Ellis, etc.).
It is markedly easier to land elite jobs in the private sector from Yale than it is at Harvard.
Sure, Harvard may have more kids at these firms, but that's mostly a part of Harvard's class size (570 at Harvard compared to 170 at Yale).
Per capita, Yale dominates placement at elite firms, in the academy, and in elite clerkships.
aun: My research involved examining, by hand, more than 15,000 first, second, and third year associates at 1295 AmLaw/Vault branch offices. No matter what you measurement you use (per capita associates, total associates, etc.) or what adjustments you make (quality adjusted, no quality adjustment, etc.), Harvard not only beats Yale in national placement, but beats if handily. Every study of law school career placement, from Wehrli to Leiter to my own, has reached the same conclusion, so this is hardly unusual. If you have data showing otherwise, I would love to trade datasets with you. aciolli@autoadmit.com
Since a few people seem serious about debating this non-issue, it is worth pointing out that approximately 50-60% of all Yale grads get federal clerkships (it was 56% the year I graduated). Nearly everybody from Yale who applies for clerkships gets one. No other school is even close.
aun: elite firm was defined as any firm in the AmLaw 200.
Joe: I don't think anyone disputes Yale's clerkship dominance. The argument is about elite firm placement. Clerkship placement and firm placement don't go hand in hand.
Although I'm an HLS grad (but with plenty good enough grades not to worry about whether HLS or Yale is better), I've got to side with aun on this to some extent. Treating the top 200 law firms in the country as "elite" is just silly. The question is what firms do the very best law students in the country want to go to, and which law school does better at getting you there.
I would say there are probably thirty or forty such firms, not two hundred, and I'm not sure PPP is the best way of figuring out which firms those are.
That said, measuring how well a school places you is tough. If the question is, "Would this student, X, get a better job if he went to Yale or to Harvard?", simply measuring the yield rates of the two schools won't tell you much because Harvard needs to dip much lower to fill its class.
Size screws everyone. You can get an interview at Cravath by being in the top 1/3 of Columbia. You can be in the top 1/3 at Columbia by being a lazing good for nothing with a half-decent head on your shoulders. Cravath is big and it needs warm bodies. The result is that it dips. Wachtel is smaller and doesn't have to dip.
In LA, this is really obvious. Every firm, even the fanciest and most selective, let in a couple stragglers from Loyola. Loyola! Not to mention USC, UCLA, etc.
Harvard gets hurt relative to Yale through the same phenomenon, although we obviously derive benefits from a larger class size, too.
Outside of those 10 firms, one rarely finds a Yalie -- too many of us go into the academy, the public sector, to IBANKING, etc. To say that Harvard places better at non-Top-10 firms because there are less Yalies is, therefore, tenuous at best.
For example, there's no way Harvard is better than Yale in terms of placement at elite firms.
Here are the 2004 selectivity numbers for Wachtell Lipton Rosen &Katz (the most selective and elite firm in the United States):
Out of 36 initial applicants from Yale, 6 were made offers — roughly a 17% chance.
Out of 70 initial applicants from Harvard, 5 were made offers — roughly a 7&chance.
Now take Cravath Swaine &Moore in 2004:
Out of 47 initial applicants from Yale, 15 were made offers — roughly a 32% chance.
Out of 96 initial applicants from Harvard, 23 were made offers — roughly a 24% chance.
Now take Davis Polk &Wardwell in 2004:
Out of 76 initial applicants from Yale, 33 were made offers — roughly a 43% chance.
Out of 148 initial applicants from Harvard, 39 were made offers — roughly a 26% chance.
So, at least in the three most selective and elite firms in America, Yale does significantly better than Harvard in terms of placement.
Not that you're necessarily wrong....
If you're interested in a more in-depth analysis of national firm placement, you might want want to take a look at my recent article, available here:
The Legal Employment Market: Determinants of Elite Firm Placement and How Law Schools Stack Up
(Though I have to admit that, if I'd been accepted by Yale, I would've gone there in a heartbeat.)
Sounds to me like these are just different kinds of rankings.
It is markedly easier to land elite jobs in the private sector from Yale than it is at Harvard.
Sure, Harvard may have more kids at these firms, but that's mostly a part of Harvard's class size (570 at Harvard compared to 170 at Yale).
Per capita, Yale dominates placement at elite firms, in the academy, and in elite clerkships.
Joe: I don't think anyone disputes Yale's clerkship dominance. The argument is about elite firm placement. Clerkship placement and firm placement don't go hand in hand.
I would say there are probably thirty or forty such firms, not two hundred, and I'm not sure PPP is the best way of figuring out which firms those are.
That said, measuring how well a school places you is tough. If the question is, "Would this student, X, get a better job if he went to Yale or to Harvard?", simply measuring the yield rates of the two schools won't tell you much because Harvard needs to dip much lower to fill its class.
Size screws everyone. You can get an interview at Cravath by being in the top 1/3 of Columbia. You can be in the top 1/3 at Columbia by being a lazing good for nothing with a half-decent head on your shoulders. Cravath is big and it needs warm bodies. The result is that it dips. Wachtel is smaller and doesn't have to dip.
In LA, this is really obvious. Every firm, even the fanciest and most selective, let in a couple stragglers from Loyola. Loyola! Not to mention USC, UCLA, etc.
Harvard gets hurt relative to Yale through the same phenomenon, although we obviously derive benefits from a larger class size, too.
Outside of those 10 firms, one rarely finds a Yalie -- too many of us go into the academy, the public sector, to IBANKING, etc. To say that Harvard places better at non-Top-10 firms because there are less Yalies is, therefore, tenuous at best.