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Admins: Data suggest law, medical school admissions unaffected by deflation
Published: Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Princeton graduates continue to be successful in gaining admission to the most selective law schools and medical schools, despite the University’s grading policy, administrators said at the Monday meeting of the Council of the Princeton University Community (CPUC).
So ...
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The data that's being trumpeted in this article doesn't demonstrate a damn thing. Tracking law school admissions rates in general mean nothing--if applicants don't think they're in range at top tier schools, they apply to lower-ranked schools, and get in. Showing that x percent of all applications are being accepted doesn't prove anything unless you're controlling for the schools in question. I'd like to see how many applications to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford Law, for example, were accepted over the last five years, and then compare that trend to that of our peer schools. If we're trending more sharply downwards than our peer schools, that would seem to indicate that grade deflation is having a negative effect. But, of course, that wouldn't fit Dean Malkiel's narrative.
Shouldn't it be "Datum shows law, medical..." or "Data show law, medical..."?
Has the Prince become an extension of the University's PR office?
Instead of critically considering, say, the possibility that while acceptance rates remain constant, fewer Princetonians than before even have the GPAs to apply, the Prince decides to authoritatively state that "Data shows [all is well!]". As Scharf said, the data don't show anything like that at all, and any paper with sense would note this.
Any worthwhile newspaper would also check with sources at, say, Yale, to see what the comparable admissions rates are there. A Harvard Law acceptance rate of 28% is meaningless if Yale's getting 35%.
Finally, I'd like to see the LSAT score of the people who wrote/approved this article. I'm generally not a Prince basher, but this sort of thing is just bad journalism.
The University wants to talk about law school admissions rates? Yes, let's talk about law school admissions rates. Currently at Yale Law School, of the approximately 570 J.D. students enrolled (190/class times three years), there are 82 students who went to Yale undergrad, 63 from Harvard, 36 from Stanford, and 26 from Columbia. How many from Princeton? Seventeen. Of all the Princeton students who apply to each year to the undisputed top law school in the country (well over 90% of student admitted to Yale Law matriculate there), only about five to six students a year manage to go there. That's pretty abysmal, and makes the University's numbers sound highly suspect.
The guy above me is missing a pretty big piece of the puzzle: how many Princetonians apply to law school?
I once compared law school application notes with a friend from Yale. There is a SIGNIFICANT difference between the number of Princetonians who even apply to YLS and Yalies who do so. Princeton pipes far, far more students into business.
I agree that the numbers seem alarming, but given Princeton's size and unusually strong bias towards business (even compared to Harvard, Stanford), I wouldn't exactly going to turn on the sirens just yet.
Dear Prince: Next time, please consult somebody knowledgeable about statistical inference before simply parroting the university's spin right back at us. There are too many issues with this data to draw any conclusions from it.
First, the admissions rate to law schools or med schools in general doesn't tell us anything because it's equally consistent with the hypothesis that Princeton students are being rejected from upper-tier schools and and compensating by going to lower-tier schools instead. Indeed, you would expect that in an economic downturn, with increased competition for grad school admissions and fewer alternatives available in the job market, students would spread their net and apply to a much greater number of safety schools than they would have in a better economy. Thus we should be expecting overall acceptance rates for Princeton students to increase now even if Princeton applicants are actually doing much worse relative to how they would have done absent grade deflation.
Similarly, for the data regarding particular graduate schools, knowing the acceptance rates for Princeton students relative to the overall acceptance rate for only a single year again tells us nothing about the effects of grade deflation. Even without any other controls, you would need to perform a difference-in-difference analysis, comparing how much the Princeton acceptance rate exceeds the overall acceptance rate post-grade deflation to how much it exceeded the overall acceptance rate pre-deflation.
Finally, there isn't any accounting here for the significant possibility that the composition of recent graduating classes may be very different from that of past classes. The grade deflation policy was announced in early 2004, meaning that it was known to the classes of 2008 and above when they were deciding which school to matriculate to. Presumably there was a self-selection effect whereby students who thought they might not cut it under the harsher grading standards would be more likely to go elsewhere, in which case recent classes may be academically superior to some of the earlier classes, in which case we should expect to see grad school acceptance rates increase rather than merely stay flat. Similarly, Janet Rapelye replaced Fred Hargadon as Dean of Admissions starting with the class of 2007, so the composition of those classes probably differs from that of earlier classes. And because the classes of 2005-2007 were transitional years, subject to grade deflation only in their later years at the University, it's hard to say much without comparing current classes to 2004 and earlier -- but so many other factors have changed that I'm not sure how much you could conclude from that comparison, either. (Data from classes graduating around the economic downturn in the early 2000's might actually provide an interesting comparison, but that was before the university's recent pushes to increase diversity and to draw in more students from poorer backgrounds, and grad school applicant pools may not be comparable because salaries for entry-level lawyers have nearly doubled since that time.)
Seriously, why does the Prince print this type of crap? There is absolutely no basis for this article beyond one year's data in the words of a Princeton administrator. Also, try to take into account the fact that Princeton students comprise of the top 1% of students in the nation so, yeah, we're probably going to do better than the national average. Whoop-dee-doo
I'm with Will Scharf.
All these damn stats are just like, "oh, Princeton grads do much better than the average at getting into this school or that school." Excuse me, we're Princeton grads. That should be happening regardless. What I want to see is TRENDS. Besides, "Princeton applicants" includes kids who graduated BEFORE grade deflation and worked for a while before applying to these grad schools.
this article is abysmal. the evidence does not fit the claims. the title is misleading as all hell.
we still resent you nancy malkiel.
Yes, maybe fewer Princetonians apply to Yale Law to begin with.
And then again, maybe fewer apply because their GPAs are not so good.
I agree with everybody else here. If the best Nancy Malkiel can do is trumpet these misleading statistics, then they must really have something to hide. The real numbers must be quite dismal.