Yale Daily News Puts Legal Elitism in Black and White

So today the Yale Daily News gives us a long-winded, comprehensive look at "elite" law students, where they come from, how they adjust to life at grand ol' Yale, what happens while there, etc. For anyone who still harbors any silly thoughts of meritocracy, this article should help you see that the upper Ivy League is basically run on a a series of elitist tautologies.

But in the midst of an article trying to make the Yale student body and its aspiring lawyers feel even better about itself, we get a flat-out admission regarding legal hiring:

Rivera interviewed roughly 40 professionals involved in law firm recruitment and hiring, and found that these people give particular preference to candidates from Harvard, Yale or Stanford law schools when reviewing job applications.

Although many recruiters actually believed that graduates of non-elite law schools were more prepared for the practical aspects of being a lawyer, they still preferred to hire from super-elite schools because of the prestige associated with them.

Yes, right there, in the Yale Daily News is an admission that many recruiters believe other "non-elite" law schools prepare their students better for practice.

And yet, (1) Yale is still the best law school in the country, says US News and World Reports and (2) Yale law graduates still get jobs much easier than others.

They're not even trying to hide how screwed up this system is anymore. It's right there in black-and-white, despite the various arguments thrown out by shameless elitists. (Side question: Did the Yale Daily News even realize they were admitting Yale must not be an excellent law school if others prepare their students better? Think about it.) Normal rules of capitalism simply do not operate at the large firm level; or, if they do, the value of a degree that says "Yale" is worth infinitely more than a degree that says "St. Johns" or "Ohio State."

Could you imagine any other trademark having this effect? You're a completely mediocre guy, but you buy a HONDA and all of a sudden your earning power triples what it would if you bought a TOYOTA. It'd be a commercial basically. You buy the product, life changes. Women want to sleep with you, men want to be you, and live in perpetual bliss while the schmucks who buy the cheaper Toyota actually have to work for a living.

This is, of course, absurd, but it's exactly like what happens in legal hiring all the time. The same kid goes to the local state school for dirt cheap and even if he makes law review and wins a gazillion awards and ranks top 5%, he'll be a longshot for BigLaw, whereas if he went to NYU or Virginia and hit the median or higher, he'd have a much easier shot.

Unfortunately for the makers of every other product in the country, their customers aren't as prestige-drunk as large law firms. Yet those in charge of legal hiring are apparently convinced that clients would balk at paying non-elite graduates high billing rates, even if the non-elite associates are more competent lawyers than their Yale peers. One has to wonder if the lawyers can't justify their own best-interest hiring practices (like paying slightly less for equal or better quality from lesser-known schools) to their clients how they can win borderline cases, but I digress...

At least this isn't lost on some Yale students.

While his classmates are well-qualified for these jobs, [one student] said, the law firms’ selective bias overlooks other candidates — such as his friends at the University of Iowa Law School — who may be just as qualified.
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[Aanother student] said that the recruiting system reinforces the system of class privilege, in which richer students are more likely to attend good high schools, get into elite colleges and professional schools, and then score jobs at top-ranked firms.

Although she is only in her first year at Yale Law, Luna said she already has a summer job at one of the top firms in Seattle — a job she feels she may not have gotten if she attended a different law school.
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But this is not always the case, said Hedy Aponte, director of attorney recruiting and development at the prestigious Kirkland & Ellis firm’s Washington D.C. Office. Aponte said her firm sometimes chooses recruitment targets based on geographic proximity to the firm rather than elite status.
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Kirkland & Ellis focuses on schools ranging from Yale to University of Virginia to George Washington University, she added.

When asked to provide data on how many Kirkland & Ellis lawyers were hired from Harvard, Yale and Stanford, Aponte declined.

Whoa, Hedy! Talk about diversity! George Washington? Virginia? Gosh darned, that's egalitarianism at its finest. What, no Emory or Georgetown graduates?

By the way, Yale Daily News, if these people decline to give you the data, you might want to run a Google search. Kirkland and Ellis puts all of its attorneys information online and it's searchable by law school. I get that our ideals of journalism have sunk, but real journalists would at least check publicly available information.

I actually ran the Kirkland data back when I did part 2 of my rankings project (still going on, since I know people are wondering about it).

In the survey, Harvard had 74 partners (12.7%) and 65 (9.3%) associates, the most from any school in either category. Stanford and Yale are actually way down the list; instead, Chicago, Northwestern, NYU, Columbia, Georgetown, Michigan, and the University of Illinois rounded out the top eight. With DePaul, GWU, and Fordham above Yale, it's probably safe to assume it has more to do with their offices in Chicago, NYC, and Washington D.C. than anything. But ultimately, despite Hedy's assertions to the contrary, Kirkland is still elitist (1.7% of your hiring pool came from DePaul. Yippee).

This would be one of those spots where I think the article was very under-researched. Harvard, Yale, and Stanford aren't the end-all of prestige hiring or elitism. But that's really getting beside the point. The point is that it's an exclusive club, and no matter your merits, you're probably not getting in unless you have the right stamp, even if you have objectively offer a superior quality of underlying product at a lower price.

The branding of the Ivy League with regards to prestige is, perhaps, the greatest marketing and advertising success in global economic history. One can only wonder if and when the ultimate consumers (i.e. clients of large firms) will fully catch on.