Law school admissions and college majors

It is no secret that law school students are drawn disproportionately from humanities and social sciences, with only a small proportion coming from science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Indeed, the political science major alone accounts for far more law students than all STEM fields combined.

There are many reasons for the paucity of graduates in STEM fields in law schools. The reason often given is that the job market is more robust for STEM graduates than for humanities graduates without a law degree, perhaps leading them to avoid law school. Another reason some give is that some STEM graduates may lack the verbal reasoning (as opposed to quantitative reasoning) skills necessary for success in law school. Some argue that people choose certain majors (such as political science or criminal justice) specifically in preparation for law school, even though law schools generally advise against such choices.

Another reason, which is probably the most significant, is the influence of US News rankings on law school admissions. For US News purposes, a GPA is a GPA, whether the GPA comes from a B.A. in French or a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. Conventional wisdom suggests that GPAs in humanities disciplines may not be equivalent to GPAs in STEM fields, but there is little data that compares the two.

In looking at this question, I recently came across this Law School Admission Council resource that provides admissions data by college majors for 2014-2015 and 2015-2016. The report contains the mean GPA and LSAT score for over 100 college majors, along with acceptance rates and "yield" rates. I collected this data and made the following chart that shows the relationship of undergraduate GPA and LSAT for dozens of college majors. Undergraduate GPAs are along the left axis and LSAT scores are along the bottom axis. The size of the circles represent the number of applicants.

(You may need to widen your browser window to see the full chart).

The chart makes a strong case supporting the conventional wisdom that the GPAs from different college majors are not equivalent. Although French majors and mechanical engineering majors have the same average LSAT, the average GPA for French majors is more than 0.3 higher, which is an enormous difference in the tightly stratified world of law school admissions. The applicant with a 158 LSAT and a 3.25 GPA in mechanical engineering likely has similar prospects as an applicant with a 158 LSAT and a 3.55 in French, but the latter is probably more likely to be admitted to law school and receive a scholarship.

This bias toward higher-GPA college majors creates several problems for law schools. The schools may end up admitting students who will not perform as well as others who were not admitted. In addition, schools miss out on students with science backgrounds who have strong employment prospects in areas such as patent prosecution. 

Law schools can easily adjust for the differences in GPAs by scaling applicants' GPAs to their LSAT scores and then normalizing by undergraduate major. US News could easily adjust its formula to take into account the grading differences of different majors (as well as different undergraduate institutions). Either or both of these changes would go a long way toward diversifying the pool of law students and reducing the incentives for law schools to manipulate GPA medians in unproductive ways.

Comments

[Mickey Robins]

Why would anybody think that students with a strong STEM background would make good lawyers? That's just not the type of reasoning power that the good/great lawyers use.

[D]

"Conventional wisdom suggests that GPAs in humanities disciplines may not be equivalent to GPAs in STEM fields, but there is little data that compares the two."

There are actually a number of high-quality works on the subject, which have shown quite clearly that humanities GPAs are greatly inflated. The seminal work on this subject may be Rojstaczer & Healy's 2010 article in Columbia University's Teachers College Record entitled 'Grading in American Colleges and Universities'. They found that relative to natural science GPAs, humanities GPAs are inflated by about .4 points (on a 4.0 scale), and humanities GPAs are also inflated relative to engineering and even social science GPAs. As the authors state in this excellent article: "We’ve looked at contemporary grades from over 160 colleges and universities in the United States with a combined enrollment of over 2,000,000 students and historical grades from over 80 schools..." Given that rigorous analysis of such a large data set concludes that humanities grades are disproportionately higher, hypothesizing that the US News emphasis on raw GPA irrespective of major could lead schools to admit inferior students is entirely reasonable.