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UC Irvine School of Law ? More Selective than Yale? Zot!

By Ashby Jones

Zot! That’s what fans of UC Irvine Anteaters’ baseball team exclaim after their team gets a strikeout (paying homage to the supposed noise an anteater makes after catching an ant). It also might be what Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the fledgling UC Irvine School of Law, is saying after bringing home the most selectively chosen incoming class of first-year students in the nation.

A press release just issued by the school reads:

The University of California, Irvine School of Law has chosen its inaugural class by accepting only 4% of its applicants, making it the most selective of any law school in the nation.

UC Irvine accepted only 110 of a total of 2,741 applicants to fill its 68 first-year positions, for an acceptance rate of 4%. By comparison, Yale Law School at 7%, and Stanford Law School at 9%, are the only other law schools with single-digit acceptance rates, according to the most recent data available from the American Bar Association (2007).

UC Irvine received more than 40 applications for each of its positions in its first class, which is also a first among law schools by a wide margin. The most competitive law schools typically receive around 20 to 30 applications per slot, according to ABA data.

Well done, Irvine. So how’d Chemerinsky et al. pull it off? Well, it probably didn’t hurt that the school was offering free tuition for all three years to all the members of the first class. “It’s important because we’re stressing public service,” Rex Bossert, spokesperson for the school, told the Law Blog. “And we want to make sure that this class has the financial freedom to pursue all sorts of avenues upon graduation.”

Indeed it seems they will. But that’s only one class. Bossert hesitated when we asked if the “free tuition” deal is going to be offered to the next class. “We haven’t decided yet,” he said. Irvine’s a public school, but so are the law schools at UCLA and Berkeley, and tuition at those institutions ain’t cheap, even for California residents. (California residents admitted in ‘08 are charged $31,103; non-resident tuition is $41,624.)

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 16, 2009 (boomark / email).