As one of your students at Vanderbilt (2 classes), I am quite surprised to hear you say that (especially since you went to Chicago). I thought Vanderbilt was about as un-competitive as a law school could be, since grading was pretty generous (curved of course, but a B+ curve makes it hard to have a GPA below 3.0), employment prospects were pretty good, but it wasn't quite selective (or highly ranked) enough to get many of the overacheiver Wall Street-or-bust types. It did strike me, being a few years out of undergrad and married, as a young school, but I thought even the young students seemed pretty laid back. Are you using the same criteria as the magazine, or what was yours?

Hi Chris,

I just had a conversation with a colleague about what determines our perceptions of competitiveness. My hunch is that one's undergraduate experience and one's career aspirations are the main factors.

It's interesting that you mention Chicago, because everyone has this image of Chicago as ultra-competitive, but I never thought of it that way. Partly because job prospects for (almost?) everyone in the class were outstanding, and partly because I had just graduated from the accounting program at BYU -- which truly was competitive! I have always assumed that the thing that made BYU's accounting program competitive was that many of the students were shooting for jobs at one of the (then) Big 8 accounting firms, but those firms only interviewed people in the Top 10% of the class (even though BYU has long had one of the top accounting programs in the country). But maybe Mormons are just really competitive. In any event, at Chicago, the classmates I remember commenting most on the competitiveness of the place had attended fancy liberal arts colleges.

My comment regarding Vanderbilt was inspired by lots of conversations with students who were trying to land jobs at Wall Street or DC firms. Many of my students were "Wall Street-or-bust types" -- and I remember several students commenting on this fact at the time -- but I was teaching the sort of classes that would attract that demographic. One of my students told me that she would be missing five weeks of class because my class was held on a Friday and she would be traveling the East Coast trying to get a summer associate position at a big firm. This was extreme, but I have never seen a law school with a bigger problem dealing with absences related to call-back interviews. (By the way, when I expressed my concern about this student, another member of the faculty shrugged and said, "Yeah, it's a real problem, but it's not like our students have their pick of Wall Street jobs.")

By and large, the students at Lewis & Clark, Wisconsin, and Arizona State did not aspire to Wall Street jobs, which significantly reduced the pressure. Wash U in St. Louis was pretty similar to Vanderbilt, and my guess is that it has gotten more similar as its rankings have risen over the past few years.

Professor Smith,

That's kind of ironic to me: I picked Vanderbilt for a few reasons, one of which was that The Princeton Review had ranked it as one of the least competitive and most collegial schools among the top 20 U.S. News law schools. Of course, the fact that I had narrowed the choices based on U.S. News rankings probably says something too...

For me though, when I think of "competitiveness" in the self-reported student surveys on which TPR bases its rankings I think of it in more cutthroat terms -- the stories one would hear about students at other schools hiding casebooks and library materials come to mind, or the unhealthy study groups from "1L".

I just checked the TPR website; things look a bit different than back when I was applying to law school. I couldn't find "competitiveness" for Vanderbilt, but maybe TPR wants me to buy the book - but Vanderbilt still ranks #4 for Quality of Life, and in my mind it would be difficult to reconcile a supercompetitive environment with a high quality of life. Then again though, I'm a laid-back West Coaster at heart.

Hope you find some good custard in Provo!

Ok, now two Chrises from Vandy have told me I am all wet. I am happy to be set straight, but if you tell me that your idea of competitiveness comes from One L, it sort of taints things. Any law school will seem uncompetitive by those standards. (Perhaps that's another reason I didn't think of Chicago as competitive. I read One L just before I started classes.)

It's actually interesting to think about how Princeton Review inquires about competitiveness. BYU is by far the highest ranking school in the Top 10 "most competitive," so it appears to me that they are picking up a bit of job desperation among students.

Vanderbilt didn't feel overly competitive for the class of 2002 because "they" were giving top of the market jobs (NYC, DC, LA, BigTX, etc.) away to Vandy students right up until the bubble burst. I remember standing in the corner office of a partner in Houston during my over-paid summer at a large firm when he got the news that Skilling had resigned: "man, that's weird..." Things got pretty competitive after that.

The majority of my friends had really great results in the job market out of school. I honestly believe that they were the types who just wanted to do well; we weren't out to beat anyone. It never occurred to us that we should be stressed about whether or not a book would be in the library. (The commercial outlines were all we needed.)

I agree with the prof. It's all about time and place. I recruited stress cases out of Vandy '03-'05. Many of the UofH students that we see are totally nuts over class ranking. Similar to BYU, that's a school where only the top students get a shot at the big firms in town.

Don't get me wrong, Vandy had its share of gunners. It was pretty disgusting. But once OCI started it became clear to our class that those folks were dated. It wasn't 1933 - the market was great in 2001. My guess is that the un-silent minority at Vanderbilt tainted the prof's view.

Josh

"Similar to BYU, that's a school where only the top students get a shot at the big firms in town." - To me that hits the extreme side of BYU competitiveness square on the head.

In my experience, BYU is almost hyper competitive among the top 20%, and even among some of the top 30%. Below that percentile, there really isn't the same competitive flair, but I suppose that might be expected...