Bengoshi ni Naritai?

Well college acceptance season is in full swing, the graduate school rankings are out and the deans are sweating and eager to really earn their salary.

It should fail to surprise anyone in Westwood that UCLA Law School has managed to dribble its way to a two-way tie for the fifteenth best law school in the country in the 2006 U.S. News & World Report rankings. When I enrolled it was ranked number 16.

A few statistics do strike me as significant..

1. It now is only a notch or three (depending on how you read the rankings -- there is a three-way tie for 11th and a two-way tie for 15th) below the venerable Boalt Hall and remains, as it does perennially, high above #18 "University of Second Choice."

2. The acceptance rate remains low, with a meager 13.6% compared to Boalt's 10%. Because of the attraction of sunny L.A., UCLA can afford to be selective. Compared to the acceptance rates at the other top 20 schools, UCLA squarely scores in the top 5-6 of the most selective schools in the country.

3. The full-time in-state tuition has rocketed to $22,123 per year. This represents no less than a ten-fold increase since the days I attended ten years ago. Has inflation worked its magic, or is it the empty state coffers at work? By contrast, it is now just as expensive (or cheap) to attend UCLA as an out-of-state student ($33,168) than #2 Harvard ($33,120) and #14 Georgetown ($33,055), my "backup" school at the time. Columbia U. in the Big Apple takes the grand prize as the most expensive institution of higher legal learning at $37,256. Guess it takes lots of money to maintain even a modicum of a sense of security in a place like Morningside Heights.