Yesterday over at Above The Law, Elie took a look at some of the 509 data I’ve been reporting on these past few days.

You know who is doing just fine in the current low-application environment? YALE! Yale is the freaking OG of being Yale. Their business is good. Other top schools who can credibly call themselves Yale-like are also doing just fine. Duke, Stanford, the state-school mafia of Michigan/Berkeley/UVA, they’re not feeling the hurt.

Later on he notes:

Lee’s graphs, (see them all here) only go through the top 150 schools. I did a chart that looks at the enrollment situation for the bottom 50 law schools:

Burnt down house

If you look closely, you’ll see that the guy holding the fiddle is wearing an ABA T-shirt. Their schools are withering. NOT YALE. But damn near everybody else. The accrediting organization must loosen up the rules to allow these schools to be more creative at addressing the concerns of the students who are not applying.

My first reaction was, “Hey! I’m pretty sure I drove by that house in Detroit on my way across border when I lived in Canada!” My second reaction was, well, I guess we need to look at the rest of the schools just to be sure they match up with Elie’s chart. So here we go. All of the unranked schools listed by USN&WR*, listed by percentage change:

Click for huge version.

Click for huge version.

Assorted Highlights:

  • Biggest drop: Appalachian (146 to 48).
  • 2nd Biggest drop: Thomas Cooley (1161 to 445). Also, they were such an outlier on number of matriculants, I had to break them out on their own chart.
  • Biggest increase: NC Central (166 to 199).
  • 2nd biggest increase: Western New England (106 to 118).
  • *Note: University of DC not listed because the ABA 509 page spits out busted PDFs for them.
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