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Law school yield protection is the belief that schools reject overqualified applicants to protect their enrollment rate. No school publishes data that would prove or disprove it. What is disclosed is yield pressure, and this table ranks all 31 schools by it: GW makes 4.3 offers per seat, Georgetown 3.3, BU 4.0.
Implied yield is enrolled students divided by offers, our arithmetic from each school's disclosed 509 figures. A low yield means the school loses most of its admits and has the strongest structural motive to manage enrollment.
#SchoolAcceptance rateOffersEnrolledImplied yield1Texas A&M12.1%63412419.6%2Vanderbilt13.3%81217221.2%3Wake Forest24.6%71015822.3%4GW27.2%2,64461223.1%5Minnesota26.7%90922224.4%6BU12.1%95323825.0%7Northwestern12.3%98125025.5%8WashU19.0%1,06527325.6%9Cornell18.2%83821725.9%10Ohio State24.6%56415727.8%11USC11.2%80522728.2%12Duke12.9%80422728.2%13Georgetown15.8%2,19367230.6%14Georgia12.7%59718631.2%15Notre Dame16.1%57518231.7%16UChicago9.7%64120331.7%17UCLA12.1%1,03933232.0%18NYU13.4%1,41245232.0%19Boston College8.5%65021633.2%20Columbia11.8%1,12041236.8%21Berkeley14.8%97437438.4%22Penn8.1%65026540.8%23Texas14.0%88136141.0%24Michigan8.6%77034344.5%25UVA10.2%68530945.1%26UNC11.2%38717645.5%27Wisconsin19.1%47425553.8%28Stanford6.1%33719357.3%29Harvard9.2%81657971.0%30BYU22.8%14812081.1%31Yale4.1%22620490.3%
Sources: each school's 2025 ABA 509 report and class of 2025 ABA Employment Summary, verified July 26, 2026. Enrolled counts use matriculants where the 509 reports them and graduating class size otherwise, which is noted here because it slightly affects the lower rows.
The claim is that a school will deny or waitlist an applicant whose numbers are far above its medians, on the theory that the applicant will enroll elsewhere and depress the school's yield.
The mechanism is plausible because yield is real and schools track it closely. Look at the top of the table: GW converts about 23 percent of its offers, Boston College about 33 percent, and BU about 25 percent, which means most admits go elsewhere.
What does not exist is evidence. No ABA disclosure, no school publication and no association dataset breaks admit or deny rates out by score band, which is exactly what testing this claim would require.
So our position is that yield protection is structurally motivated, widely believed, and unproven. We will not rank schools as yield protectors on data this thin, and neither should anyone else.
Unknown, and any list claiming otherwise is built on self-reported forum data with severe selection bias. Applicants who are denied post about it; applicants who are admitted quietly enroll.
What the table does support is a different and more useful claim: schools with heavy yield pressure have the strongest incentive to look for evidence you would actually attend. That is a behavioral prediction rather than an accusation.
The schools at the top of this table are also, not coincidentally, the schools that run binding early decision programs, which exist precisely to solve yield. Our ED table covers all 24 of them.
The response is the same either way and costs nothing: demonstrate genuine interest, specifically and verifiably.
Write a real why-this-school paragraph where one is invited, naming a concrete program tied to your actual goal rather than praising the school. Attend an information session and ask a question that shows you read the curriculum.
Accept an interview invitation if you get one, since eleven of these schools run invitation-only evaluative interviews and interest is exactly what they assess. And if a school offers a non-binding way to signal preference, use it.
What not to do is lower your target list out of fear. Applying only to schools where you sit at the median, because you worry that being strong will hurt you, is a much more reliable way to end up with a worse outcome than yield protection ever was.
Yield pressure is also why waitlists move. A school making four offers per seat is forecasting behavior, and forecasts miss.
When they miss low, schools go to the list, which is why waitlist movement at high-offer schools runs from late spring into the weeks before orientation. If you are waitlisted at a school near the top of this table, that is a genuinely live position rather than a polite rejection.
The move is a short letter of continued interest that states you would enroll if admitted, adds new information, and then goes quiet for four to six weeks.
GW makes about 4.3 offers per enrolled student, BU about 4.0 and Boston College about 3.0, which means each of those schools loses roughly three quarters of its admitted pool to other schools every year.
At the other end, Harvard, Yale and Stanford convert offers at far higher rates, which is why they have no structural need for binding early decision and do not offer it.
The relationship is direct and worth stating plainly: schools with low yield are the schools that run ED programs, that ask why-this-school questions, and that pay attention to demonstrated interest. That is yield management operating in the open.
None of that proves any school denies strong applicants. It shows why schools care about signals of interest, which is the actionable part regardless of whether yield protection is real.
Write a genuine why-this-school paragraph where one is invited, naming one concrete program tied to one specific goal. Adjectives about the school are worthless; a sentence only you could write is not.
Attend an information session and ask a question you could not have answered from the website. Admissions offices are small and they notice.
Accept any interview invitation immediately, since eleven schools in this set run invitation-only evaluative interviews and interest is part of what they assess.
And if you are waitlisted at a high-offer school, treat it as live. Schools making four offers per seat are forecasting behavior, forecasts miss, and the list is how they correct.
Every number in the table comes from a primary disclosure: each school's 2025 ABA Standard 509 Information Report for admissions, cost and aid, and its class of 2025 ABA Employment Summary for outcomes. Both are filed annually and both are free to read.
We did not use rankings, surveys or reputation. Where a figure required arithmetic, such as a percentage or a net cost, we state that it is our arithmetic and give the inputs so you can check it.
Where we could not verify something, the table says so rather than filling the gap with an estimate. That is why some rows read not published or not verified instead of carrying a number that would look more complete and mean less.
It cannot tell you your outcome. Every figure here describes a class of several hundred people, and your position inside that distribution is set by first-year grades that have not happened yet.
It cannot price your offer, because aid depends on where your numbers sit against each school's medians rather than on the median award. Half of every school's grant recipients got less than the figure shown.
And it cannot capture fit, culture, or whether you will do your best work in that building for three years. Those are discoverable only by visiting and asking current students specific questions, which is worth more than any table on this site.
Apply to the reaches. The cost of a rejection is an application fee and the cost of self-selecting downward is the outcome you did not get, which is the larger of the two by a wide margin.
Signal interest concretely wherever the application allows it, because that is the response that works whether or not yield protection is real.
And treat waitlists at high-offer schools as live positions rather than polite rejections, since schools making four offers per seat go to their lists most years.
The belief that schools deny or waitlist applicants whose numbers are far above their medians, to protect the share of admits who enroll. The incentive is real; published evidence that schools act on it does not exist.
Unknown. No school publishes admit or deny rates by score band, and the lists circulating online are built on self-reported forum data with heavy selection bias. Treat any named list as speculation.
Demonstrate genuine interest at low cost: a specific why-this-school paragraph, an information session with a real question, accepting any interview invitation, and using any non-binding preference signal the school offers.
By implied yield from disclosed 509 figures, GW converts about 23 percent of offers, BU about 25 percent and Boston College about 33 percent. These schools have the strongest structural motive to manage enrollment.
No. Lowering your list out of fear is a far more reliable way to get a worse outcome than yield protection has ever been shown to be.
Written by Ali, Georgetown Law, founder of Lovare Institut.
July 30, 2026
July 30, 2026