Can someone shed some light? 18% of Penn Law Incoming class identifies as LGBTQ Forum

Share experiences and seek insight regarding your experience as an underrepresented minority within the legal community.
Forum rules
Anonymous Posting

Anonymous posting is only appropriate when you are sharing sensitive information about bar exam prep. You may anonymously respond on topic to these threads. Unacceptable uses include: harassing another user, joking around, testing the feature, or other things that are more appropriate in the lounge.

Failure to follow these rules will get you outed, warned, or banned."
ModestMewtwo

New
Posts: 3
Joined: Thu Sep 20, 2018 7:38 pm

Can someone shed some light? 18% of Penn Law Incoming class identifies as LGBTQ

Post by ModestMewtwo » Thu Sep 20, 2018 9:07 pm

It seems strange for a minority group to have such high representation at a law school. Most estimates suggest people who identify as LGBTQ are maybe 6-10% of the general population. 18% indicates overrepresentation in a strictly statistical sense.

Does Penn simply receive an inordinately high number of qualified GLBT applicants? Or are they attempting to over-represent them within their student body?

User avatar
4LTsPointingNorth

Bronze
Posts: 253
Joined: Tue Nov 18, 2014 9:17 am

Re: Can someone shed some light? 18% of Penn Law Incoming class identifies as LGBTQ

Post by 4LTsPointingNorth » Fri Sep 21, 2018 11:14 pm

Any fair and reasonable speculation on this should presume that Penn made its admissions decisions independently from any desire to curate the number of LGBTQ-identifying individuals in its incoming class.

Even if Penn was mindful of that metric in evaluating otherwise-qualified applicants, Penn only gets to choose who to admit (and not who ultimately decides to matriculate). So this is likely just a year where a larger than representative proportion of individuals who identify as LGBTQ happened to choose to attend Penn for any number of possible reasons.

I really don't think you can derive any credible indicators of anything else from an isolated data point like the incoming class profile of just one year's incoming class. You would need to compare incoming class profiles for a number of years and compare those trends to trends from comparable law schools in order to even begin being able to draw any credible inferences.

LSlyfe

Bronze
Posts: 197
Joined: Tue Nov 21, 2017 12:36 pm

Re: Can someone shed some light? 18% of Penn Law Incoming class identifies as LGBTQ

Post by LSlyfe » Tue Nov 27, 2018 5:40 pm

ModestMewtwo wrote:It seems strange for a minority group to have such high representation at a law school. Most estimates suggest people who identify as LGBTQ are maybe 6-10% of the general population. 18% indicates overrepresentation in a strictly statistical sense.

Does Penn simply receive an inordinately high number of qualified GLBT applicants? Or are they attempting to over-represent them within their student body?
Non-LGBTQ identifying memeber of the penn 2021 class. The prior response is correct in terms of you garnering any particular data points but i can say many of my classmates said that they choose Penn based on the culture/environment. You tend to run into the same people at various ASWs and I think many of them just developed a sense of community early on and that may have been a decent factor in their decision to deposit. I don’t think Penn over-admitted to increase population size, I just think it’s a fluke of yield rather than admittance.

Post Reply Post Anonymous Reply  

Return to “Underrepresented Law Students”