Posting on behalf of a reader:
Great piece, but I saw no mention of LSD.Law or lawschooltransparency.com!
LSD (Law School Data) has changed a lot since I practically lived on it four years back, but it's got a heap of admissions data from previous years and tools to compare your data/hypothetical numbers with other applicants and admitted students. It's also got an active community where current applicants can chat with one another for moral support and report their offers/rejections/waitlists real time. One of the handiest features lets you upload all your application login info then check the status on all of your applications with one click. I'm actually still in contact with some of the people I met on LSD and sweated through the hideous 2020-21 admissions cycle with. Admittedly, the folks who get geeky/obsessive about admissions skew towards those competing for T30 offers. That may not always be great for the psychology of someone with a lower GPA/LSAT, but the opportunity to connect with people going through similar trauma (and who are likely to go on to have neat/impactful/high-profile legal careers) has value.
Law School Transparency is more along the lines of the tool I think you have in mind. I haven't taken a look in a few years, but if I recall correctly they're pulling data from things like the school ABA 509 reports and making it searchable by a ton of parameters...including ones that many applicants care deeply about, but USNWR seems to overlook or bury behind their pay wall.
Re: Tuition cost as a factor - I'd say more than half of BYU's students name cost/scholarships as the #1 reason they enrolled. Friends at Alabama report it's similar there. So, I think you've got a bunch of folks who maybe aren't Big Law focused, but who've got great GPAs/LSATs/backgrounds. For such folks, BYU, 'Bama, and even AZ check a lot of highly desirable boxes: well ranked, cheap tuition, lots of scholarship offers, low cost of living...while still having plenty of "respected academia perks" (e.g., international connections), and doing well enough in other areas (e.g., clerkship placement) that students who come in without a firm career path aren't going to be limited the way someone at dinky/local/less respected school likely will be. I've got a friend who is a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who was accepted to BYU, but graduated from HLS in 2021 and clerked in the 11th Cir. then for CJ Roberts. He fully acknowledges that securing his clerkships was easier because he was a HLS grad, but he pointed out that BYU has been placing a lot of students in federal clerkships. It might take a BYU student two prior clerkships (instead of one) to be competitive for a SCOTUS clerkship, but being at BYU doesn't put a SCOTUS clerkship out of reach... and we're graduating with little to no debt! (I also suspect that having little/no debt but needing to do two clerkships at lower pay is a long term net win for young grads.)
Re: Class Size - I'm not sure that's as minor a factor as many folks seem to think. I agree that it's not a factor as heavily weighted as it would be for an undergrad. They're choosing between schools with 1-5,000 students and places like Ohio State with 65,000+. That said, once I had full-tuition offers and was choosing between BYU and a T14, the difference between a 1L class of 130 and 700+ became a significant consideration. In a profession where personal connections count for a lot, it's a whole lot easier to get to know professors and classmates in a smaller law program... and many law school applicants are savvy enough to know it.
Just a few thoughts from someone in the trenches who's strangely fascinated with law school admissions! Thanks for another solid piece.
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