Value of highly ranked undergrad if law school in your future

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Retired (praise Jesus) Biglaw (ugh) lawyer here

There is no way in hell that I'd recommend a kid or family going into debt to attend Bates over Wooster to increase the chance of T14 admissions. In fact, I wouldn't recommend going into debt to attend any college with the goal of goal to law school. No way.

Law school admissions are based almost entirely on GPA and LSAT, even at the so-called T14 level. Yale might be somewhat of an exception, because it's so small and so selective, but I wouldn't select a college based on the probability of getting admitted to Yale Law.

Interesting that you mention Yale, because they actually share the undergraduate schools of their law students:

https://law.yale.edu/admissions-financial-aid/jd-admissions/profiles-statistics/undergraduate-institutions-represented-yls-2020-24

Apparently it doesn't matter much there, as well.

The site below also shows where recent hires at Skadden Arps went for undergrad:

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/law/

Doesn't appear to matter to top law firms, either.

Don't see Wooster on those lists.

The top pre-law grad from Wooster in 2021 is going to BC Law School https://wooster.edu/2021/05/05/wooster-names-jacob-abramo-2021-carpenter-prize-winner/

The 2020 one is going to Ohio State Law School.

2019 - Univ of Minn Law School

To answer your question, it will be challenging to get into a top law school from Wooster.

Not if you go to Wooster and have a high GPA and high LSAT.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Retired (praise Jesus) Biglaw (ugh) lawyer here

There is no way in hell that I'd recommend a kid or family going into debt to attend Bates over Wooster to increase the chance of T14 admissions. In fact, I wouldn't recommend going into debt to attend any college with the goal of goal to law school. No way.

Law school admissions are based almost entirely on GPA and LSAT, even at the so-called T14 level. Yale might be somewhat of an exception, because it's so small and so selective, but I wouldn't select a college based on the probability of getting admitted to Yale Law.

Interesting that you mention Yale, because they actually share the undergraduate schools of their law students:

https://law.yale.edu/admissions-financial-aid/jd-admissions/profiles-statistics/undergraduate-institutions-represented-yls-2020-24

Apparently it doesn't matter much there, as well.

The site below also shows where recent hires at Skadden Arps went for undergrad:

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/law/

Doesn't appear to matter to top law firms, either.

I never said it matters to law firms at all -- at law firms all that matters is the law school.

I also never said that Yale doesn't admit anyone who didn't attend a top college. I merely said it was "somewhat" of any exception. Yes, I'm aware of their published list for the last five years, but the list doesn't say how many students from each school was actually admitted and are attending. If you really have time, click on the Skadden website and read the bios of the Yale Law grads who work there. You'll see that the overwhelming majority went to elite colleges.

That list is about 180 schools. In five years, Yale had about 1000 students enroll. All this shows is that where you attend college is not a bar to entry, but without more data, it's impossible to say whether it is comparatively easier to get accepted at Yale if you're applying from certain schools rather than others. So you can't say that it doesn't matter.

Your last two sentences contradict each other, so I don't get your point. My point is that it DOES matter, at least "somewhat," at Yale. It's a small law school that is more selective than any in the country. The large majority of Yale Law students went to top colleges -- fact.

I think I probably would agree with you. You can get into Yale law from any undergraduate institution, but I think (not know) that it is easier to do some from a small group of colleges (certainly Yale undergrad). There is a difference between "can you do it" vs "how hard is it".

It's easier to do from Yale because there are way more ridiculously smart, hard-working, ambitious overachievers there than at less selective schools, not because Yale has a golden ticket they hand out to each graduate. A superstar is a superstar, regardless of where they get their education.

so, it's easier.

No, not for any one individual. My comment referred to it being natural that a place with more qualified applicants would yield more acceptances--I could have phrased that better. The same individual, though, would not have an easier time applying from Yale than from, say, Wesleyan or Connecticut College.

That’s pure speculation. All you reasonably know is that a greater percentage of the class is from Yale vs Wesleyan. Everything else is your off the cuff belief.

And your opinion is your off-he-cuff belief. I believe mine is more based in fact. It's not exactly the same thing, but take a look at Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study of lifetime income sometime. They've shown definitively that someone's earning capacity is not attributable to where they went to college. Those who don't go to a super-selective college but were of a similar caliber earn just as much as those who did attend the elite colleges. It seems likely, in my off-the-cuff opinion, that the same would apply to likelihood of success at Yale Law and that their admission team knows this.

Ha ha ha. Different poster here. Nothing that you just said is "fact." You have no idea what Yale Law admissions people think. None. Zero. But I can tell you one thing that I KNOW they think: that Yale undergrads are good bets for admission because they have a proven track record of success. And the number two school represented at Yale Law? Harvard, of course.

Starting at page 114 of the attached Yale Law School Bulletin for 2019-2020 -- the most recent one that I could find -- there's a list of schools by the numbers for the entire student body in 2018. There were 635 students enrolled in the JD program in the year.
Of those 635, here are the schools with more than five students represented in the entering class.

Yale: 90
Harvard: 59
Columbia: 34
Princeton: 31
Stanford: 22
Dartmouth: 21
Cornell: 19
Chicago: 18
Brown: 17
Penn: 16
Georgetown: 13
UC-Berkeley: 13
Duke: 10
Michigan: 8
Northwestern: 8
USC: 8
Johns Hopkins: 7
UVA: 7
Amherst: 6
Swarthmore: 6

These schools alone, all of which are considered top tier, accounted for 413 of Yale's 635 student enrolled that year.

Then you have other fine schools enrolling multiple applicants: Barnard, BC, Bowdoin, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, William & Mary, Davidson, Emory, Haverford, Pomona, MIT, Middlebury, NYU, Rice, Notre Dame, Wash U, UCLA, Tufts, the military and naval academies, Vanderbilt, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams, and UNC. No slackers here, either, and these schools combined account for another 84 students.

So now you're at 497, leaving only 138 to count. Quite a few of those are from top schools as well.

Yes, maybe 1/5 of the student body at Yale Law in 2018 came from less "fancy" schools, but in most of those cases we are talking about one student represented in all three classes (not one in each class). There are exceptions, to be sure -- BYU had 5, DePaul had 3, and a few less high regarded big state schools had a couple each.

So it seems to me that the Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools, and that what you say is fact is closer to fiction.

https://bulletin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/yale-law-school-2019-2020.pdf

Those schools simply have a higher percentage of graduates who are great at test taking and get really high LSAT scores to go along with their high GPAs. If they went somewhere else for undergraduate, it would make no difference in how they score on the LSAT.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Retired (praise Jesus) Biglaw (ugh) lawyer here

There is no way in hell that I'd recommend a kid or family going into debt to attend Bates over Wooster to increase the chance of T14 admissions. In fact, I wouldn't recommend going into debt to attend any college with the goal of goal to law school. No way.

Law school admissions are based almost entirely on GPA and LSAT, even at the so-called T14 level. Yale might be somewhat of an exception, because it's so small and so selective, but I wouldn't select a college based on the probability of getting admitted to Yale Law.

Interesting that you mention Yale, because they actually share the undergraduate schools of their law students:

https://law.yale.edu/admissions-financial-aid/jd-admissions/profiles-statistics/undergraduate-institutions-represented-yls-2020-24

Apparently it doesn't matter much there, as well.

The site below also shows where recent hires at Skadden Arps went for undergrad:

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/law/

Doesn't appear to matter to top law firms, either.

I never said it matters to law firms at all -- at law firms all that matters is the law school.

I also never said that Yale doesn't admit anyone who didn't attend a top college. I merely said it was "somewhat" of any exception. Yes, I'm aware of their published list for the last five years, but the list doesn't say how many students from each school was actually admitted and are attending. If you really have time, click on the Skadden website and read the bios of the Yale Law grads who work there. You'll see that the overwhelming majority went to elite colleges.

That list is about 180 schools. In five years, Yale had about 1000 students enroll. All this shows is that where you attend college is not a bar to entry, but without more data, it's impossible to say whether it is comparatively easier to get accepted at Yale if you're applying from certain schools rather than others. So you can't say that it doesn't matter.

Your last two sentences contradict each other, so I don't get your point. My point is that it DOES matter, at least "somewhat," at Yale. It's a small law school that is more selective than any in the country. The large majority of Yale Law students went to top colleges -- fact.

I think I probably would agree with you. You can get into Yale law from any undergraduate institution, but I think (not know) that it is easier to do some from a small group of colleges (certainly Yale undergrad). There is a difference between "can you do it" vs "how hard is it".

It's easier to do from Yale because there are way more ridiculously smart, hard-working, ambitious overachievers there than at less selective schools, not because Yale has a golden ticket they hand out to each graduate. A superstar is a superstar, regardless of where they get their education.

so, it's easier.

No, not for any one individual. My comment referred to it being natural that a place with more qualified applicants would yield more acceptances--I could have phrased that better. The same individual, though, would not have an easier time applying from Yale than from, say, Wesleyan or Connecticut College.

That’s pure speculation. All you reasonably know is that a greater percentage of the class is from Yale vs Wesleyan. Everything else is your off the cuff belief.

And your opinion is your off-he-cuff belief. I believe mine is more based in fact. It's not exactly the same thing, but take a look at Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study of lifetime income sometime. They've shown definitively that someone's earning capacity is not attributable to where they went to college. Those who don't go to a super-selective college but were of a similar caliber earn just as much as those who did attend the elite colleges. It seems likely, in my off-the-cuff opinion, that the same would apply to likelihood of success at Yale Law and that their admission team knows this.

Ha ha ha. Different poster here. Nothing that you just said is "fact." You have no idea what Yale Law admissions people think. None. Zero. But I can tell you one thing that I KNOW they think: that Yale undergrads are good bets for admission because they have a proven track record of success. And the number two school represented at Yale Law? Harvard, of course.

Starting at page 114 of the attached Yale Law School Bulletin for 2019-2020 -- the most recent one that I could find -- there's a list of schools by the numbers for the entire student body in 2018. There were 635 students enrolled in the JD program in the year.
Of those 635, here are the schools with more than five students represented in the entering class.

Yale: 90
Harvard: 59
Columbia: 34
Princeton: 31
Stanford: 22
Dartmouth: 21
Cornell: 19
Chicago: 18
Brown: 17
Penn: 16
Georgetown: 13
UC-Berkeley: 13
Duke: 10
Michigan: 8
Northwestern: 8
USC: 8
Johns Hopkins: 7
UVA: 7
Amherst: 6
Swarthmore: 6

These schools alone, all of which are considered top tier, accounted for 413 of Yale's 635 student enrolled that year.

Then you have other fine schools enrolling multiple applicants: Barnard, BC, Bowdoin, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, William & Mary, Davidson, Emory, Haverford, Pomona, MIT, Middlebury, NYU, Rice, Notre Dame, Wash U, UCLA, Tufts, the military and naval academies, Vanderbilt, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams, and UNC. No slackers here, either, and these schools combined account for another 84 students.

So now you're at 497, leaving only 138 to count. Quite a few of those are from top schools as well.

Yes, maybe 1/5 of the student body at Yale Law in 2018 came from less "fancy" schools, but in most of those cases we are talking about one student represented in all three classes (not one in each class). There are exceptions, to be sure -- BYU had 5, DePaul had 3, and a few less high regarded big state schools had a couple each.

So it seems to me that the Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools, and that what you say is fact is closer to fiction.

https://bulletin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/yale-law-school-2019-2020.pdf

You just spent a lot of time not responding to what I said. "The Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools", as you say, because there are a ridiculously higher number of qualified applicants at those highly regarded schools, not because those schools are highly regarded.

That’s a theory not a fact

One half of Yale Law school are Ivy + Stanford graduates. One half. One quarter went to Yale or Harvard alone. But, ok, sure -- that doesn't mean Yale leans heavily in favor of these schools. Ok.

The average LSAT and GPAs of undergraduate graduates from those schools are significantly higher than most other schools. That is why they are so heavily represented. You can see it here:
https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/council_reports_and_resolutions/May2018CouncilOpenSession/18_may_2015_2017_top_240_feeder_schools_for_aba_applicants.authcheckdam.pdf

Any law school that takes lower LSAT, lower GPA kids over higher LSAT, higher GPA kids is putting their ranking at risk and they don't want to do that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Retired (praise Jesus) Biglaw (ugh) lawyer here

There is no way in hell that I'd recommend a kid or family going into debt to attend Bates over Wooster to increase the chance of T14 admissions. In fact, I wouldn't recommend going into debt to attend any college with the goal of goal to law school. No way.

Law school admissions are based almost entirely on GPA and LSAT, even at the so-called T14 level. Yale might be somewhat of an exception, because it's so small and so selective, but I wouldn't select a college based on the probability of getting admitted to Yale Law.

Interesting that you mention Yale, because they actually share the undergraduate schools of their law students:

https://law.yale.edu/admissions-financial-aid/jd-admissions/profiles-statistics/undergraduate-institutions-represented-yls-2020-24

Apparently it doesn't matter much there, as well.

The site below also shows where recent hires at Skadden Arps went for undergrad:

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/law/

Doesn't appear to matter to top law firms, either.

I never said it matters to law firms at all -- at law firms all that matters is the law school.

I also never said that Yale doesn't admit anyone who didn't attend a top college. I merely said it was "somewhat" of any exception. Yes, I'm aware of their published list for the last five years, but the list doesn't say how many students from each school was actually admitted and are attending. If you really have time, click on the Skadden website and read the bios of the Yale Law grads who work there. You'll see that the overwhelming majority went to elite colleges.

That list is about 180 schools. In five years, Yale had about 1000 students enroll. All this shows is that where you attend college is not a bar to entry, but without more data, it's impossible to say whether it is comparatively easier to get accepted at Yale if you're applying from certain schools rather than others. So you can't say that it doesn't matter.

Your last two sentences contradict each other, so I don't get your point. My point is that it DOES matter, at least "somewhat," at Yale. It's a small law school that is more selective than any in the country. The large majority of Yale Law students went to top colleges -- fact.

I think I probably would agree with you. You can get into Yale law from any undergraduate institution, but I think (not know) that it is easier to do some from a small group of colleges (certainly Yale undergrad). There is a difference between "can you do it" vs "how hard is it".

It's easier to do from Yale because there are way more ridiculously smart, hard-working, ambitious overachievers there than at less selective schools, not because Yale has a golden ticket they hand out to each graduate. A superstar is a superstar, regardless of where they get their education.

so, it's easier.

No, not for any one individual. My comment referred to it being natural that a place with more qualified applicants would yield more acceptances--I could have phrased that better. The same individual, though, would not have an easier time applying from Yale than from, say, Wesleyan or Connecticut College.

That’s pure speculation. All you reasonably know is that a greater percentage of the class is from Yale vs Wesleyan. Everything else is your off the cuff belief.

And your opinion is your off-he-cuff belief. I believe mine is more based in fact. It's not exactly the same thing, but take a look at Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study of lifetime income sometime. They've shown definitively that someone's earning capacity is not attributable to where they went to college. Those who don't go to a super-selective college but were of a similar caliber earn just as much as those who did attend the elite colleges. It seems likely, in my off-the-cuff opinion, that the same would apply to likelihood of success at Yale Law and that their admission team knows this.

Ha ha ha. Different poster here. Nothing that you just said is "fact." You have no idea what Yale Law admissions people think. None. Zero. But I can tell you one thing that I KNOW they think: that Yale undergrads are good bets for admission because they have a proven track record of success. And the number two school represented at Yale Law? Harvard, of course.

Starting at page 114 of the attached Yale Law School Bulletin for 2019-2020 -- the most recent one that I could find -- there's a list of schools by the numbers for the entire student body in 2018. There were 635 students enrolled in the JD program in the year.
Of those 635, here are the schools with more than five students represented in the entering class.

Yale: 90
Harvard: 59
Columbia: 34
Princeton: 31
Stanford: 22
Dartmouth: 21
Cornell: 19
Chicago: 18
Brown: 17
Penn: 16
Georgetown: 13
UC-Berkeley: 13
Duke: 10
Michigan: 8
Northwestern: 8
USC: 8
Johns Hopkins: 7
UVA: 7
Amherst: 6
Swarthmore: 6

These schools alone, all of which are considered top tier, accounted for 413 of Yale's 635 student enrolled that year.

Then you have other fine schools enrolling multiple applicants: Barnard, BC, Bowdoin, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, William & Mary, Davidson, Emory, Haverford, Pomona, MIT, Middlebury, NYU, Rice, Notre Dame, Wash U, UCLA, Tufts, the military and naval academies, Vanderbilt, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams, and UNC. No slackers here, either, and these schools combined account for another 84 students.

So now you're at 497, leaving only 138 to count. Quite a few of those are from top schools as well.

Yes, maybe 1/5 of the student body at Yale Law in 2018 came from less "fancy" schools, but in most of those cases we are talking about one student represented in all three classes (not one in each class). There are exceptions, to be sure -- BYU had 5, DePaul had 3, and a few less high regarded big state schools had a couple each.

So it seems to me that the Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools, and that what you say is fact is closer to fiction.

https://bulletin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/yale-law-school-2019-2020.pdf

You just spent a lot of time not responding to what I said. "The Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools", as you say, because there are a ridiculously higher number of qualified applicants at those highly regarded schools, not because those schools are highly regarded.

That’s a theory not a fact

One half of Yale Law school are Ivy + Stanford graduates. One half. One quarter went to Yale or Harvard alone. But, ok, sure -- that doesn't mean Yale leans heavily in favor of these schools. Ok.

The average LSAT and GPAs of undergraduate graduates from those schools are significantly higher than most other schools. That is why they are so heavily represented. You can see it here:
https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/council_reports_and_resolutions/May2018CouncilOpenSession/18_may_2015_2017_top_240_feeder_schools_for_aba_applicants.authcheckdam.pdf

Any law school that takes lower LSAT, lower GPA kids over higher LSAT, higher GPA kids is putting their ranking at risk and they don't want to do that.

But does average matter? You only need one or two students killing it on the LSAT and Gpa at every school and it appears that happens every year from a LSAT standpoint. If you have that distribution of 1-2 people at every school then it seems admissions should be similarly distributed, no?

[Anonymous]

Doesn’t really matter. It’s a GPA/LSAT game. That said, to increase your chances, spend time in the military first. Regardless, major in accounting or engineering to guarantee a solid job after law school. It doesn’t matter which school you attend. Law is, sadly, still largely dominated by white males who highly value other white males who can “do the math.”

[Anonymous]

Few professions are as credentialist-crazy as law. But the only credential that really matters is where you went to law school. Partners will probably assume that if you went to a T14 and did well that you could have attended a better undergrad but wanted to save money. That’s some prudent stuff right there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Retired (praise Jesus) Biglaw (ugh) lawyer here

There is no way in hell that I'd recommend a kid or family going into debt to attend Bates over Wooster to increase the chance of T14 admissions. In fact, I wouldn't recommend going into debt to attend any college with the goal of goal to law school. No way.

Law school admissions are based almost entirely on GPA and LSAT, even at the so-called T14 level. Yale might be somewhat of an exception, because it's so small and so selective, but I wouldn't select a college based on the probability of getting admitted to Yale Law.

Interesting that you mention Yale, because they actually share the undergraduate schools of their law students:

https://law.yale.edu/admissions-financial-aid/jd-admissions/profiles-statistics/undergraduate-institutions-represented-yls-2020-24

Apparently it doesn't matter much there, as well.

The site below also shows where recent hires at Skadden Arps went for undergrad:

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/law/

Doesn't appear to matter to top law firms, either.

I never said it matters to law firms at all -- at law firms all that matters is the law school.

I also never said that Yale doesn't admit anyone who didn't attend a top college. I merely said it was "somewhat" of any exception. Yes, I'm aware of their published list for the last five years, but the list doesn't say how many students from each school was actually admitted and are attending. If you really have time, click on the Skadden website and read the bios of the Yale Law grads who work there. You'll see that the overwhelming majority went to elite colleges.

That list is about 180 schools. In five years, Yale had about 1000 students enroll. All this shows is that where you attend college is not a bar to entry, but without more data, it's impossible to say whether it is comparatively easier to get accepted at Yale if you're applying from certain schools rather than others. So you can't say that it doesn't matter.

Your last two sentences contradict each other, so I don't get your point. My point is that it DOES matter, at least "somewhat," at Yale. It's a small law school that is more selective than any in the country. The large majority of Yale Law students went to top colleges -- fact.

I think I probably would agree with you. You can get into Yale law from any undergraduate institution, but I think (not know) that it is easier to do some from a small group of colleges (certainly Yale undergrad). There is a difference between "can you do it" vs "how hard is it".

It's easier to do from Yale because there are way more ridiculously smart, hard-working, ambitious overachievers there than at less selective schools, not because Yale has a golden ticket they hand out to each graduate. A superstar is a superstar, regardless of where they get their education.

so, it's easier.

No, not for any one individual. My comment referred to it being natural that a place with more qualified applicants would yield more acceptances--I could have phrased that better. The same individual, though, would not have an easier time applying from Yale than from, say, Wesleyan or Connecticut College.

That’s pure speculation. All you reasonably know is that a greater percentage of the class is from Yale vs Wesleyan. Everything else is your off the cuff belief.

And your opinion is your off-he-cuff belief. I believe mine is more based in fact. It's not exactly the same thing, but take a look at Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study of lifetime income sometime. They've shown definitively that someone's earning capacity is not attributable to where they went to college. Those who don't go to a super-selective college but were of a similar caliber earn just as much as those who did attend the elite colleges. It seems likely, in my off-the-cuff opinion, that the same would apply to likelihood of success at Yale Law and that their admission team knows this.

Ha ha ha. Different poster here. Nothing that you just said is "fact." You have no idea what Yale Law admissions people think. None. Zero. But I can tell you one thing that I KNOW they think: that Yale undergrads are good bets for admission because they have a proven track record of success. And the number two school represented at Yale Law? Harvard, of course.

Starting at page 114 of the attached Yale Law School Bulletin for 2019-2020 -- the most recent one that I could find -- there's a list of schools by the numbers for the entire student body in 2018. There were 635 students enrolled in the JD program in the year.
Of those 635, here are the schools with more than five students represented in the entering class.

Yale: 90
Harvard: 59
Columbia: 34
Princeton: 31
Stanford: 22
Dartmouth: 21
Cornell: 19
Chicago: 18
Brown: 17
Penn: 16
Georgetown: 13
UC-Berkeley: 13
Duke: 10
Michigan: 8
Northwestern: 8
USC: 8
Johns Hopkins: 7
UVA: 7
Amherst: 6
Swarthmore: 6

These schools alone, all of which are considered top tier, accounted for 413 of Yale's 635 student enrolled that year.

Then you have other fine schools enrolling multiple applicants: Barnard, BC, Bowdoin, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, William & Mary, Davidson, Emory, Haverford, Pomona, MIT, Middlebury, NYU, Rice, Notre Dame, Wash U, UCLA, Tufts, the military and naval academies, Vanderbilt, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams, and UNC. No slackers here, either, and these schools combined account for another 84 students.

So now you're at 497, leaving only 138 to count. Quite a few of those are from top schools as well.

Yes, maybe 1/5 of the student body at Yale Law in 2018 came from less "fancy" schools, but in most of those cases we are talking about one student represented in all three classes (not one in each class). There are exceptions, to be sure -- BYU had 5, DePaul had 3, and a few less high regarded big state schools had a couple each.

So it seems to me that the Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools, and that what you say is fact is closer to fiction.

https://bulletin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/yale-law-school-2019-2020.pdf

Those schools simply have a higher percentage of graduates who are great at test taking and get really high LSAT scores to go along with their high GPAs. If they went somewhere else for undergraduate, it would make no difference in how they score on the LSAT.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Retired (praise Jesus) Biglaw (ugh) lawyer here

There is no way in hell that I'd recommend a kid or family going into debt to attend Bates over Wooster to increase the chance of T14 admissions. In fact, I wouldn't recommend going into debt to attend any college with the goal of goal to law school. No way.

Law school admissions are based almost entirely on GPA and LSAT, even at the so-called T14 level. Yale might be somewhat of an exception, because it's so small and so selective, but I wouldn't select a college based on the probability of getting admitted to Yale Law.

Interesting that you mention Yale, because they actually share the undergraduate schools of their law students:

https://law.yale.edu/admissions-financial-aid/jd-admissions/profiles-statistics/undergraduate-institutions-represented-yls-2020-24

Apparently it doesn't matter much there, as well.

The site below also shows where recent hires at Skadden Arps went for undergrad:

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/law/

Doesn't appear to matter to top law firms, either.

I never said it matters to law firms at all -- at law firms all that matters is the law school.

I also never said that Yale doesn't admit anyone who didn't attend a top college. I merely said it was "somewhat" of any exception. Yes, I'm aware of their published list for the last five years, but the list doesn't say how many students from each school was actually admitted and are attending. If you really have time, click on the Skadden website and read the bios of the Yale Law grads who work there. You'll see that the overwhelming majority went to elite colleges.

That list is about 180 schools. In five years, Yale had about 1000 students enroll. All this shows is that where you attend college is not a bar to entry, but without more data, it's impossible to say whether it is comparatively easier to get accepted at Yale if you're applying from certain schools rather than others. So you can't say that it doesn't matter.

Your last two sentences contradict each other, so I don't get your point. My point is that it DOES matter, at least "somewhat," at Yale. It's a small law school that is more selective than any in the country. The large majority of Yale Law students went to top colleges -- fact.

I think I probably would agree with you. You can get into Yale law from any undergraduate institution, but I think (not know) that it is easier to do some from a small group of colleges (certainly Yale undergrad). There is a difference between "can you do it" vs "how hard is it".

It's easier to do from Yale because there are way more ridiculously smart, hard-working, ambitious overachievers there than at less selective schools, not because Yale has a golden ticket they hand out to each graduate. A superstar is a superstar, regardless of where they get their education.

so, it's easier.

No, not for any one individual. My comment referred to it being natural that a place with more qualified applicants would yield more acceptances--I could have phrased that better. The same individual, though, would not have an easier time applying from Yale than from, say, Wesleyan or Connecticut College.

That’s pure speculation. All you reasonably know is that a greater percentage of the class is from Yale vs Wesleyan. Everything else is your off the cuff belief.

And your opinion is your off-he-cuff belief. I believe mine is more based in fact. It's not exactly the same thing, but take a look at Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study of lifetime income sometime. They've shown definitively that someone's earning capacity is not attributable to where they went to college. Those who don't go to a super-selective college but were of a similar caliber earn just as much as those who did attend the elite colleges. It seems likely, in my off-the-cuff opinion, that the same would apply to likelihood of success at Yale Law and that their admission team knows this.

Ha ha ha. Different poster here. Nothing that you just said is "fact." You have no idea what Yale Law admissions people think. None. Zero. But I can tell you one thing that I KNOW they think: that Yale undergrads are good bets for admission because they have a proven track record of success. And the number two school represented at Yale Law? Harvard, of course.

Starting at page 114 of the attached Yale Law School Bulletin for 2019-2020 -- the most recent one that I could find -- there's a list of schools by the numbers for the entire student body in 2018. There were 635 students enrolled in the JD program in the year.
Of those 635, here are the schools with more than five students represented in the entering class.

Yale: 90
Harvard: 59
Columbia: 34
Princeton: 31
Stanford: 22
Dartmouth: 21
Cornell: 19
Chicago: 18
Brown: 17
Penn: 16
Georgetown: 13
UC-Berkeley: 13
Duke: 10
Michigan: 8
Northwestern: 8
USC: 8
Johns Hopkins: 7
UVA: 7
Amherst: 6
Swarthmore: 6

These schools alone, all of which are considered top tier, accounted for 413 of Yale's 635 student enrolled that year.

Then you have other fine schools enrolling multiple applicants: Barnard, BC, Bowdoin, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, William & Mary, Davidson, Emory, Haverford, Pomona, MIT, Middlebury, NYU, Rice, Notre Dame, Wash U, UCLA, Tufts, the military and naval academies, Vanderbilt, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams, and UNC. No slackers here, either, and these schools combined account for another 84 students.

So now you're at 497, leaving only 138 to count. Quite a few of those are from top schools as well.

Yes, maybe 1/5 of the student body at Yale Law in 2018 came from less "fancy" schools, but in most of those cases we are talking about one student represented in all three classes (not one in each class). There are exceptions, to be sure -- BYU had 5, DePaul had 3, and a few less high regarded big state schools had a couple each.

So it seems to me that the Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools, and that what you say is fact is closer to fiction.

https://bulletin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/yale-law-school-2019-2020.pdf

You just spent a lot of time not responding to what I said. "The Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools", as you say, because there are a ridiculously higher number of qualified applicants at those highly regarded schools, not because those schools are highly regarded.

That’s a theory not a fact

One half of Yale Law school are Ivy + Stanford graduates. One half. One quarter went to Yale or Harvard alone. But, ok, sure -- that doesn't mean Yale leans heavily in favor of these schools. Ok.

The average LSAT and GPAs of undergraduate graduates from those schools are significantly higher than most other schools. That is why they are so heavily represented. You can see it here:
https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/council_reports_and_resolutions/May2018CouncilOpenSession/18_may_2015_2017_top_240_feeder_schools_for_aba_applicants.authcheckdam.pdf

Any law school that takes lower LSAT, lower GPA kids over higher LSAT, higher GPA kids is putting their ranking at risk and they don't want to do that.

But does average matter? You only need one or two students killing it on the LSAT and Gpa at every school and it appears that happens every year from a LSAT standpoint. If you have that distribution of 1-2 people at every school then it seems admissions should be similarly distributed, no?

If the mean is higher, it means the 1 sigma, 2 sigma, etc. are also higher for that school assuming a normal distribution for the undergraduate school. The report also has the highest scores. The average LSAT at Yale Law School is 173. There are major undergraduate schools that don't have anyone scoring that high in 2017 (the most recent year in that report), including Illinois, Penn State, Michigan State, Missouri, South Carolina, St Johns, Temple, etc. Yale undergraduate, with a max score of 180 and a mean of 167.5 (95th+ percentile) will have many out of the 184 who took the test that year.

I'd argue law school admissions is stat driven, but a significantly higher percentage of students from schools like Yale can present the needed stats.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:To my knowledge Law is the only profession where even 20 years out, one lawyer will ask another - where did you go to school? And they mean both undergrad and law. And I guess, hearing from legal friends, being able to say Cornell Yale is more prestigious than saying Wooster Yale.

I'm a lawyer of this vintage and this is just not true. No one asks!

Funny. People always check lawyers (and doctor's) before they are hired. They always show up on Google search. Only a no-named school grad insists they don't matter.

Different PP. Law school matters. Undergrad does. not. matter. for law, as the attorneys in this thread have explained. I don't know why that's so hard for nonlawyers to believe.

Lol, all the free legal advice you see on here are worth what you pay for. They are free for reason. Everyone's law school and undergrad school is visible because there's demand for those info. Undergrad matters Yale and YLW or Yale and Yale Med school is different from the University of Phoenix and Western School of Law or the University of Phoenix and the U of Guadalupe Med school.

Undergrad is visible simply because, as a degree, it's a natural part of the resume. But, BigLaw hiring partners don't care, sorry. You can attend University of Utah, HLS, and work at an elite firm. TCU and HLS. Lake Forest College and HLS. Santa Clara undergrad and Stanford law. Bradley University in Illinois and Northwestern. I know people with each of these combinations. No one cares about the undergrad; it is simply a triviality in their personal history, like where someone grew up.

But sure, if you want to pay for advice, go ask ANY law school admission consultant and they will tell you what matters, college GPA and LSAT. Not undergrad.

If you need a life-threatening medical scenario, who would you choose?

University of Phoenix undergrad and the U of Guadalupe Med school.
or
Yale and Yale Med school?


If you were charged with a serious crime and looking at 50+ years behind bars, who would you choose?

the University of Phoenix undergrad and Western School of Law
Yale and YLW?


And what's the chance of the University of Phoenix undergrad and YLS? It happens and you might see it more with legitimate state schools and YLS - but they are not all that common because of the quality of the undergraduate school. If you refuse to believe it, why don't we ever see an Anne Arundel Community College and YLS combo?

Actually, faced this. Had open heart surgery when 45. My cardiac surgeon went to Dartmouth and then Harvard Medical School. It was re-assuring but did not affect my decision. I went there because he was at the best hospital in the World for cardiac surgery, Cleveland Clinic. I know they do 3000 a year of these surgeries versus others that do 300 and have seen the hardest cases. It would be like going to a top law firm when needed; I don’t care where they went to school but care they are at that firm e.g. Johnny Depp’s lawyer. She had experience in cases of the nature needed. I had a second heart surgery and the cardiologist went to foreign medical school and trained in Quebec. I didn’t care because he was at Cleveland Clinic. So it’s the fact where they are employed not where they went. It is re-assuring but not critical.

[Anonymous]

All of these threads devolve into parents and graduates of mediocre degree mills circle jerking how undergrad doesn't matter. Then this will be quoted by a fake Ivy League alum who says they agree, undergrad doesn't matter. It's all so pointless.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Few professions are as credentialist-crazy as law. But the only credential that really matters is where you went to law school. Partners will probably assume that if you went to a T14 and did well that you could have attended a better undergrad but wanted to save money. That’s some prudent stuff right there.

The top students at top law schools are from elite undergrads because brilliant teenagers don't want to be at a degree mill around drunken midwit morons who don't care about school. Brilliant teens seek the most competitive environments. And it's 2022, there's the internet and there's generous financial aid, it's not like you can feign unawareness of elite college or how to get into one or afford one. There's nothing "prudent" about seeking an easy environment for undergrad, it actually suggests you're narrow-minded and weak, possibly terrified of competitive gunner peers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:To my knowledge Law is the only profession where even 20 years out, one lawyer will ask another - where did you go to school? And they mean both undergrad and law. And I guess, hearing from legal friends, being able to say Cornell Yale is more prestigious than saying Wooster Yale.

I'm a lawyer of this vintage and this is just not true. No one asks!

Funny. People always check lawyers (and doctor's) before they are hired. They always show up on Google search. Only a no-named school grad insists they don't matter.

Different PP. Law school matters. Undergrad does. not. matter. for law, as the attorneys in this thread have explained. I don't know why that's so hard for nonlawyers to believe.

Lol, all the free legal advice you see on here are worth what you pay for. They are free for reason. Everyone's law school and undergrad school is visible because there's demand for those info. Undergrad matters Yale and YLW or Yale and Yale Med school is different from the University of Phoenix and Western School of Law or the University of Phoenix and the U of Guadalupe Med school.

Undergrad is visible simply because, as a degree, it's a natural part of the resume. But, BigLaw hiring partners don't care, sorry. You can attend University of Utah, HLS, and work at an elite firm. TCU and HLS. Lake Forest College and HLS. Santa Clara undergrad and Stanford law. Bradley University in Illinois and Northwestern. I know people with each of these combinations. No one cares about the undergrad; it is simply a triviality in their personal history, like where someone grew up.

But sure, if you want to pay for advice, go ask ANY law school admission consultant and they will tell you what matters, college GPA and LSAT. Not undergrad.

If you need a life-threatening medical scenario, who would you choose?

University of Phoenix undergrad and the U of Guadalupe Med school.
or
Yale and Yale Med school?


If you were charged with a serious crime and looking at 50+ years behind bars, who would you choose?

the University of Phoenix undergrad and Western School of Law
Yale and YLW?


And what's the chance of the University of Phoenix undergrad and YLS? It happens and you might see it more with legitimate state schools and YLS - but they are not all that common because of the quality of the undergraduate school. If you refuse to believe it, why don't we ever see an Anne Arundel Community College and YLS combo?

Actually, faced this. Had open heart surgery when 45. My cardiac surgeon went to Dartmouth and then Harvard Medical School. It was re-assuring but did not affect my decision. I went there because he was at the best hospital in the World for cardiac surgery, Cleveland Clinic. I know they do 3000 a year of these surgeries versus others that do 300 and have seen the hardest cases. It would be like going to a top law firm when needed; I don’t care where they went to school but care they are at that firm e.g. Johnny Depp’s lawyer. She had experience in cases of the nature needed. I had a second heart surgery and the cardiologist went to foreign medical school and trained in Quebec. I didn’t care because he was at Cleveland Clinic. So it’s the fact where they are employed not where they went. It is re-assuring but not critical.

Can you point me to a university of Phoenix grad working as a physician at Cleveland Clinic?

[Anonymous]

OR you have 3 kids and saved enough for $65k/yr but not $82k/yr and you don’t qualify for financial aid. What then oh wise one?

[Anonymous]

How many students are there at the University of Phoenix? One in 10,000.

How many students are there at Ohio State? One in 1000.

How many students are there at UCLA? Seven in 10.

How many students are there at Yale? Ten in 10.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Retired (praise Jesus) Biglaw (ugh) lawyer here

There is no way in hell that I'd recommend a kid or family going into debt to attend Bates over Wooster to increase the chance of T14 admissions. In fact, I wouldn't recommend going into debt to attend any college with the goal of goal to law school. No way.

Law school admissions are based almost entirely on GPA and LSAT, even at the so-called T14 level. Yale might be somewhat of an exception, because it's so small and so selective, but I wouldn't select a college based on the probability of getting admitted to Yale Law.

Interesting that you mention Yale, because they actually share the undergraduate schools of their law students:

https://law.yale.edu/admissions-financial-aid/jd-admissions/profiles-statistics/undergraduate-institutions-represented-yls-2020-24

Apparently it doesn't matter much there, as well.

The site below also shows where recent hires at Skadden Arps went for undergrad:

https://lesshighschoolstress.com/law/

Doesn't appear to matter to top law firms, either.

I never said it matters to law firms at all -- at law firms all that matters is the law school.

I also never said that Yale doesn't admit anyone who didn't attend a top college. I merely said it was "somewhat" of any exception. Yes, I'm aware of their published list for the last five years, but the list doesn't say how many students from each school was actually admitted and are attending. If you really have time, click on the Skadden website and read the bios of the Yale Law grads who work there. You'll see that the overwhelming majority went to elite colleges.

That list is about 180 schools. In five years, Yale had about 1000 students enroll. All this shows is that where you attend college is not a bar to entry, but without more data, it's impossible to say whether it is comparatively easier to get accepted at Yale if you're applying from certain schools rather than others. So you can't say that it doesn't matter.

Your last two sentences contradict each other, so I don't get your point. My point is that it DOES matter, at least "somewhat," at Yale. It's a small law school that is more selective than any in the country. The large majority of Yale Law students went to top colleges -- fact.

I think I probably would agree with you. You can get into Yale law from any undergraduate institution, but I think (not know) that it is easier to do some from a small group of colleges (certainly Yale undergrad). There is a difference between "can you do it" vs "how hard is it".

It's easier to do from Yale because there are way more ridiculously smart, hard-working, ambitious overachievers there than at less selective schools, not because Yale has a golden ticket they hand out to each graduate. A superstar is a superstar, regardless of where they get their education.

so, it's easier.

No, not for any one individual. My comment referred to it being natural that a place with more qualified applicants would yield more acceptances--I could have phrased that better. The same individual, though, would not have an easier time applying from Yale than from, say, Wesleyan or Connecticut College.

That’s pure speculation. All you reasonably know is that a greater percentage of the class is from Yale vs Wesleyan. Everything else is your off the cuff belief.

And your opinion is your off-he-cuff belief. I believe mine is more based in fact. It's not exactly the same thing, but take a look at Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale's study of lifetime income sometime. They've shown definitively that someone's earning capacity is not attributable to where they went to college. Those who don't go to a super-selective college but were of a similar caliber earn just as much as those who did attend the elite colleges. It seems likely, in my off-the-cuff opinion, that the same would apply to likelihood of success at Yale Law and that their admission team knows this.

Ha ha ha. Different poster here. Nothing that you just said is "fact." You have no idea what Yale Law admissions people think. None. Zero. But I can tell you one thing that I KNOW they think: that Yale undergrads are good bets for admission because they have a proven track record of success. And the number two school represented at Yale Law? Harvard, of course.

Starting at page 114 of the attached Yale Law School Bulletin for 2019-2020 -- the most recent one that I could find -- there's a list of schools by the numbers for the entire student body in 2018. There were 635 students enrolled in the JD program in the year.
Of those 635, here are the schools with more than five students represented in the entering class.

Yale: 90
Harvard: 59
Columbia: 34
Princeton: 31
Stanford: 22
Dartmouth: 21
Cornell: 19
Chicago: 18
Brown: 17
Penn: 16
Georgetown: 13
UC-Berkeley: 13
Duke: 10
Michigan: 8
Northwestern: 8
USC: 8
Johns Hopkins: 7
UVA: 7
Amherst: 6
Swarthmore: 6

These schools alone, all of which are considered top tier, accounted for 413 of Yale's 635 student enrolled that year.

Then you have other fine schools enrolling multiple applicants: Barnard, BC, Bowdoin, Claremont McKenna, Colgate, William & Mary, Davidson, Emory, Haverford, Pomona, MIT, Middlebury, NYU, Rice, Notre Dame, Wash U, UCLA, Tufts, the military and naval academies, Vanderbilt, Wellesley, Wesleyan, Williams, and UNC. No slackers here, either, and these schools combined account for another 84 students.

So now you're at 497, leaving only 138 to count. Quite a few of those are from top schools as well.

Yes, maybe 1/5 of the student body at Yale Law in 2018 came from less "fancy" schools, but in most of those cases we are talking about one student represented in all three classes (not one in each class). There are exceptions, to be sure -- BYU had 5, DePaul had 3, and a few less high regarded big state schools had a couple each.

So it seems to me that the Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools, and that what you say is fact is closer to fiction.

https://bulletin.yale.edu/sites/default/files/yale-law-school-2019-2020.pdf

You just spent a lot of time not responding to what I said. "The Yale admissions team leans heavily in favor of students at very highly regarded schools", as you say, because there are a ridiculously higher number of qualified applicants at those highly regarded schools, not because those schools are highly regarded.

That’s a theory not a fact

One half of Yale Law school are Ivy + Stanford graduates. One half. One quarter went to Yale or Harvard alone. But, ok, sure -- that doesn't mean Yale leans heavily in favor of these schools. Ok.

The average LSAT and GPAs of undergraduate graduates from those schools are significantly higher than most other schools. That is why they are so heavily represented. You can see it here:
https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/council_reports_and_resolutions/May2018CouncilOpenSession/18_may_2015_2017_top_240_feeder_schools_for_aba_applicants.authcheckdam.pdf

Any law school that takes lower LSAT, lower GPA kids over higher LSAT, higher GPA kids is putting their ranking at risk and they don't want to do that.

But does average matter? You only need one or two students killing it on the LSAT and Gpa at every school and it appears that happens every year from a LSAT standpoint. If you have that distribution of 1-2 people at every school then it seems admissions should be similarly distributed, no?

If the mean is higher, it means the 1 sigma, 2 sigma, etc. are also higher for that school assuming a normal distribution for the undergraduate school. The report also has the highest scores. The average LSAT at Yale Law School is 173. There are major undergraduate schools that don't have anyone scoring that high in 2017 (the most recent year in that report), including Illinois, Penn State, Michigan State, Missouri, South Carolina, St Johns, Temple, etc. Yale undergraduate, with a max score of 180 and a mean of 167.5 (95th+ percentile) will have many out of the 184 who took the test that year.

I'd argue law school admissions is stat driven, but a significantly higher percentage of students from schools like Yale can present the needed stats.

But there are hundreds of other schools. So even if they have a lower percentage of high scorers the raw numbers of non-Yale high LSAT/high Gpa students must be higher no?