Pre-Law. Go for prestige or not?

[Anonymous]

Does it really matter where your DC goes for pre-law if they’re bright enough to get into a top law school for their JD?
I'm looking for insights from professionals in the field. I'm really conflicted due to the peer pressure of sending my DC to a prestigious undergrad school.
JD is 125k per year. It's a no brainer to me to pay for JD instead of undergrad so that DC has no student debt. They're likely to get a full-ride at a T50+. I'm ok to pay the difference if it's not a full-ride.
Please don't talk about alumni benefit if you haven't personally experienced it. Looking for non-hypothetical views.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Does it really matter where your DC goes for pre-law if they’re bright enough to get into a top law school for their JD?
I'm looking for insights from professionals in the field. I'm really conflicted due to the peer pressure of sending my DC to a prestigious undergrad school.
JD is 125k per year. It's a no brainer to me to pay for JD instead of undergrad so that DC has no student debt. They're likely to get a full-ride at a T50+. I'm ok to pay the difference if it's not a full-ride.
Please don't talk about alumni benefit if you haven't personally experienced it. Looking for non-hypothetical views.

I graduated from a top 10 undergrad, and went to a top 5 school within the last five years, and currently an associate at a firm that's ranked in the top 10 by Vault.

Law school admissions is mostly GPA + LSAT. However, it's also much more holistic than people make it out to be, especially in the past few cycles where it has gotten much more competitive compared to the 2010s when people were regularly getting into places like UVA Law with a 160 LSAT.

Going to an elite undergrad does not inherently increase your chances to getting into an elite law school, but the boost comes from mostly the intangibles that boost the soft factors that law school admissions officers look at when determining who to admit. Law schools nowadays give more weight to work experience, so if you've worked a few years in tech, IB, consulting, and other jobs that elite schools feed into, that's going to be a plus. If you've studied on an elite postgraduate scholarship like the Schwarzman, Marshall or Truman (again outcomes that elite undergrads feed disproportionately into) that's going to also be a plus. Because Ivies and Ivy Plus school have lower faculty to student ratios, students can often develop meaningful relationships with the faculty, and have them write strong, individualized rec letters, another plus. Elite schools also have pretty rampant grade inflation, which is going to be another plus factor.

Moreover, certain undergrads are perceived as feeders into certain law schools. At my law school, I would guess that around 20% of the law students also did their undergrad at the same school (an Ivy). At Yale Law (widely considered the top law school in the country) the majority of their students come from the Ivies, Ivy Plus, and top liberal arts colleges. However, my law school classmates also came from schools that I've never heard of, but were definitely the valedictorians or summa grads of their respective schools.

However, if your child is self-driven, they should be able to maintain a high GPA at a state school, get a high LSAT score, develop strong meaningful relationships with professors, and maybe get a few years of meaningful work experience, and be able to get a T14 law school acceptance.

The legal field is notoriously prestige driven, however, and some firms and judges looking for clerks have been known to also be cognizant of where their applicants did their undergrad. So there's also that intangible in going to an elite undergrad if your child is looking to be a lawyer.

[Anonymous]

Full ride at T-50; plus high GPA; plus really high LSATs - that's a perfectly good approach. If you go to Harvard undergrad, maybe it make it easier to get into HLS; same with Yale. Otherwise undergrad prestige doesn't matter much.

[Anonymous]

I recommend selecting undergrad or a major based on a 100% of going to law school. If law school is a strong interest, I would try to select a major based on a couple of factors that include maximizing GPA, but also consider employability, interest, and skills growth related to the employability and law school (or other grad school) success (e.g., developing strong writing skills for law school). Accounting (specifically tax) is a major that actually has a stronger overlap with law than one might expect with strong employability and no weed out courses to tank a gpa. But it may need supplemented with writing heavy courses.

[Anonymous]

No go for highest GPA possible! I went to an ivy law school and the majority of our class came from middle of the road colleges where they had absolutely excelled.

[Anonymous]

Also save your money for a high prestige law school which is 3 more years of $$$$!

Better to take merit pay for college. For your legal career, hardly anyone will ask or care where you went to college. The law school logo will trump anything that came before it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No go for highest GPA possible! I went to an ivy law school and the majority of our class came from middle of the road colleges where they had absolutely excelled.

I don't think that's true. Yale Law School was 70% from top 20 schools.

It may have felt that way to you based on who you knew, but I would expect that actually 50%+ came from top schools...which still leaves a sizeable minority.

[Anonymous]

I don’t think parents should pay for law school. If the kid has the chops they should be able to get a good scholarship and also make their own decisions about which school to go to, balancing the cost against their career ambitions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I recommend selecting undergrad or a major based on a 100% of going to law school. If law school is a strong interest, I would try to select a major based on a couple of factors that include maximizing GPA, but also consider employability, interest, and skills growth related to the employability and law school (or other grad school) success (e.g., developing strong writing skills for law school). Accounting (specifically tax) is a major that actually has a stronger overlap with law than one might expect with strong employability and no weed out courses to tank a gpa. But it may need supplemented with writing heavy courses.

Accounting? No. Econ, Poli/Sci, History, English....

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don’t think parents should pay for law school. If the kid has the chops they should be able to get a good scholarship and also make their own decisions about which school to go to, balancing the cost against their career ambitions.

With what's happening with AI, now way in hell I would tell my kid today that we would pay for law school...nor that they should even be thinking about it as an option until things sort out.

[Anonymous]

GPA and LSAT are essentially all that matters. Work experience too since US News started weighing that more. Unless you're trying to go to Yale it doesn't matter at all.

[Anonymous]

If you're picking one, I agree that elite LS prob has more ROI than elite undergrad.

[Anonymous]

I went to Yale Law School and I'd say that Yale and Harvard undergrads, specifically, had an outsized presence. Less so beyond that, but the class was still 3/4th people from very, very good schools. The other 25% were valedictorians of random schools or had some other star factor (e.g., Olympic medalist(s); disabled purple heart winner with a 175 LSAT score; first ever Black student body present at white Southern school; celebrity child genius; best selling author... all real examples at YLS at the same time as me).

[Anonymous]

No, go wherever, get great grades and a good LSAT.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t think parents should pay for law school. If the kid has the chops they should be able to get a good scholarship and also make their own decisions about which school to go to, balancing the cost against their career ambitions.

With what's happening with AI, now way in hell I would tell my kid today that we would pay for law school...nor that they should even be thinking about it as an option until things sort out.

As of today, the ABA continues to insist that only humans can practice law and represent others' interests.