Value of highly ranked undergrad if law school in your future
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Anonymous
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. |
Anonymous
Nice PR - or PC - work there. You are going to have to explain why the SCOTUS justices don't come out of mediocre schools. |
Anonymous
I'll bet you they took one Allegheny College student in the entire five years. |
Anonymous
Clarence Thomas went to Holy Cross. Not mediocre, but not top tier either. Amy Coney Barrett went to Rhodes. In any event, it's only a recent thing where all of the justices went to fancy schools (even if you want to call Notre Dame fancy). In the 20th and 21st Centuries, one-third of Supreme Court justices did not attend top 25 law schools. Warren Burger, who Nixon selected as Chiel Justice and who served on the Court until 1986, went to the William Mitchell College of Law. Thurgood Marshall went to Howard. Lewis Powell went to Washington & Lee. Next question? |
Anonymous
Exactly. SCOTUS and POTUS choices have been influenced by USNWR! POTUS is chosen by us, and we are influenced by the rankings. SCOTUS is chosen by POTUS, who is very aware of we the people's biases. |
Anonymous
My question is where did Roberts, Alito, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor go for undergrad? |
Anonymous
There are almost 3000 4-year colleges in the US, so of course it's unlikely they would take more than one from any given college that doesn't get first pick like Ivies and similar colleges do. There are many other colleges on that list, though, with similar rankings. The point is that those who could've succeeded at an elite college but ended up at not-so-selective College X for whatever reason do have just as good a shot at getting into Yale Law. There aren't anywhere near as many of these students at the less selective colleges, which is why you don't see as many getting in. |
Anonymous
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. |
Anonymous
how many do you think applied? |
Anonymous
+2. We care about undergrad only for athletics. |
Anonymous
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 |
Anonymous
Yikes! Someone needs to go back to basic data analysis class... |
Anonymous
All of the above bolds are private schools. None of your examples shows a mediocre school producing anything of value, i.e., the University of Dayton, the University of Puerto Rico, the University of Guam, UMBC... |
Anonymous
A masters in IF is useless unless you have money to burn don’t do it. |
Anonymous
I'm a lawyer of this vintage and this is just not true. No one asks! |