List of college names but no number of students accepted. It seems to me it is weak evidence . |
Your leg up for law school is a near perfect GPA - as close to 4.0 as you can get - coupled with a super high LSAT. Don’t kid yourself that a 3.65 from Bowdoin is going to trump a 3.9 from UMD. It won’t. The 3.9 and a high LSAT will qualify for $$ at many schools. The 3.6 will not. A top 14 will guarantee you a good job - if you want to make 215 K to start, you will be able to. . A 3.6 from Bowdoin and Georgetown or Washington and Lee Law will cost 600 K plus and if you are middle of the pack you could end up a contract attorney making $35 an hour. Many will never practice Law at all. |
Biglaw not retired 50s partner here. Go somewhere that you want to go factoring in financial situation and interests. Study what you want, what you like because you will need to do very well. If you have a great interest in sciences sure that is an option and IP law could be an option. Finance degree is not needed for securities law and does not really give you a leg up working or in hiring. It could be a good story if you love it but marginal. Get into the best law school you can and that you can afford. T14 gives a broader chance to get to biglaw if you want that or have loans. T25 should do just fine. After that there is a sliding scale. Top 10% of class may be ok or could be just top 5% or just top couple of students. It will vary by school. There is no net. A lot depends on the economy and remember the only grades that are getting looked at by biglaw are first year grades. For the people mentioned above, they have their summer offers before school starts in September. Almost all get hired after summer. |
Having watched my kid go through the Law School admissions process last year, this is exactly right. I don't know if it's "easier" to get into a top law school than a top undergrad institution but it's certainly more predictable. For undergrad, impeccable GPA and test scores are the table stakes to even merit consideration - and then you must have the something special to be admitted. For top law schools, if you have the GPA and LSAT in the 75th+ percentile, you're going to get into a top law school. Yale, and to a slightly lesser extent Stanford, are the only 2 that still need "something special" -- Yale Law School admitted only 16 students direct from undergrad last year so that something special seems to include relevant work experience. Where law school admission could be "harder" than undergrad is if it's harder to make a 3.95+ GPA in college than in high school and/or if it's harder to score in the 99th percentile on the LSAT than the SAT/ACT. It's no surprise that if a person has the grades and test scores to get into a top undergrad, they are likely to continue to achieve similar scores in college - so if any school is a "feeder," it's only because it enrolls more of those kids in the first place. As a 1L, my kid has found more genuine socio-economic diversity in law school - with classmates from a wide range of undergrad institutions - than at their non-HYP Ivy undergrad school where everyone was seemingly from private schools or highly affluent suburban public schools. |
Again, correlation doesn’t equal causation. Very few kids from a “bad” undergrad college are applying to Harvard Law. |
True. Most are the valedictorians. The median GPA for Harvard Law’s class of 2026 is 3.9. The median LSAT is 174 |
What about Jenny? And she was on Law Review! LOL https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-samuels-a93067127 |
This is simply untrue. They're not getting accepted out of these schools because they're considered exceptional in "preparing" students for law school -- they're getting in because they have good grades and high LSAT scores, and students who score high on the LSAT are likely to have scored high on the SATs, which these schools place a premium on in admissions. |
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So, if I wanted to maximise my chances of getting into a t14 school, I should find the easiest major in the easiest college that gives As to everyone? And spend a few months prepping for LSAT, right? |
LAW review doesn’t mean what it used to. |
Yes. |
No such college. The colleges that you think are so easy and “give As to everyone” have low graduation rates—- therefore they do not “give As to everyone.” |
Within reason, yes, because the law schools report stats to USNWR-so the days of holistic review are over. But you must be no 1 your class. |
You have no idea what you're talking about. |