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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]In the legal field, the prestige of your law school is what matters, not undergrad. And going to a fancy undergrad doesn’t give you an admissions boost for law school except maybe on the very edges. It’s all LSAT and GPA. In fact for someone targeting a T14 law school it might be a better strategy to go to a state school for undergrad if you can do better there (less competition). [/quote]

Everyone gives this advice, but I have never seen anything that supports it...at all.  Yale law school is 70% kids from just 20 undergraduate schools (all top schools), and then 30% come from 150+ other schools (i.e., 1 kid from each school).

The #1 feeder to any T14 school by far, is the undergraduate school.  So, Harvard undergrad has the most kids at Harvard law, same for Northwestern, same for UVA.

I wish someone could show a link to an analysis or really anything to support the position that law school is only GPA and LSAT.[/quote]

I’m the PP you’re responding to. I went to Penn Law, so I can’t comment on Yale. [b]My class of ~250 at Penn comprised at least 50% of public and non-elite college alums.[/b] If you look at stats for admitted students (Law School Numbers is one source, although it’s self-reported), the common trend is that they are either at or above both medians for GPA/LSAT or have at least one of GPA/LSAT above the 75th percentile for those schools. The medians now are something like 3.9 GPA/171 LSAT and 75ths are obviously higher. Maybe attending an elite undergrad helps on the margin, like if they’re choosing between two applicants and it’s an “all else equal” situation, but otherwise those two numbers are the key factors. Often a high GPA and a high LSAT (required to get into any of those schools) means that the student is a strong academic performer and a strong standardized test taker, which sometimes/often correlates with the prestige of their undergrad institution. Obviously there are good reasons why it might not, and in my experience and also as borne out by empirical evidence if you look at T14 admits, students who are able to perform at that level (regardless of undergrad school) are not left out.

I would posit that the correlation between YLS admissions and T20 undergrad institutions is mostly just a correlation. The students admitted to YLS are, in all likelihood, lifelong high academic achievers. It makes sense that those students disproportionately attend T20 undergrad schools. Also, for what it’s worth, YLS is well known in law school admissions to be more “black box” and to value soft factors (i.e., not LSAT/GPA) more than their peer schools do. So maybe undergrad institution is a factor for them, I don’t know.[/quote]

Once more, 50% of the class is coming from 20 schools and 50% is coming from 200+ schools.  So, once more...even your example doesn't support your conclusion.

People can "posit" anything they want to pull out of their a**.  Show me a true independent analysis that either proves you right (or proves me wrong).[/quote]

I’m telling you this as someone who actually went through the law school admissions process and attended one of these schools. This is the advice I’d give my own kid. Multiple posters at this point have explained that there’s an obvious correlation between high academic achievers (counting both standardized test scores and GPA) and elite undergrad institutions, which partially explains why those institutions are overrepresented at elite law schools. I’m not going to spend any more time looking for evidence for you, but there’s plenty available if you care to do any research on this. You can start by looking at admitted student profiles on LSN, Reddit, and the TLS forum. The overriding factors in law school admissions are LSAT and GPA, prestige of undergrad institution is really not meaningful except insofar as it correlates to the obvious fact that these schools tend to produce students with extremely high GPAs (because those students were already exceptional academic achievers) AND 97th+ percentile LSAT scores of 170 and above.

If you have, and want to throw away, $400k on an elite college because you think it’s a good investment for elite law school admissions, it’s your money. You’re still incorrect about it.[/quote]

You actually don't have any evidence.  You just have random bits of information.  True evidence would be Law School admissions folks going on the record and saying exactly what you say above, or USNEWS or anyone doing some kind of analysis and coming to a fairly definitive conclusion that undergrad schools don't matter.

You are upset because your "evidence" doesn't support your conclusion...at all.  When you say 50% of your law school class came from just 20 schools....that is statistically significant evidence that you yourself provided.

50% of Harvard undergrads go to public schools.  Do you honestly think that means it isn't an advantage to graduate from Exeter or Andover for admission to Harvard that have outsized %ages of the class going to Harvard?  Those kids still have high GPAs and test scores.

I think law school in general is a waste of $$$s.  I would not encourage my kid to go to law school at all.

I am just asking for anyone to provide something of substance (from any reputable 3rd party). to support their assertions regarding law school and undergrad.  That's it.
[/quote]

If you’re looking for some sort of study that disproves that a disproportionate number (relative to the total population of US college students) of T14 admits attended elite undergrad institutions, you’re not going to find it. Obviously that’s true. I’m saying attending an elite undergrad is not a significant advantage or plus factor in elite law school admissions. Those two facts can coexist. I and other PPs have explained this already, so this is the last time I’m going to engage with you, but students who meet T14 admissions criteria of an extremely high GPA AND LSAT are way more likely to come from a certain subset of colleges for a variety of reasons. But students who meet this criteria from non-elite undergrad institutions are also admitted. It’s about meeting the basic admissions criteria, which is a high bar. Law school admissions is actually extremely predictable, regardless of a student’s undergrad institution.

And by the same token, I disagree that attending an elite private high school makes admission to an elite undergrad more likely *for a kid who meets the qualifications*. There are empirical studies on this, at least at the HS level. A kid who has the scores/soft factors to be admitted by an elite undergrad institution isn’t harmed by attending public high school. It’s just that the kids at elite private/boarding schools also tend to have advantages (wealthy parents who can pay for enrichment and tutoring, can make massive donations to universities, have family legacy, etc.), and sometimes those advantages can help a kid who might not have gotten in if they were just average Joe at a public school. It’s correlation, not causation. And I actually think in today’s age of DEI, elite universities are sensitive to the perception that rich kids are buying their way in. All else equal, they might admit the public school kid instead. I interview for my elite undergrad college and see the admissions results; the public school kids I interview have had a better admissions rate than the private school kids over the past few years.[/quote]

I am looking for a study that analyzes law school admissions and definitively comes to the conclusion that undergraduate institution does not matter.  That a 4.0 and 178 from Frostburg State, beats a 3.95 and 177 from Stanford 99/100 times for T14 admission.

Absent that study, everything that has been written many, many times on DCUM is absolutely not supported by the empirical evidence.

Case closed.[/quote]

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