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[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]

This is correct. 
PP is having trouble separating causation from correlation.  [/quote]

I actually don’t.  I am just looking for an independent study that supports anyone’s position on the topic.

I don’t care if I am proven right or wrong.[/quote]

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