Does not matter with respect to law school admissions.
Iâd take such reports with a grain of salt. It addition to Chicago undergrad kids almost certainly averaging far higher LSAT stats than average, itâs easy for a college that likes to brag about a high rate of professional school acceptances to manipulate such stats. For example, a school might discourages students from applying to professional schools where they are likely to be rejected, or encourage students to apply to bottom of T15 over what may be better options.
If you look at individual pre-law students at Chicago, many have far from positive things to say about their experience and law school admissions results, which some associate with harsh grading at Chicago. An example thread is at Honors graduate with 174 LSAT shut out at top law schools . He had a 3.3 GPA + 174 LSAT. He claims he was âshut out at top law schoolsâ due to his lower Chicago GPA (at the time near Chicago average), but was accepted to the bottom of T15.
To the OP: Iâd ask your daughter to make her case. After all, if she wants to go to law school and become a lawyer, sheâd have to be able to convince others (with evidence and sound reasoning). So what is driving her stubbornness? Can she explicate? Has she examined where her desires come from? There are advantages to attending a LAC for undergrad, but many below the top tier offer big merit scholarships and their faculty, from all reports, care just as much about their students as those at top LACs do. Is her stubborness due to combination of pride/looking good in front of others/wanting to be among intellectual peers/non-adult understanding of how hard it is to save 6 figures/wanting a reward for working hard in HS/fear (lack of self-confidence)/wanting to assert her individuality/something else?
I donât know about Law schoolâŠbut my husband is a Dr and no one ever asked him where he went to UG. There are many schools which will give your daughter a strong foundation. I see NO need to spend anywhere near 300k for and undergraduate degree. We cast a wide net for my daughter, who is pursuing a music degree. We donât qualify for any FA, but there are schools that determine aid based on different factors. Need blind, need based, meets need. Does she have any special talents? There are schools which provide scholarships based on talents/sports etc . I would advise you to look around and see what is possible. I would not place so much emphasis on undergrad esp since you know there is higher level education to come.
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just bc you can afford it, is it wise? This is something we struggled with. Weâve been down this path a few times, with my husband and now my daughter. Thankfully, my husband chose to get a wonderful education without the huge, big name price tag (not that his education wasnât costly but it wasnât âoverpricedâ bc of a name) so we somehow knew how to navigate this process. 300k for an undergrad degree is INSANE if you ask me. Itâs really a personal decision and one I donât judge anyone for. I just wonder what the stats are for people who attend smaller, lessor known UG colleges and have successful law degrees. It really is uncertain. What does âsuccessâ equate to? Being a law partner, working 80 hours a week to make it? vs working on your own and making a great pay and have a fulfilled life. It really is an individual decision.
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This is only anecdotal, but Iâve practiced in three different âBiglawâ firms over 20+ years, including at firms ranked in Vaultâs top 10 (where I am now). I can say without question that we have interviewed and hired many attorneys from stellar law schools who did not attend colleges that top the national rankings or the national liberal arts college rankings. More than a handful attended, for example, regional universities that are not ranked against national universities or national liberal arts colleges. Law school interview cutoffs are determined by law school and class rank, not a candidateâs undergraduate school. Do we have a whole lot of lawyers who attended tippy-top undergraduate universities and tippy-top law schools? Yes, but that is no way a requirement.
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@BKSquared. I agree with your point about T25 students generally being good test takers, and I agree that those who were strong on the SAT would also have a good chance of scoring well on the LSATs. But Iâm sure also that there are many people who tested well on the LSATs who did not post the kind of overall SAT scores you might need for T25 because they were much stronger verbally than quantitatively. I can image some of these students doing very well in their majors in their respective colleges, and finding themselves in a great position with respect to GPA and LSAT when it comes time to apply to law school.
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Very personal decision and in the end only you know if itâs worth it. I suggest you come up with a budget of what you are willing and comfortable paying and tell your child before they start applying.
We gave my son a budget (we are not full pay) and he could choose any school that came at or below the budget.
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That is not what is at issue. I was a partner in Big Law and was heavily involved with hiring. Undergrad was not a real factor, law school and rank within law school were the gating factors as you mentioned, then how well they interviewed determined flybacks/offers/no offers. The question is whether going to a T25 undergrad is advantageous in getting into a stellar law school. I attended Berkeley Law in the 80âs and jumped to banking in the late 90âs, so things certainly could have changed. But it was pretty evident in my law school class that a disproportionate number of students were grads of HYPS, UCB and UCLA. I did have friends who did very well in law school and went to Big Law or prestigious clerkships after graduation who went to good publics and other schools, but they were the only 1 or 2 grads from those schools. I think I have come across more recent data about some T15 law schools (Yale and UVA) where again certain schools were over represented. The question of course is whether those were cases of causation or correlation â the correlation of really strong students, test takers and people shooting for top grad programs also coming disproportionately from top undergrad programs. I really donât know but I am skeptical of taking the blanket advice that undergrad doesnât matter at all and go for the cheapest school with the most grade inflation (I canât believe law school admissions donât know which colleges have inflation and internally make adjustments).
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Much has changed since the 1980s. Higher education is much more expensive now then it was then. Many state public universities attract top âIvy League qualityâ students by offering merit scholarships to their honors colleges/programs.
Law school admissions is not the same game as it was in the 1980s.
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About 50% of YLS comes from the Iveyâs+Stanford + UChicago+ Georgetown. At UChicago Law, the same schools account for about 25% of the class. About 5% of the offers at UChicago come from UChicago undergraduate.
But is that a treatment effect (i.e. your law school favored applicants from those undergraduate colleges) or a (pre-)selection effect (i.e. those undergraduate colleges have a large number of students prone to doing well in course work (grades / GPA) and standardized tests (like the LSAT) who apply to law school)?
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Yes, I agree. I noted that further down in that post
For Berkeley (and UVA if I remember correctly), there is a further factor as state schools that they would favor in state students who likely went to S, UCB and UCLA in the case of Berkeley.
Cal, Harvard, Yale, and UCLA still have the greatest absolute numbers at T14âs. Then the big Ivies Cornell and Penn and then UMich.
A little surprisingly (or maybe not), next are Duke, Georgetown, Columbia, and UVa before we get to Stanford tied with Northwestern. Then NYU before Princeton and then the U of C.
Interestingly, itâs the undergraduate bodies of the T14 + UCLA (which is knocking on the doors of the T14, displacing Georgetown) + Princeton in the top 16.
But in any case, we should also expect the greatest number of the best T14 applicants to be at those schools, so Iâm not sure that really tells us all that much.
UF has about as many alums in the T14 as Brown and UMD and UCSD have about as many as Dartmouth. Obviously the state schools are far bigger than those 2 Ivies.
Yet while Iâm fairly certain the vast majority of the kids at Brown and Dartmouth could get in to UF/UMD/UCSD, I doubt a large portion of the kids at UF/UMD//UCSD could get in to Brown and Dartmouth.
BTW, itâs not as if Dartmouth does that poorly in T14 admissions. On a proportional basis, it does better than Penn and Cornell.
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Dale & Krueger (2011) found no difference in career earnings between students who attended elite colleges and those who were admitted to those same college but chose to enroll elsewhere. In other words, college attended (the intervening variable) made no difference. Frank Bruni in his recent (2016) book, âWhere You Go Is Not Who Youâll Beâ makes essentially the same point.
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I agree that saying the undergraduate institution âdoesnât matter at allâ probably goes too far. Thereâs certainly going to be a line below which law schools will question if someone can handle the academics. But I agree with others that the top 25 or so schools do not have anything close to a monopoly on quality academics or smart students.
As @PurpleTitan points out, for example, a good number of T14 law students came from UF/UMD/UCSD, none of which are T25 for undergrad (though UF and and UCSD are in the 30s). In addition, a quarter of the score-reporting students at a handful of colleges ranked in the 40s, and at least one college ranked in the 50s, have SATs over 1500 (per USNWR). Similar to the kids at T25 schools, one would expect a good number of these kids to score well on standardized tests like the LSAT, and it seems fair to say that students who have achieved top grades at those schools are quite capable. It seems to me that such schools should be viewed similar to schools like UCLA, the student body of which has a pretty wide 25/75 percentile SAT range (1280/1530). I donât see a good reason why a student who can compete and earn top grades at any of these schools would be treated much differently.
The law schools of Columbia, NYU, UChicago, Harvard, and Duke each report that their students attended between 92 and 164 different undergraduates institutions.
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I kind of understand where she is coming from, donât necessarily agree with it, but I get it. My daughter is an incredibly driven, strong, resilient, smart young girl who has battled against many obstacles throughout her life, she has been bullied merciless in her school (several schools) as she has a physical deformity (was born missing an eye), and has many other family circumstances that singled her out (hispanic in a mainly white school, severely autistic brotherâŠ) So aside from wanting a top education from a top school, I guess is her way of saying F#@% U!!!
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A few thoughts:
- She can say that by winning prestigious scholarships too.
- Having a chip on your shoulder isnât necessarily a bad thing (and I understand the feeling), but being driven to choose an option that may not be afffordable or amass a lot of debt seems . . . . counterproductive? Like, why not harness that drive to win scholarships, start a company, help people in the world, etc.?
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Oh absolutely, agree with you 100%, like I said, I do understand where is coming from, but I donât agree with it.
She is working on a list of schools that include both LACs, state schools, a variety of schools. I guess once she has acceptances or rejections is easier to make a decision, right now it is just talk
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18 posts were split to a new thread: Law school admission and elite colleges