<p>Which ivy has the best english undergrad program? Which has the highest admit to law school? Thanks so much!</p>
<p>Yale definitely for English (despite my bias, I think this is actually true). </p>
<p>Law school admissions is less about what school you went to and more about how well you perform in your classes and on the LSAT. While going to an ivy might give you a slight boost, it’s not going to help much if your numbers are below where they should be.</p>
<p>Hehee thanks, why are you biased to Yale - do you go there? And could you rank the ivies from 1 - 8, 1 being the best english (you said Yale), and 8 being the, out of the ivies, worst.</p>
<p>Harvard traditionally does best, percentage-wise, in law school admissions. I forget where the article I read that in is.</p>
<p>And rankings are silly and subjective. Every Ivy has a good English program, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the qualitative difference between them.</p>
<p>What other, nonivy schools have great eng/pre-law programs (i.e. middlebury, duke, georgetown, etc.)</p>
<p>Yale and Berkeley generally vie for #1 English department ranking. Harvard has fabulous senior people, but is less strong in the sub-60 ranks. Cornell has also long had a first-rank English department. So does Columbia, but it has somewhat consumed itself in internecine warfare – the provost actually had to put it in a kind of receivership for awhile, because the internal politics were so toxic. Princeton is OK, but traditionally very conservative, no edge. Dartmouth, Brown, and Penn are also fine, but not at the level of the others. Brown and Penn both have excellent creative writing programs, Columbia too. The others not so much (although they are all pretty good at having star authors teach some classes).</p>
<p>Duke was considered an excellent English department 20 years ago, but I don’t know where it stands now. Stanford has a great department, but I’m not sure that’s what you want to hear. Johns Hopkins is traditionally very strong in English, too, and in creative writing. Chicago’s department is well-regarded.</p>
<p>It isn’t hard to hire good English faculty, so I’m sure Middlebury and Georgetown have some, but they don’t register on the greatdepartmentometer. It’s hard for any LAC to have enough breadth to have a great department.</p>
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<p>And this would be your own, personal “greatdepartmentometer”? Middlebury has an outstanding English department with a number of well respected and accomplished faculty members (including Jay Parini, Julia Alvarez, and John Elder (just to name a few)). Classes are small across the board, allowing for lots of personal attention from faculty.</p>
<p>Historically, Amherst has had a strong and distinguished faculty in English, and English has consistently been the major-of-choice of Amherst graduates. A significant proportion of every graduating class attends a top law school.</p>
<p>If you are competitive for Yale, consider Amherst, and Williams too. Pomona and Middlebury are also good choices.</p>
<p>I can’t believe this is of actual concern to anyone qualified to get into Yale (or Harvard or Berkeley). For example, if you can’t get into a top law school from Yale, it’s because you didn’t score high enough on the LSAT. That has nothing to do with Yale (or Harvard or Berkeley or any other school where the students have high SAT’s and thus are likely to have high LSAT’s). If somehow you’re drawn to a particular teacher at a particular school, then the relative quality of the best known departments might make a whit of difference but otherwise you’re engaging in useless mental masturbation.</p>
<p>I agree in principle, but I’ll disagree on the Berkeley bit. Berkeley’s grading system is so vicious that it makes it tougher to get into a top law school.</p>
<p>Honestly, if you have the stats to get into top schools like the Ivies, it is really pointless to think about which ones will be best for getting into law schools. All of them will be very good, as long as you have good grades and scores. There’s hardly anything that you learn in college that helps you that much in law school, with the exception of learning how to write well. Beyond that, there’s really no reason that a political science major will do better in law school than a film or music major. Law school is mostly new stuff.</p>
<p>Yeah, and from what I’ve seen over many years, the handful of lawyers who learned to write well forget how, starting in law school and then in practice. There can be no other explanation for the hideous language that fills documents produced by firms populated by top law school grads.</p>
<p>I think poetry is a good major for law school because it teaches you close textual analysis. Another good one is Computer Science because you learn how to take 3 pages to describe how to drink a diet Coke and that blows apart your preconceptions about how things work and the methods you use to look at them.</p>
<p>Nothing you learn in undergrad classes applies at all in law school and I mean at all. Law school is about ripping apart your preconceptions of what things mean and then teaching you how to see things from the special perspective of a legal system. That relies on close analysis and a method - often called the Socratic method - in which you are forced to abandon your perspective as you explore the various possible perspectives to illuminate the specific choices made in that case in the law. Try to fit PoliSci or Econ to that. You can’t except in the context of worry about the “best”: the best school, the best major, the best kind of breakfast food, the best toilet paper. Bottom line: study what you enjoy, do well, score high on the LSAT and you’ll get in to a very good law school. </p>
<p>In my section in law school, we had as a student a well-known professor who was a noted expert on certain legal topics. He started day 1 trying to show he was better than us and was quickly reduced to our level. Get that? The guy was literally an expert and the law school methodology was completely new - and shocking - to him. </p>
<p>I guarantee that any kid at a top law school will walk out of the first class or two having had his or her mind blown by the swirling perspectives. And that is exactly what the professors do to you on purpose. So don’t take PoliSci unless you want to take PoliSci. Take Art History or Asian Studies or whatever the heck you want.</p>