Brown vs. Columbia

Graduate School Law School
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<p>(1) The Yale GPAs used in my posts are not from the YDN. They are from UCS, which gets them from LSDAS. LSDAS gets them in turn from the actual transcripts sent directly by Yale to LSDAS for students applying in that admissions cycle. (If you are really curious, I con’t remember the exact link, but go to [Yale</a> University](<a href=“http://www.yale.edu%5DYale”>http://www.yale.edu), click the link for current students, click the one for UCS, click again for law school, and you’ll see the link for admissions data. It’s also been posted on this site numerous times.) They are real numbers. Only the cut offs for honors come from the YDN and it gets them from Yale’s administration. They are real numbers too. I’m not relying on self-reported #s. </p>

<p>(2) My impression is that the fact that Yale College’s yield is slightly lower is in large part a reflection of the fact that students who defer are not counted in the yield. We are dealing with relatively small numbers and every year, there is a group of Yalies who defer to take a Rhodes, Marshall, Gates, Fullbright, Mellon (limited to Yale grads, though they may exist at other schools), or in the case of 2007 grads in particular, to do things like work on a political campaign. I think Yale College students are more savvy about the fact that YLS is generous with deferrals and thus more likely to apply planning to defer than students from most colleges would be. I don’t know how YLS counts these students, but Yale College does NOT include them in its matriculation numbers; I know that simply because it is explained on the website. </p>

<p>(3) I didn’t accuse Lergnom of “lying.” I simply looked at his profile and posts when he said admissions was capped at 10 Yalies. I wanted to know what time period he was talking about since that has NEVER been the case since I first thought of applying to law school. I thought it possible that he went to law school in a previous era. His profile said that he was born in 1973 and is 36 years of age. So, when I made my comment about being much older than Lergnom, I based it on that. I simply wanted to withdraw my comment when I then read posts in which he said he attended Yale College in the 1970s.</p>

<p>(4) I vehemently disagree with the idea that if you can make the top 10% at Yale you could “rule the school” anywhere else. Among other things, Yale does have distribution requirements, but they are nothing like gen ed requirements at some school. And it’s sometimes these gen ed requirements that wreck gpa’s. My own undergrad college did not require a music course to graduate. Had it done so, it would have been a struggle for me as I am virtually tone deaf. I would not have ended up with as high a gpa. I don’t know the current rule, but it used to be that you could graduate from Yale with one math course and you could choose to take that math course at another school during the summer. A student who struggles in math might end up with a higher gpa at Yale than he would at a lower ranked school with more extensive math requirements. It’s also the case that Yale and many other top colleges tend to base grades on essay exams and papers. There are people who excel at these who don’t do well on multiple choice exams.</p>

<p>(4a) One should not conclude from this that I think everyone who is ranked first in his class at any college would be in the top 20% at Yale. Let me make it very clear that I don’t. I’ve seen some kids at the top of the class at a local college who cannot write a coherent sentence under pressure. It doesn’t matter. Exams are all multiple choice. The papers they write are all written out of class and they spend 20 hours to knock off 3 pages which I suspect are less impressive than what an average Yalie writes in an exam. Again, this is NOT the case for ALL of these students–some would excel anywhere. It’s just that different college curricula require different skills to excel. It’s really next to impossible if not actually impossible to predict the gpa and class rank someone would have received had he attended a college in a different USNews tier. </p>

<p>(5) I know a number of Yalies who got into YLS and who graduated from Y College cum laude rather than magna. They weren’t privileged in the sense lergnom is using that word. The kids with the lowest gpa from YC who was accepted to YLS whom I know personally had an unusually difficult course load. Among other things, he received B minuses in math courses his freshman year–math courses which are usually taken by juniors and seniors majoring in math. I suspect it helped that the faculty members reading his application had a pretty good idea of just how advanced those math courses really were. Another such case double majored in two well regarded disciplines which do not overlap at all in terms of course requirements. Both also had strong ECs and won undergraduate writing prizes. The first, BTW, chose Harvard Law instead and graduated magna cum laude. </p>

<p>(5) I do agree with ACM that YLS takes more students from top colleges because of the quality of the student bodies. Again, despite alll the tangents, the only point I am trying to make is that I vehemently disagree with the advice that the best thing you can do if you want to get into YLS is to go to some unknown college in North Dakota and that going to Yale College will hurt your chances. I still think that’s absolute hogwash.</p>

<p>FINALLY–high school students should choose the college they plan to attend without giving any thought to LS admissions. It really should be irrelevant.</p>

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<p>To illustrate Jonri’s point (4), I’ll throw in a cautionary tale about a very bright friend (a national merit finalist) who went to a non-selective college and flunked out. His professors didn’t design their tests to reward students who had a deep understanding of the material presented in class, and the ability to apply that understanding to novel situations - few of their students were capable of that kind of performance. Instead, they designed their tests to reward students who studied long hours. The students with the best grades were those with the best rote memorization skills.</p>

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<p>jonri, I’m sure we could have some interesting discussions about this and other topics, but i think we’ve beaten this one to death. Example: do we really need to go into the distribution requirements - which haven’t substantially changed in 30 years - versus what one might take at some hypothetical other school? It ends up being anecdotal. We narrowed the point to a few issues - essentially, the profile of the actual admitted group.</p>

<p>There are many other issues we could bring in. For example, when there’s rampant grade inflation, how is that distributed and do all students choose to benefit from inflation (even if it were evenly distributed across departments). If for example grades in science are lower - as they tend to be, partly because grads in those areas are less important for graduate school and employment - then you’d find fewer non-law school applicants in the lower grade pool and more in the upper percentages. How much of an effect? That would become a complicated regression. </p>

<p>Now as for AMC, one of the good things about going to Yale is that you’re supposed to learn critical thinking. If it sounds like I’m being snarky, I am because it should be beneath you to offer drivel like, “I’m curious where * went to school.” That’s the rhetorical equivalent of “nyah, nyah, nyah” and you can do better. But more importantly, why be defensive? Challenge your beliefs and don’t defend them with nyah, nyah, nyah and distortions (like saying I said a 4.0 at UND is “always better”). Why are you defending Yale? Isn’t Yale tough enough, well-established enough, prestigious enough to take a punch? </p>

<p>Here’s the simple truth - as Greybeard has also noted above: most of the people in your class, likely including you just by dint of numbers and nothing personal*, will not amount to much of anything. A few will be wildly successful, but those will not necessarily be the ones you currently would pick - or even people you currently respect. Most will do fine and a number will screw it up. Go to your 20th, 25th, 30th, etc. reunion. You’ll see: most of the people are indistinguishable from the rest of the upper middle class population and many of them will see their time at Yale as their high point. That isn’t wrong, not by any means, but life is not a degree and if there is a secret to success beyond school - other than naked ambition and selling your soul for cash, which many do - it is to challenge yourself, repeatedly and critically. Yale grads’ life stories follow the same normal distribution as the rest. The center line is skewed higher - but then you have to control for incoming wealth advantages - but is the deviation really so much less that the 95% confidence interval covers a tiny spread? (The answer is no, but the assumption people tend to make is yes.)</p>

<p>*The phrase “It’s only business, nothing personal” - known from The Godfather - is attributed to an associate of Dutch Schultz.</p>

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<p>Lergnom, did you debate in high school? Sorry if that comes across as “nyah, nyah, nyah.” I just feel as if I’ve been the victim of a “spread.” You’re the one who brought in a lot of other points. Somehow those I raise are “anedoctal,” while those you raised are not. Even definitions have shifted. </p>

<p>Again, the RFD [Reason for decision] is that as the person who posted saying that if you want to go to YLS you’d be better off going to some unknown school in North Dakota, you have the burden of proving that point. I respectfully submit that you have not done so. Indeed, you have presented nothing other than your personal opinion to support your position and therefore lose this round. Not a single word in your last post even addresses this issue! </p>

<p>I hope you can tell that this is written with tongue in cheek and that it is “nothing personal” here either.</p>

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<p>I hope you didn’t take that part as meant for you. Seriously.</p>

<p>BTW, I should have corrected my first statement. Realized that today as I was sipping my iced coffee. I mentally slipped - old age - and thought of the old law school size. Given the increase of 1/3, my number really isn’t that far off. The old number was meant to give the impression - a little low of course, but then one can’t help but advocate, can one? - of 10% of the class. Looks like they’re a few ticks over that now. </p>

<p>I enjoy poking at the solemnity and particularly at notions which appear correct on their face but which statistically don’t stand up. College admissions is a particularly hilarious area because people - mostly absolutely uninformed kids - quote rankings as though God writ them. They have no clue how the ratings are derived. They don’t understand error. They don’t understand what a standard deviation is. They have no idea that #32 may actually be lower than #45, especially since I would bet real money that the compilers don’t run 10,000 trials for each major error scenario. They don’t understand how the ratings weight subjective versus objective factors - and I doubt more than a handful (out of each 10,000) even attempt to look up the methodologies. </p>

<p>That this is true even in the quantitative fields is striking. A tiny number of future engineers looks up how that field’s rankings are compiled - or how the methods vary by compiler - and, even though there’s an actual engineering society to advance engineering education, almost no one looks up what the departments actually get in research dollars in the fields in which they’re interested. Nope, it’s all about books and magazines that print lists because lists are inherently believable and kids are just as susceptible to marketing even as the media tells us that kids are more cynical. You can actually find the number of published papers a department generates. </p>

<p>It’s amazing that people concentrate on small apparent differences that literally may not be real, meaning they’re within the error. School A is #27 and school B is number #32. Wow! As for a school like Yale, the schools at the top end of the prestige lists are in a different general class or grouping.* If you understand statistics at all and if you spend any time with the methodologies, you see there’s a bunch of schools in this group, a huge bunch of schools here - which may divide into a few somewhat smaller but amorphous groups - and then another “lower” bunch. I’m sure some of the people doing the work understand and would prefer to present the data differently but there is power in a list which has a #1. It’s genuinely weird and even disturbing to hear kids defend the most marginal prestige issues. </p>

<p>Note: grad school matters. Academic jobs reflect the ranking of your grad program and the earnings difference lasts for about a decade, at least per the study I read. We all know a highly ranked law school attracts more lucrative firms that pay more. (Though of course we then see people find their level, no matter where they went.)</p>

<p>But no, I hated debate because, to me, it was artificial. I’m more into the sport of negotiation. </p>

<p>*As admissions has changed, with more kids from more backgrounds and more places applying to more places, there are two possibilities: a) the admissions offices have somehow developed the skill to analyze and thus admit the actual “best” applicants or b) they haven’t. If anyone reading this has ever done hiring, he or she knows the answer is the latter; even the most elaborate game playing testing yields some stinkers and excludes some you wish you’d hired. (This isn’t a knock on the admissions people; this is a limit of systems that try to predict the future based on imperfect evaluations of imperfect past data.) I could lay out some number analysis but the answer is that admissions are more of a lottery and if you were to look backwards at the applicants from the future, you’d find they aren’t allocated with great efficiency in the rankings order. This means the rankings are what? Rough measures that include ancient past performance that can generally be lumped in bunches but which less and less reflect the actual allocations of talent. (And some argue they never did, but the culture was less open in important ways, as in the old club of Wall Street, and the culture was less merit rewarding.)</p>

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<p>My child is a current student at Yale. He once told me that one premed student he knows at Yale, who is very good at taking multiple choice tests in premed pre-req’s, is constantly worried about the possibility that his GPA may be wrecked by the distribution requirement outside the science area. After the class of 2009, all courses taken for the distribution requirement have to be taken for grades, rather than Cr/D/F.</p>

<p>For some humanity students, I heard the challenge is the courses for the science distribution requirement.</p>

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<p>Quoting AMC987:

I can relate to what you said here. My child was a top student at a top High School. But I can sense that it is much more challenging for him to pull an A consistently at Yale. It does not help that to graduate from Yale, it requires 4 more courses than most other schools would require, and he is advised by his adviser at UCS to take all 36 courses with grades (in order to be a “competitive” applicant to professional schools.)</p>