<p>I sure hope so, Greybeard!</p>
<p>Thanks, everyone, for your comments. I really appreciate it. Thought I was losing my mind for a bit there.</p>
<p>Harvard Law School tends to be a competitive place because a lot of students who are very competitive people attend it. However, if you are one of those rare people who really "march to the beat of" you own "drum" it's a great place to go to law school. Why? Because almost everyone gets a job. If you aren't interested in getting a job at one of the 5 most prestigious firms in any major city..guess what?...nobody forces you to do that. EVERYONE and I do mean EVERYONE who graduates from HLS gets a legal job unless he or she sets too high a bar.</p>
<p>The dirty little secret many lower ranked law schools don't want you to know....is that they are far more competitive than the top law schools. Why? Because many of their graduates won't get a job..any job..in law. </p>
<p>I took an Amtrack ride recently and met a young woman who graduated from my college alma mater. She was at or near the bottom of the class there....because, according to her, she'd had a lot of fun in college. She got an above average, but not outstanding LSAT score. While she got into Brooklyn Law School with no $, she chose a second tier school which gave her a lot of merit money. </p>
<p>She told me that more than one-third of her 1L class flunked out. (She was convinced her school did this to make its bar passage rate look good.) Of those who graduated, only those who made law review had a chance of getting a job with a major law firm. She freely admitted that nobody helped anyone else and the whole atmosphere was totally cutthroat because they all knew that whether you made law review was the difference between having a job at a half-decent law frim and being unemployed. </p>
<p>Harvard Law is laid back compared to what she described.</p>
<p>Jonri is right - a lot of the HLS competitiveness is really self-generated. It's really 'artificial competition'. </p>
<p>However, I would say that there are important differences in competitiveness even amongst the very top law schools. For example, Yale Law also has a lot of highly competitive students. If you're not highly competitive, then you probably wouldn't have gotten the scores necessary to get into Yale Law. But Yale Law takes steps to defuse the competitive atmosphere of the school. Is there still some competitiveness within Yale? I'm sure there is. But it's not accentuated the way it is at Harvard. </p>
<p>I would say, speaking for myself, I would probably prefer to go to Yale Law than Harvard Law. But of course, that presumes that I even have that choice to make. I would probably choose to go to Harvard Law over some other non-top law school.</p>
<p>What about the competitiveness or lack thereof at other top law schools like Stanford, Columbia, UPenn, Michigan, Boalt, etc?</p>
<p>To add to what Jonri said:</p>
<p>It is sometimes very worthwhile (for those who want the big firm job and the $$$) to go to a higher-ranked law school that doesn't give any money than to take the merit aid at a much lower-ranked law school. I'm not talking about the difference between Columbia and Cornell - more like Columbia and Pace. Unless you have a serious personality defect, you can get a really respectable job coming out of the top law schools - those jobs that pay $125,000/year. It'll be very difficult to get those coming out of second, third, and fourth tier schools - with the result that you'll make much less money coming out of those schools and could have repaid the debt many times over had you gone to Columbia. </p>
<p>(Before y'all start attacking, I'm writing this from purely the economic perspective - if someone wants the money or the prestige or atmosphere of a big city firm.)</p>