<p>I know that 90% if Law Admissions are GPA and LSAT. But does it matter what I do and where I go? Is it better to go to a un heard of undergrad school and get a 3.8-4 or a big state school and get a 3.5-8. And can I major in ANYTHING? Like will it matter wether I do Econ or Poly-Sci, or Finance, or even Children Education? Thanks </p>
<p>I’m told that it doesn’t matter where you go, and so go wherever you can get the highest GPA. What you major in makes no difference for getting in.</p>
<p>HOWEVER, I simply cannot fathom that someone who has a 3.8 GPA from Yale will be treated the same as someone who has a 3.8 GPA from No-Name Dopey College.</p>
<p>In addition, major in something that will give you good life-long skills for law school and practicing as a lawyer, such as extensive reading and writing practice.</p>
<p>Your undergraduate name is entirely irrelevant. A 3.9 from nowheresville beats a 3.8 from Yale, even if the 3.9 is in basketweaving and the 3.8 in electrical engineering.</p>
<p>I disagree. One’s ungrad institution definitely carries weight in law school admissions. That’s not to say one can’t be admitted to a top law school from a lesser undergrad, but there is far less margin for error when it comes to you undergrad record.</p>
<p>There is no evidence at all that undergrad name plays any role in the admissions process. It is also fundamentally implausible. Schools know that their consumer base (students) is largely driven by USNWR rankings (go look at the bonuses deans get for moving even a few points). USNWR looks at the admitted class’ GPAs and LSATs. It does not look at undergrad name. Consequently, schools would be acting against their own economic interest to consider undergrad names. In a battle between cash and selectivity, who do you guess wins?</p>
<p>There are certainly more USNWR-qualified applicants than slots at places like YHS. </p>
<p>Padad, you’d be surprised. Given that YS give a close look at an applicant’s softs, out of 107 HSL applicants (2011-2014 cycles from LSN) with GPA’s >= 3.9 and LSAT’s >= 173, 100 were accepted, 6 were waitlisted, and 1 was rejected (<a href=“Search | MyLSN.info”>http://mylsn.info/3kuv8l/</a>). Just some food for thought. </p>
<p>@padad: On top of Vctory’s point that there really aren’t that many top applicants, YHS aren’t a particularly representative sample. Even if those schools did care about undergrad name, they would still amount to only 1% of schools and only 20% of the T14.</p>
<p>I can tell you that at the Ivy law school I attended many different colleges were represented, but the top national universities and LACs placed multiple students in each class, whereas lower ranked schools (including very large state universities which i’m sure had many, many applicants to my law school) often only placed a single student. As I said, it is an issue of “margin of error” with your transcript if you are applying from a weaker undergrad. In addition, if you look at the Wall Street Journal’s study on the top “feeder” schools to the top law, business and medical schools, there is an empirical correlation between to top undergrads attending top law schools (though in part this might be explained by the fact that the applicants at the top undergrads tend to have higher LSAT scores, as they did SAT scores). Beyond all this, i can tell you that from my college (a top 5 LAC) about 12 of us went straight to law school after college and 3/4ths went to Ivy or equivalent.</p>
<p>Majors could matter more if you’re a splitter (conventional or reverse)…</p>
<p>@victory, I would think that if you want to quote numbers, you should at least try to justify your statistics. What is the distribution of schools from these applicants, is a sampling of 107 representative, etc? </p>
<p>@Demo, i would think that attending YHS is the goal of applicants who apply to the T14 in general. </p>
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<p>AP Stats: correlation does not equal causation. </p>
<p>Why would you be so sure of the bolded? The FACT is that the average law school applicant from even the top publics (Cal, Michigan, UVa) are not competitive for Ivy law. Such average applicant does not have a high enough LSAT to be competitive. So, even if your assumption is true, it does’t matter how many applied from top undergrad public, becos most of them will be auto-rejects due to a low LSAT.</p>
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<p>…test-taking ability. Indeed, top undergrads select for high testers as part of their admissions requirement. Most anyone who can score a ~2100 on the SAT can clear 17x on the LSAT with prep. (Do you really think that Harvard College has the highest mean LSAT score solely due to the education received by four years in Cambridge?)</p>
<p>^^^^^ Well, neither of us have all the stats so I can’t say I am SO sure, but I think it is reasonable to assume that Big State U will have several hundred seniors applying to law school in a given year. Further, I think it’s reasonable to assume that the top 10% of these law school hopefuls at each school will shoot for T-14 schools. If these assumptions are correct, that means there might be as many as 20-30 applicants from Big State U (and from large, mid-tier private colleges) to each of the T-14 schools in a given year. </p>
<p>HLS, for e.g., gets 5,000 applicants each year, so I think my numbers are in the ball park.</p>
<p>And yes, test taking ability is indeed the explanatory factor to which I was referring.</p>