<p>Hello,</p>
<p>I'm getting mixed answers from my law school friends to the question; does the prestige of the undergraduate school play a significant role in being admitted to the top 3 (Harvard, Stanford, Yale)?</p>
<p>Some are saying; it does, as most admittees(to the top 3) come from top tier schools such as Cal(Berk.), UCLA, Columbia, Cornell, UofC, etc.
So, I took the liberty to search through the forum only to find an old, outdated thread:
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/duke-university/326689-law-school-harvard-yale-uva-undergrad-representation.html%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/duke-university/326689-law-school-harvard-yale-uva-undergrad-representation.html</a></p>
<p>It basically shows that Harvard, and Yale indeed cares about the prestige of the applicants' UG university as most of their admittees, if not all, are from tier 1 schools.</p>
<p>I was just wondering if this information was correct or not. And, if someone can prove the contrary that prestige doesn't matter and mainly GPA/LSAT does.</p>
<p>Don’t confuse correlation with causation. Smart kids tend to go to top UG. Smart kids also tend to score well on the LSAT. Kids who score well on the LSAT go to the top law schools. Sure, if you go to H, you may have a slight leg up for HLS admission, same for Y, but you still need that great LSAT as well as very good grades to be considered for these law schools.</p>
<p>Given that Yale and Stanford have such small class sizes and can pick from the best and the brightest, I would imagine that there’s a small effect (v. no effect) based on undergraduate institution attended. But undergraduate institution isn’t going to make up for bad grades/LSAT.</p>
<p>It’s not necessarily that they care about “prestige”. They do care about performance, and they know that tork that earned a B+ at a very demanding school may have earned an A or an A+ at a school where there was less competition.</p>
<p>I had a good friend at Berkeley Law who had a single grade of less than an A in four years at his undergraduate school, a non-flagship state university. His LSAT score was well above the mean for every law school in the country that reported the number. (Only Harvard didn’t report theirs at the time.) He was rejected at Harvard and Stanford.</p>
<p>As is turned out, he was capable of succeeding at Harvard, which he proved by earning excellent grades there during his last year of law school when he participated in an exchange program the two schools.</p>