I know this has probably been asked a dozen times, but here’s my question. Does where you go for undergrad affect your chances of admission to law schools? A lot of people say that what you do is more important than where you do it, but I remain skeptical. So if two students applied to the same law school, and had similar stats, similar recs, everything even their GPA of say, 3.5 was the same, but one went to a random state school and another went to a school like Rice University, would the latter student have better chances?
Others will disagree, but I think that, all things being equal, if a law school has to pick between 2 candidates for one seat, the one with a Rice degree with be picked over one from a “random state school”.
There are so many variables at play that it’s really difficult to say how a particular person’s application would turn out though.
@gdlt234: Happy Alumnus is correct that, everything else being equal and law schools being somehow unable to add a seat, undergrad school could matter. It’s just basically never the case that everything else is equal. Law schools cut first and foremost by GPA and LSAT. That will fill 90% of their class. The remaining 10% is made up, usually, of URMs with a little bit thrown in for exceptional cases. Law schools just don’t have any real reason to care where you went to undergrad. Employers will sometimes care though.
And to just parse down on that a little bit, if you went to SE Slippery Rock Rock State and have about the similar academic credentials say as a gal from Princeton–the admissions committee will in most instances give a nod to the latter. Now, as was previously mentioned, if you are dealing with the intangibles that largely make-up the last 10% of the class, they may not be as prominent a feature, however, usually speaking, the Princeton application is not considered within that segment of the admission’s group.
In undergrad admissions (especially at top schools), thousands of applicants will have almost identical stats. At that point, they are distinguished by other factors, because the school could literally fill its entire class twice over with valedictorians or people who got 2300+ on the SAT.
Law school admissions is just different. Most candidates, especially today (with application numbers in the gutter), do not have the same stats as other candidates. Trust me, it is NOT the situation wherein a hundred students with similar stats are competing for ten slots. It’s like, maaaaybe two or three students with similar stats are competing for the very last slot - and those other two are going to be waitlisted.
Besides, what do similar stats at radically different schools look like? If you have a 3.5 at Princeton and a 175 LSAT, you look like a great candidate; if you have a 3.5 from South Podunk and a 175 LSAT, you look like a bit of a slacker.
@boolaHI: The admissions committee won’t give a nod to the latter, it will add both. Any set of numbers that can push up a school’s stats is welcome because of just how few decent LSAT scores there are. If it really comes down to it, law schools can always add another seat. The marginal cost of another student is trivial, especially compared to the tuition dollars coming in.
I don’t know what it’s like today, but when I was applying to law school the top law schools had a disproportionate number of students from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Williams, Amherst, and Middlebury. Of course that could be because those schools had a disproportionate number of high LSAT scores, but it may also be because law schools preferred students from those undergrads.
@Demosthenes49 Well, different situations dictate different outcomes, e.g are we talking an in-state versus out-of-state, a private law school versus a public, a highly ranked ranked school versus one in the middle? Now, while certainly not a definitive overview, having served on 3 different law schools admission committees, my little sampling of this world, says something a bit different.
Perhaps, but 99% of law schools won’t care, and both applicants will be accepted nearly everywhere but HYS, Chicago and Boalt; the latter two really like high GPA’s, so Chicago might favor the P’ton grad. Edited to add, both 3.6/175 even have a high probability for HLS. (HLS has such a large class, they have to accept nearly every 173+ to hold their median.)
Maybe I should clarify a bit: the LSAT is very strongly correlated with SAT score. Someone who goes to their flagship state school on scholarship may well ace the LSAT, but the chances of someone who goes to Slippery Rock (where 75% of the students score a 540 or below on the SAT Critical Reading) acing the LSAT are… almost nil.
It’s just not like the SAT, wherein some kid from Choate and some kid from inner city Baltimore might both have 3.8s and 2200 SATs.
Exactly. And that is why I said, while outliers certainly exist, rare do you find, per the example I provided of the Slippery Rock grad competing head to head, with similar scores and grades, as to the Princeton grad.
That said, a little while ago, several years ago, we meet an AA kid who was actually out favorite bartender, who wanted to attend law school, and my wife and I agreed to help support him through law school. Long story short, so his stats were as follows GPA about 3.65, from the U of Illinois Chicago,(basically an urban commuter school), and he took about 6 years to graduate,but when he took the LSAT, he did very well ( we help pay for a Kaplan class) and I think he scored a 168 or 169, which is very respectable. Even better ending to the story, he just graduated from NYU, and he starts in the fall at one of the larger firms in the city. He said the most he ever made prior to law school was in the high 30s, his starting salary this fall–$162K…so, sometimes it all works out.
AA Males, are the most underrepresented group of people at Law school. I am not at all surprised that he got accepted to NYU. He probably also had some other fine choices within the T14 (some probably with $$). Well done, he will always remember what you and your wife did for him and will hopefully pay it forward.
Yes, where you go absolutely matters, especially at the top five or ten law schools. Yes, exceptional students are at all top schools but generally speaking name brand gets you noticed.
@SeattleTW: The top 5 or 10 law schools are absolutely desperate to keep their LSAT numbers up and have far too few qualified applicants to ever care about undergrad name. The only exception is Yale, but they sort by things other than undergrad institution.
If you want to go to YLS, go to Yale undergraduate. At least, statistically, they have the greatest representation. Further, I have seen their scores/gpa relative to other applicants, and they afford them a bit of latitude.
BoolaHI is right, and same for HLS; there is another thread on this topic that shows the leeway that Harvard College people applying to HLS get.
If you look at those “scattergrams”, top law schools certainly don’t just pick everyone who meets minimum GPA and LSAT score requirements; some people above minimum numeric thresholds get in, but many do not, so having a strong application in all respects is important.
Undergrad does indeed matter and when I was in law school the kids would judge each other based in part where they had gone. Yale and Princeton had by far the most representatives. Those who attended unknown schools had to suffer the indignity of the frequent, “where’s that” or “never heard of it,” especially the first semester. Even top public schools were not perceived of as prestigious enough and private schools were the norm.
^^if you can’t handle that kinds of slight (err, microagression), y’all ought not be going into the brutal legal profession. (Attending a no-name undergrad will be the least of your worries.)
But, otoh, after three years, the no-name undergrad still gets to put HLS/T<15 on his/her resume.