<p>I don’t care if the OP ends up at an elite, an LAC, or a state public. Any decently-ranked school that is strong in bio, chem, math and physics can prepare a student for med school. I wouldn’t recommend going to a regional/directional public whose name and quality is unknown outside of the area.</p>
<p>What is important is when a student will have to borrow a lot for undergrad, and ALSO have to borrow for med school.</p>
<p>If a person does NOT have parents to assume some/all of that debt, the OP will be in trouble if he takes out sizeable loans for undergrad and then attempts to get loans for med school.</p>
<p>A person can easily “max out” on borrowing power for med school. AND, some med schools will NOT accept you if you have a lot of undergrad debt, because they fear that you’ll run out of money before finishing med school. (If the debt is all in the student’s name.)</p>
<p>Stafford limits the combined total of undergrad and med school debt to $224k. That total is less than just the cost of medical school. So, see my point? </p>
<p>Yes, some future doctors take out regular private bank loans and such, and guess what? They are still drowning in debt 20+ years later! There are kids on this forum whose parents are doctors who cannot afford their kids’ college costs, because they are still drowning in loans from med school.</p>
<p>41 percent of Harvard’s Class of 2009 was unemployed at graduation, and the median salary of the graduates who did manage to find employment was 40k.</p>
<p>A) top LAC, state law school
B) state U, top law school C) state U, state law school</p>
<p>(Assuming that state U is not one of the public anomalies like W&M.)</p>
<p>If one could be reasonably certain of admission to a top law school after attending state U, I would agree that saving the expense for later is a prudent long-term choice. But this simply isn’t true, so the picture grows murkier. You will sacrifice long-term opportunities in admission to “top law school” by attending state U. Can you make outcome B happen? ABSOLUTELY. Plenty of people do every year. But consider the numbers by proportion, and remember that it’s not easy to get high grades even at state U. E.g. Generic Student with a 3.6 GPA has a better chance of getting into a top law school from Swarthmore than from Penn State. (I haven’t checked the statistics, but it seems like a reasonable hypothesis to me.)</p>
<p>wow thanks everybody for sharing your thoughts! Just to clarify, the state school I was talking about was UMass (Amherst). </p>
<p>I’m confused on one point–in this thread itself I read that state schools have “HUGE faculties, HUGE resources” for research/internships, while another poster said LACs have better internship opportunities. Am I missing something, or is there a discrepancy?</p>
<p>Also, does anyone know if state schools follow a grade deflation or inflation policy? Would it be tremendously difficult to maintain a 3.8+ at this state school? And would this 3.8 be better than a say, 3.3 at a LAC (if applying for grad/med/dent school)? </p>
<p>Also, no I didn’t qualify for any fin aid at my LAC (which was my #1 choice) and it doesn’t give out at merit aid. They clarified that right at the beginning…</p>
<p>What is really weird is that I got almost no merit aid at UMass either. I know that UMass is always strapped for cash but I was expecting at least some aid… UMass is still pretty expensive with about $23k each year.</p>
<p>Also for clarification, yes I am aware that I may change my mind and not do pre-med but I know that I will definitely do some sort of grad school. </p>
<p>kwu, so you are saying that the unemployment rate for recent Harvard graduates is four times the unemployment rate for the country as a whole. Where do all those unemployed Harvard grads go, and what do they do? Surely there is something missing here. That statistic is very weak out of context.</p>
<p>I think you need to show those Applebee’s numbers are representative of Applebee’s everywhere, and not just for some in major city areas.</p>
<p>Keilexandra, I feel you’ve missed half the thread.</p>
<p>Read my initial post about how law school admissions is not affected by where you go to undergrad. Then read the subsequent posts where no one could refute that statement.</p>
<p>^At first I thought you were just selectively reading, but then I realized that the posts I have made previously in support of my point, mainly in summary of others’ points–which, btw, no one refuted–were in a different thread. I link you to my latest post in that thread but encourage you to read the entirety for yourself.</p>
<p>*Read my initial post about how law school admissions is not affected by where you go to undergrad. *</p>
<p>I person can get into a top law school by going to a ranked known public state. My cousin’s son is now at Stanford Law, and he went to UC Davis. </p>
<p>However, I would NOT recommend going to a “directional state” and then try to get into a top law school (BTW…I’m not sure what you’re calling a top law school. Top 20? Top 50? What???</p>
<p>I know someone who always wanted to go to UMich law school. She went to a local directional public (I think it was in Ohio or PA), because her parent worked there, and she could go there for free. She had a a high GPA and a high LSAT, however, she wasn’t accepted. She later learned that UMich Law had NEVER accepted anyone from her directional state school (they probably had never heard of it). She never thought to consider that when she decided her undergrad.</p>
<p>If she had gone to her state’s flagship (which was either Penn St or Ohio St), she would have had a better chance of being accepted.</p>
<p>James - My apologies. The rest of the thread, however, does address your point of undergrad to grad/law. IIRC there is some evidence that law schools are more prestige-conscious than med schools. Certainly the bias is well-documented for grad school; I don’t recall the link right now, but I remember reading a (depressing) blog article by a philosophy professor at UC-Davis who has said that applications from an “unknown” school are not seriously considered regardless of GPA or recommendations (unless the recommending professor is well-known to the committee, which is hit-or-miss at any school). And the bar for being known was pretty high.</p>
<p>I leave the definition of “top” open in correlation with the indefinite definition of a “top” undergrad.</p>
<p>mom2collegekids: Can we stop perpetuating stories such as those? There are websites that have accumulated data on law school admissions from many students, for many cycles. There are forums that talk about these things year-round. If your friend’s case was so outlandish, you should tell your friend to post her stats and admissions results on one of the dedicated law school forums, where she and her fellow applicants can commiserate together and cook up a new conventional wisdom. But right now the conventional wisdom says that undergraduate reputation, even down to the directional state universities, does not matter much.</p>
<p>Keilexandra: I do not see anything that might go beyond anecdotal evidence. Until you show me, can we please agree to stop perpetuating the myth that elite undergraduate colleges benefits one substantially in law school admissions?</p>
<p>James - Can you show me evidence-beyond the anecdotal “conventional wisdom”–that elite undergraduate colleges offer NO substantial benefit (by which I mean, there’s more than a few exceptional students every year who would not have been admitted if they had the same stats from a lesser school) in law school admissions? I agree that admissions is based PRIMARILY on GPA and LSAT. But, 1) a higher GPA is often easier, not harder to attain at a grade-inflated elite, and 2) there is correlative evidence in that elite undergrads are overrepresented at the top law schools. Take the remaining representation from “other” schools and ask yourself whether this number really represents the majority of students who believe that they can just as easily go to Harvard or Yale Law from Northern Arizona University as from Columbia. (I make up the names and use an extreme example, but to call the benefit of prestige a “myth” invites such comparisons.)</p>
One quick point: “unknown” is probably not the same as “non-Ivy”. A wide variety of relatively non-selective institutions are actually quite well-known in many areas (the NRC surveys rather handily demonstrate this).</p>
<p>Also, non-professional grad school admissions seem to vary by discipline. Research-heavy areas such as the sciences and engineering appear to place the strongest emphasis on research experience (based on discussions on a science forum I visit). The humanities may value prestige a bit more.</p>
<p>There seems to be a discrepancy… Do state schools have “HUGE faculties, HUGE resources” for research/internships, or do LACs have better internship opportunities. Is there a general trend (of course there will be tons of exceptions).</p>
<p>Also, does anyone know if state schools follow a grade deflation or inflation policy? Would it be tremendously difficult to maintain a 3.8+ at this state school? And would this 3.8 be better than a say, 3.3 at a prestigious LAC (if applying for grad/med/dent school)?</p>
<p>^ Those statements are both generalizations that can never be completely validated. In general, I would say that LACs peak a bit higher but drop off far more radically. In other words, a tip-top LAC may offer connections to prestige-focused industries not available at all but a few state schools, but even a very mediocre state university is big and broad enough to offer many opportunities. </p>
<p>An LAC will generally have small departments with only a few professors and only a few areas of relatively small research. At the top places, those professors are probably very adept at their subject and do not lack depth. But at more mediocre LACs, I would be concerned about the limited resources available.</p>
<p>State schools are more likely to use strict curves, which can lead to some pretty harsh grade deflation. Of course, a less-competitive student body may mitigate that by pulling the curve down. I don’t know enough about UMass to comment specifically.</p>
<p>From what I know about med schools, a 3.8 at almost any state flagship would be hugely preferable to a 3.3 anywhere. But you should wait for comments from more knowledgable sources to confirm that.</p>
<p>“Read my initial post about how law school admissions is not affected by where you go to undergrad.”</p>
<p>Sorry, but that’s just not true. While LSAT and GPAs are key, adcom’s most certainly do consider the quality and competiveness of the undergraduate institution. </p>
<p>How do they judge that? Well, it’s based on the undergrad school’s reputation (based on the school’s experience with the undergrad university and based on the avg LSAT of all the students from that school).</p>
<p>Do state schools have “HUGE faculties, HUGE resources” for research/internships, or do LACs have better internship opportunities.</p>
<p>As for internships, it can be entirely influenced by location. If a school (even a lowish ranked school) is near a source of many internships and/or co-ops, then it will have better opportunities than some higher ranked big publics or LACs that are in the middle of nowhere. </p>
<p>I see that first-hand at the 3rd-tier ranked public by my home. Its campus is located right amongst a huge research park, so many of its students get internships and co-op positions.</p>
<p>noimagination - “Unknown” is definitely not the same as “non-Ivy.” But IIRC, it’s not the same as “directional state school,” either, unless there’s an exceptional professor connection (by which I mean NOT an exceptional recommendation but an exceptionally well-connected professor teaching at a relatively “lesser” school). I don’t know how UMass-Amherst ranks for non-pre-professional grad school in the OP’s interest areas, whatever they are. I agree that humanities grad school seems to value prestige more than in sciences.</p>
<p>A 3.8 at a state school would be better than 3.3 from almost any LAC, unless perhaps you’re comparing an unknown non-flagship to Swarthmore or Reed. But you’re assuming that you would achieve a 3.8 at the state school and a 3.3 at the LAC, which I find rather doubtful unless aforementioned LAC is Swat or Reed.</p>
<p>I agree with the notion that LACs have a higher peak but drop off more radically.</p>
<p>^ Remember, this is CC. If we were talking about students in general, I would agree with your message - “directional state schools” may indeed offer limited opportunities. However, even kids with modest stats for this site are still well above-average, and most of them could gain admittance to a decent state flagship with ease. They might get some scholarship money too…</p>
<p>UMass is, like most New England flagships, a notch or three below the UCs or Big Ten. However, they do have some good programs. This is a good example of what I was talking about earlier; while UMass may not be the best state university around, it is large enough to offer opportunities and possibilites. I would not expect med schools to throw out an applicant because they went to somewhere like UMass.</p>
<p>^I think most flagship universities are perfectly good for pre-law and pre-med; grad school is more dependent on individual department strength. But I was responding to James098 who claimed that even attendance at a directional state U would make no difference in grad/professional school admissions.</p>