<p>Is it better to enroll at an IVY like Harvard or to attend a top 10 public university with scholarship money if one plans to attend law school after undergrad?</p>
<p>I heard prestige in undergrad is overrated and all that matters is LSAT/GPA</p>
<p>Well. If you want to go to Harvard for the prestige, then you shouldn’t be considering it as an option. For me, I want to go to Harvard for the amazing college experience and the diversity.</p>
<p>Crimsonuser, the OP may be looking for prestige, but he did not ask why you wanted to go to harvard, so it would be more helpful if you answered his/her question. </p>
<p>At the OP I think that going to top schools for undergrad is up to the person, yes now you may think that you are going to grad school, but a lot can change in two to three years.</p>
<p>First of all, you may be surprised to find that Harvard can be a similar price to a public with scholarship, or even cheaper. Financial aid there is outstanding, and Admissions likes to claim that no one ever chooses to not go to Harvard because they can’t afford it.</p>
<p>That said, your user name makes me inclined to think that you’re a rising sophomore at Maryland. In that case, a UMD grad with excellent GPA and LSAT should be competitive for any law school.</p>
<p>The conventional thinking is that where one did his or her undergrad makes only a small difference. However, if you look at the breakdown of where students from top schools come from, you’ll see that students from top-ranked undergrad institutions are significantly over-represented.</p>
<p>^However, the students at top undergrad institutions are very good students in general. They tend to have high SATs and strong extracurriculars. It’s reasonable that this would translate to college success and high scores on the LSAT/MCAT. So I don’t know how much the brand name comes into play :)</p>
<p>^ Yes, I am fully aware of the confounding variables. The extent of the over-representation, however, is so significant that I speculate that it is not fully attributable to non-causal factors.</p>
<p>I had to make a similar decision this last spring. For me, Harvard was more expensive than my state’s flagship university with scholarships. When I compared the two in terms of resources, opportunities, and general feedback about the experience from students, I had a lot of trouble matching my state’s school to H. I wanted to get out of the state. I wanted to do something not many people I knew had done or could do. Also, I just felt like if I picked my state’s uni I would always have the “what if?” regret about going to Harvard. Money wasn’t too big of an issue, so I felt like my choice became very clear.</p>
<p>No one’s going to have your answer. You really just have to think about going to each and deciding where you’d be most comfortable and doing what you want to ultimately be doing (or, in some cases, being somewhere that gives you the options to discover something you never thought you’d be doing).</p>
<p>Unlike DayMan, my daughter is attending Harvard for less than the cost of any of our in-state public universities (NY State SUNY/CUNY.) For our family, choosing Harvard was a win-win situation. May it also be the same for you!</p>