<p>If GPA and LSAT only matter, why don't I just go to some random crappy community college and get my 4.0GPA and then spend time studying for the LSAT and just get into Harvard/Yale Law? Isn't that a much more easier way to get to T14 Law school? In comparison to slaving away at any ivy league?</p>
<p>1.) Excellent undergraduate programs provide excellent opportunities - opportunities that are technically available at larger schools but are difficult to find and obtain. Things like internships, research, certain types of specific volunteering projects. For example, Yale’s Elmseed fund, a microfinance group that sustains projects in Latin America (I think). Or working for a professor at Harvard’s Petrie-Flom bioethics center. Or doing your photography project among clinical trial patients at Duke’s hospital under the supervision of a pediatrician who also happens to be a widely published photographer. </p>
<p>2.) Being surrounded by talented peers also helps. Of course you can make contacts in law school, but you’re still robbing yourself of four years worth of contacts. And you need some of those to write you letters of recommendation to make it into law school in the first place.</p>
<p>3.) The main point here is that if you go to a low-ranked school, you will have to be one of the dozen or so most driven students in your entire university. You will have to be studying when everybody else thinks it’s ridiculous. You will have to have an LSAT score relatively high enough that it is embarrassing and will make you want to hide it from your friends, even your well-meaning ones. Your friends will get frustrated while you continue studying despite practice scores well above theirs–and might even take it as an affront and an insult.</p>
<p>If you are at a top school, your friends will be similarly talented and driven. They will help encourage you to perform at your best, and if anything they will express disapproval if they see you slacking off. This was very important for me, and it is very important for most people. Maybe you’re the exception.</p>
<p>Can you do this? I certainly could not have: the ostracization would simply have been too high. It would have made undergrad miserable. Most people cannot. But maybe you are the exception, since obviously some exceptions do exist.</p>
<p>4.) People who are trying to quantify the effect of a top-tier college education are ignoring the situational differences here. In general, I’ve found that name-branding matters only in situations where the candidate already has a high LSAT score.</p>
<p>High LSAT/High GPA: No need for top undergraduate school
Low/Low: Top school doesn’t help
High/Low: Top-tier university helps explain why obviously bright student has poor grades; at a low-ranked university, you just assume he’s a slacker
Low/High: Again, top school doesn’t help.</p>
<p>So it’s situationally-dependent.</p>
<p>5.) College is about more than getting into law school.
A.) For one thing, very few students stick to their plans. If you are blindly focused on one goal, it means you might get stuck without other options if you change your mind. Or if you are forced to change your mind. If you decide you’d like to go into consulting, tough–doesn’t matter what you score on the LSAT, nobody will recruit you.
B.) For another thing, college is also supposed to prepare you for law school – not just get you in.
C.) Finally, and I cannot overstate this: going to a top school is fun. Seriously.</p>
<p>College does NOT prepare you for law school. Law school is radically different than your undergrad. In law school, for instance, your professors will interrorgate you in front of the class and embarass you if you did not read the cases. Your entire grade for each class will also be based solely on the final exam.</p>
<p>Nah, that’s not true. College isn’t perfect preparation, of course, but that’s not to say it does nothing. Intensive reading and writing among talented peers in a school with high standards helps a great deal.</p>
<p>Letters of recommendation from people who matter most, research assistant positions with people who matter most, TA’ing competitive students, peer tutoring competitive students, “gold star” on GPA, etc.</p>
<p>You’ll need all these to stand a chance at admission to Yale. </p>
<p>If you want to pull a 4.33/180 from Podunk U, enjoy Harvard.</p>
<p>^^^ Ya, you’ll also need to be a best selling author or olympic athlete. I’m not sure too many people are legitimately upset about “settling” for Harvard or Stanford. And those that are need to have reality hit them in the face.</p>
<p>looking to go to college just for lsat and gpa is naive and narrow minded. period.</p>
<p>You may be able to get into Harvard, but you will not be able to get into Yale and Stanford. Besides, you can get amazing internships without even trying hard if you attend a top school (HYP, Stanford, Dartmouth, MIT, Columbia, Penn, etc.), and those internship will change your view of the world.</p>
<p>Three major problems
- You might decide you don’t want to go law school in that 4 years, then your Chico State degree won’t be too useful for doing anything else.
- You won’t necessarily do better at a worse school - there will be less grade inflation and less motivation and support. A 3.8 might be top 2 or 3% at UC Riverside, but median at Brown.
- Law school is mostly about LSAT. If you can’t get a 170+, no amount of easy competition will help you, and if you can get 170+, even harder competition pushing down your GPA 0.1-2 is not going to make you drop out of the T14. At best, you’ll spend 4 years at a crappy undergrad so you can go to Harvard instead of Columbia and have essentially the same opportunities (and as mentioned, the potential downside is much bigger)</p>
<p>A different ploy is to attend to a school without grades, but take a single easy graded course at a different college or CC. Your LSAC GPA will be a nice safe 4.0 or, ideally, 4.33.</p>