<p>Do I need to go to a top 20 university for undergrad? I plan to study hard and get the highest GPA possible and LSAT score, but would going to a lesser ranked school make my chances lower for top top law or mba programs (yale, stanford, wharton, chicago, columbia).Is top 75 good enough? 50? 30? 20?</p>
<p>Thank you!</p>
<p>If am not mistaken, law school admissions depend on your LSAT scores and your undergraduate GPA.</p>
<p>Law School admissions are as political as other grad school admissions, replete with political correctness and all sorts of agendas. Yale is the hardest law school to get admitted, by many counts. While LSAT score above 170, a gpa of 3.9 or higher, being valedictorian of your college, all help, they will also admit kids of legacy, people with unusual backgrounds (such as mid level government employees), people with other graduate degrees, work experience, people of wealth who will stroke a check, people of poverty who are URM’s, etc. Not everyone who gets in is LSAT 170 etc. So it depends on who you know, what you know and who you are. </p>
<p>No harm in trying. But its always good to keep options open and apply to many law schools.</p>
<p>As for your undergrad degree go where you will thrive and be happy. You may change your mind when you are there anyway. Sometimes the best lawyers are not people who have been dreaming of Yale Law School for eternity.</p>
<p>I’ve spent a lot of time considering law school and my understanding is a high LSAT and high GPA alone aren’t enough for Yale. You need to go to a top school for undergrad and cure cancer or have some other spectacular accomplishment.</p>
<p>Ha ha…no you don’t. LOL</p>
<p>If you do some searches on this board, this topic gets discussed often. </p>
<p>I made the mistake of saying that a person needs a high LSAT and should go to - at least - a recognizable name university to get accepted to a top law school (such as an ivy or similar elite). </p>
<p>I was shot down and told that ANY decent university with good grades would be enough with a high LSAT score.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>I should add…</p>
<p>No one should go into debt for undergrad if they plan on going to law school or med school (regardless of rank). You’d end up either borrowing WAY too much, or running out of borrowing power before finishing.</p>
<p>Only a completely and utterly obscure school would hurt you.</p>
<p>Look at the undergraduate enrollments posted on the YLS website.</p>
<p>Law schools have narrow LSAT ranges, usually 5 points for the middle 50%, so like 165-170 would be an good law school’s lsat range. This leads me to believe that if you have a good gpa and get high lsats it hardly matters where you go. The top 10-15 schools get into YLS and HLS at a higher rate than the others, but that is explained by higher LSAT scores at those ugrad institutions, not by some nepotism. The only nepotism is within the same school. So yale law gives an advantage to yale ugrad because they expect higher yeild. Same is true for HLS, SLS, CLS.</p>
<p>“I was shot down and told that ANY decent university with good grades would be enough with a high LSAT score.”</p>
<p>That is true but still, we’re talking about Yale here. If you go to some unknown state school you’d better have perfect stats, be a URM, and have some good softs.</p>
<p>^ Since a student from an elite undergraduate school would need near-perfect stats and excellent softs (and URM status in most cases) to stand a good chance anyway, your statement doesn’t really say much, sorry.</p>
<p>On a related note to the OP’s question… If I wanted to attend a top-tier law school but spent my undergrad years at a major state university, would I have to be part of their honors college for favorable consideration? I literally know nothing in regards to grad school.</p>
<p>“^ Since a student from an elite undergraduate school would need near-perfect stats and excellent softs (and URM status in most cases) to stand a good chance anyway, your statement doesn’t really say much, sorry.”</p>
<p>Thanks for pointing that out…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Better rethink that. Yale Law School’s 25th-75th percentile LSAT scores are 169-177, median GPA is 3.9, and its acceptance rate is a minuscule 7.7%—so a 169 on the LSAT, a very good score which would put you around the middle of the class at some very good law schools like Berkeley, Penn, Michigan, Duke, Northwestern, and UVA, would put you in the bottom quartile at Yale. They have a very small class (about 180, or roughly 1/3 the size of Harvard Law School’s entering class) and an extremely high yield—about 80% of those accepted decide to attend. This means they can be very, very choosy. And they are. A high LSAT score and a high undergrad GPA may get you considered, but when they’re rejecting 12 out of every 13 applicants, most of them with high LSATs and high GPAs, something distinctive in your background over and above the usual credentials may be necessary to get you in the door. Problem is, it’s hard to say what that would be; depends who else is applying that year. Oddly enough, though, I think a high LSAT score and a high GPA from an Ivy or some other prestigious and highly selective undergraduate institution is probably not distinctive enough in its own right to do the trick; those candidates are a dime a dozen at a place like YLS. Cure cancer? Well, obviously not everyone who gets in has done that. URM and/or legacy helps, but neither is a guarantee when the odds against admission are that long.</p>
<p>ok, so you are not even in college yet and you are trying to plan your route to yale law school? </p>
<p>i would urge to 1) enjoy college for its own sake – those years go by too fast and it is a unique time in your life to explore things, 2) make sure you really want to be a lawyer - most people who think they want to, don’t really know what it is like to be a lawyer, 3) if you do really want to be a lawyer, don’t get your heart set on yale – no matter how bright or wonderful you are, the odds just aren’t good.</p>
<p>realize that when it comes to law school admissions, you aren’t just applying in a pool with other college graduates – or even people who’ve been out a year or two. you get a lot of second career applicants – ESPECIALLY at Yale. </p>
<p>have you seen this info? [Yale</a> Law School](<a href=“http://www.law.yale.edu/admissions/profile.htm]Yale”>Profiles & Statistics | Yale Law School) about 7.5% of applicants were admitted for the class of 2011. i would bet that the overwhelming majority of the other 92.5% of the applicants had great gpa’s and lsat scores.</p>
<p>but to answer your question – you definitely do not have to go to a top college or university – look at the list of colleges at the above link that were attended by successful applicants. you just need to do really well where ever you attend - and while that may be necessary to get in, it is certainly not sufficient to get in…</p>
<p>fyi - here yale lists its acceptance rate as 6.9% [Yale</a> Law School](<a href=“http://www.law.yale.edu/admissions/fastfacts.htm]Yale”>http://www.law.yale.edu/admissions/fastfacts.htm)</p>
<p>Well all of the above are true. Its also a quiet phone call or shall we say “recommendation”. But a lot of admits have special hooks and the average age of many law school students is around 24…suggesting some work for two years and try again. I know people shot down once, who got admitted the second time around after working for a few years.</p>
<p>As a Yale Law School grad who had no special hook, I can tell you it is not true that “a lot of admits have special hooks”. Nor do you have to go to a top college–as one poster said, Yale gets hundreds more top applicants from top colleges than it can accept and does not want the school to be so limited. When I was there, more than 100 colleges were represented.
You need great credentials of every sort–and some luck, given the overwhelming odds. There are many fine law schools; do not pin your hopes on Yale.</p>