This sounds about right except that, in my experience, one’s undergraduate institution carries significant weight for law school admissions. Just by way of example, my undergrad (a large public school in CA with plenty of top 1% scorers on the LSAT) sent 9 students to my law school. Williams sent 10. Harvard sent more than 80.
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Yeah…well, I’ve been working in science and with scientists and engineers for decades. Even worked for a legislator who was a PhD scientist. Unfortunately, the approach that’s necessary for good reason in their disciplines, the white-knuckling of logic*, the focus on answerable problems, the intense scrutiny of claims, the fealty to rationalism, translates very poorly to the world of policy, governance, values, cultures. That’s not because the people working in those areas are charlatans and manipulators. It’s because they work differently to STEM, and are much broader in their range and approaches.
I’ve met few STEM people who understand that the territory of their discipline, and the fact that it is a discipline, is something determined by the humanities, which is the territory of deciding what human affairs (of which STEM is one area) are worth spending time on and why. STEM people left to themselves do not, I regret to say, make a strong case for our spending what we do societally on their work. Which is why we didn’t until you had a magnificent advocate at MIT and the help of an atom-bomb win. You might notice that respect for STEM has waned markedly since. It’s because without dramatic wins on the scale of atom bombs, STEM has real trouble with the compelling argument. Even when they have one. People are going in droves for the vax, but the developers aren’t public heroes, even though they should be, and so should the manufacturers be. There’s nothing trivial about the engineering for it but there’s a giant public “meh”. And an absolute technological triumph, the global internet, is widely regarded as a global cesspool dangerous to human liberties and rights because so much of it’s designed for and by people who understand only STEM. Again, a real pity.
It’s a big STEM fumble that’s part of a much longer STEM fumble, and frankly a lot of that fumble comes out of attitudes like the one you’ve just displayed: STEMlike reason and critical thinking are paramount, facts facts facts, STEM is best, engineering ftw. It’s not been a helpful approach to engaging with the world whose respect STEM needs for survival.
You see it too all over the SV attitude that the nation-state is done. The nation-state, and the relative stability it generates, underwrites their ability to operate what’s really a delicate and sophisticated industry, but they’ve reasoned their way away from that fairly obvious point into some kind of weird utopianism that, again, suffers from too few history courses.
A promising thing I see, though, is that the young people in STEM are largely free of the “basket-weaving” disrespect for other disciplines (that inculcation did a lot of harm to STEM people in the 20th c – did a lot of harm to non-STEM disciplines and soc sci, too, made them scientize inappropriately to maintain funding/respect) and are genuinely curious about them. They just want to know how they work, and once it’s explained and they see it in practice, they want very much to work with those other people. And they see the problem with trying to work across those boundaries when, in STEM, you’re working in a pretty rigid system – you don’t get far before what you’re doing is not-STEM, but the rigidity itself is a problem when trying to work with things you can see are worthwhile in other fields. In other words, while seeing the value in their disciplines and taking them seriously, they also come to the limits of STEM pretty fast. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of their frustration with that.
*I’ll actually argue with that one. I’ve been privileged to work with some very creative, deep scientists, and I can tell you that logic is not always steering the ship in their work. The leaps and half-visions and intuitions are an extremely important part of their best work (and are great fun). Polanyi discusses it in his Personal Knowledge writings but…yeah, science at the “advancing science” level isn’t the logic machine it’s made out to be.
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Really? Maybe one’s age is also a factor. Both my spouse and I have benefited from access to jobs/funding/related based on old friendships. Some of these friendships are 30+ years old and were formed pre-internet. If you extend the thinking, many if the people you spend undergrad or even high school with, will certainly be part of your network in the years to come.
My high school kids get this. I think most young people understand the value of their connections.
Law schools do exhibit a strong home undergrad bias and YHS get enough applicants so they can be discriminator— ahem cough cough holistic.*
For many reasons, regionalism also shows up. Take a look at the entering classes for SLS and Chicago Law, for instance.
*Actually, since HLS is so big, with a drop in applicants, it was probably inhibiting their ability to be holistic, but now they accept the GRE too.
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This.
My impression is that most people here are upwards of 45. When we were in undergrad, for most of us, our school names weren’t all that important for grad school entry. That’s changed radically. It’s an important thing to understand when you’re telling kids to “just make sure you get into a good grad school, undergrad doesn’t matter that much.” Used to be true. Not anymore. The grad programs are anxious too, faculty are conservative by nature (in behavior, not politically), and they see a far more rigorous sorting process at undergrad level than used to exist. They’re afraid to buck it that much. From their pov, it’s a choice between an almost-sure thing and wildcards. If they fill a class with students from lesser universities, they figure the odds of grad attrition and long time-to-PhD are higher (which endangers a grad program), the light shines less brightly on their own programs because they lose the bragging rights (students from [Ivy] choose our grad program!), and if it’s a discipline where the profs rely on the grad students’ work, they’re afraid of not getting well-trained, ambitious students.
Which is why CC is also high school confidental. The parents get it. All you can do, the whole way along, is stack odds, but you stack them with elite preschool → elite prep → elite U → pipeline-to-best-jobs grad school, and then the kid can get the kind of job that with brights, pluck, and hard work they could’ve been contenders for out of State U in 1974.
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The quote you listed in the post did not say high school relationships have no influence. Instead it said,
“I’d be hard pressed to find any field in which relationships made 20 years ago during undergrad are more likely to be influential than relationships made with people you have been working with during recent years.”
While people no doubt do develop relationships during undergrad, that’s not the only time in life in which important relationship ships can form. People can and do also form relationship in the decades that follow. For example, they also form relationships during grad or professional school. Relationships also occur while working on the job. In some jobs, people spend more time with work colleagues than they do with their family.
In the vast majority of fields, the latter work relationships/connections are particularly important for future employment. The work relationships are more likely to involve persons working in a similar field who are well qualified for employment in that field, and they are also more likely to be recent. The guy you knew from 20 years ago in college might have been a great person back then, but he is less likely to be well qualified for the positions you have influence over, and a lot can change in 20 years, particularly if you haven’t kept in touch well over the decades. If you have an open position for an amazing job, I’d expect it’s far more likely to recommend a colleague and friend that you have worked with in recent years… someone you know will do the job well, will get along with, and has helped/assisted you in employment or other areas in recent years.
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Actually, all relationships matter. Both my spouse and I spent lots of TIME with people in our teens, 20’s and thirties. Once you have a family, you might not be working 60-70 hours a week and your career is already on a trajectory.
I’d add, many aren’t getting into careers until much later.
But the deepest relationships were formed in the early years. This could absolutely vary. We were in tech and management consulting where you see people under pressure and work often til 2/3AM. Same at many top colleges where you know who is outstanding. So the tech wave was high and many rode it for many years. Sure, we’ve made additional connections along the way. But I do think one tends to have similar aged friends in their networks. Not all friends are equal. Decades long friendships are deeper than those made recently. YMMV.
I also think that some fields tend to be more collaborative so connections vary. My current field relies less on connections than other fields I’ve worked in.
So, I guess I’d say in the fields of tech, mgmnt consulting and IB, early relationships will have long term impact. Naturally depends on personality as well. We are both entrepreneurs and rely on others with skills we need. Less concerned about finding a job then finding a person who can do a job. ( ie, more hiring than being hired).
Harvard College has roughly 1600 students per class. Perhaps 20% of them will enter law school, which is about 320. If 80 of them are joining your college, that’s roughly a quarter of all Harvard College students entering law matriculating at your CA college’s law school, which doesn’t really make sense.
Backing up a bit, do Harvard students get into law schools at high rates? Of course, for two reasons. First, they are generally smart and can get a high LSAT score. Second, given similar GPAs and LSAT scores between a University of Tulsa grad and a Harvard grad, the Harvard grad would likely get the nod.
But note that Harvard Law School admitted students from 164 undergrad colleges last year. Note only was University of Tulsa represented, but so was Appalachian State, CUNY Brooklyn, Franklin Pierce University, Spelman College, Truman State, and state universities in Alaska, Alabama, Idaho, Kentucky, Montana, Nevada, and Oklahoma. The last time I checked none of those, or dozens of others on the list, were considered elite colleges.
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Apparently the elite college admissions boards didn’t get the memo. They keep admitting students from our local public high school.
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I went to a college in CA, not a CA law school. The numbers were what they were. It was simple counting from the 1L Photo Book. There were also loads from Yale and Princeton and many from Stanford, other Ivies, and so on. Were other, so-called lesser schools represented? Of course. The place has about 550 1L’s, so there’s lots of room, but the tilt was definitely towards the elite undergrad institutions. This was back in 1992, things have not changed all that much.
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Home undergrad bias was probably even stronger back then.
As was regionalism.
Which law school are you referring to? I’d be surprised if any law school had >80 Harvard undergrads in a single year.
Law school admissions have a reputation for closely following LSAT + GPA stats and having little influence from undergrad school name. You can see some example scattergrams on the site at Recently Updated J.D. Profiles | Law School Numbers . There is a clear correlation with LSAT + GPA stats and law school admission, far more than occurs at selective privates for undergrad admission. However, there are quite a few outliers on the scattergrams, who were admitted in spite of having lower stats than the standard admission threshold. Rather than attending a HYPSM… type elite private college for undergrad, the outliers seem to be primarily URMs… in many law schools scattergrams above, almost entirely URMs. For example, in the linked Chicago law school scattergram above, it looks like all of the most extreme outlier acceptances with lower stats were URMs. The high stat kids in the scattergram were almost always accepted, regardless of whether they attended Harvard for undergrad rather than an non-selective directional public. And the low stat acceptances were URMs who attended a good variety of different undergrad colleges – some selective and some not selective.
This leads to the question, if they don’t strongly favor Harvard undergrad kids, then why do they have more kids who attended Harvard for undergrad than the local non-selective directional state in my area? One has to also consider how many kids with the required exceptionally high stats apply from the particular undergrad college? Harvard and other highly selective colleges that admit applicants with top test scores no doubt have a high concentration of kids with high test scores who pursue law. Students who apply to highly selective privates for undergrads are also more likely to apply to favor selective privates for other degrees than average, after controlling for stats.
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Harvard Law is the largest day program in the country (at least it was in 1992 and probably still is; Georgetown was the largest law school, but that included a substantial night school cohort) and, understandably, had lots of room for lots of double-H’s. And other Ivy League grads also made up a huge portion of the school. Sure, you’d meet a few CA public grads like me and the occasional Rutgers or Wisconsin or Occidental or whatever, and my guess is that it’s not all that different today. Of course, this was all more than a quarter of a century ago.
HLS grad from the mid-90’s here. Totally agree with this. Not only were the elite colleges and universities massively over-represented, but many of the attendees knew each other and formed study groups during the first few weeks of class.
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I’d expect that to be the case.
Though in sheer numbers (about a decade ago), Cal and UMich sent roughly the same numbers to elite law/med/b-schools as Penn, Columbia, Duke, and Cornell and only slightly less than Stanford and Princeton (Yale is even more and Harvard College outpaces everyone). Also more than other Ivies/equivalents.
What I’m curious about is how well average state flagships do. Also the honors college and named full-scholarship program kids.
That’s the key. No one is controlling for quality of the student. They aren’t getting in just because they are Ivy grads. Obviously of the school has a higher concentration of top students, they’ll have a high number both applying to law school and getting accepted to top law schools. Among my D’s good friends (full ride scholarship cohort of 26), there is 1 going to Harvard Med, 1 to Columbia Med, 1 to Harvard Law. Will know all of the results at the end of year celebration. Those are not at all atypical results for this cohort scholarship program. Those not getting into top programs are atypical.
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I’d be very surprised if the number as a total % of college graduates for law school is as high today as it used to be. So many more fields to go into than there used to be. Not to mention, law/medicine and a few others were known to pay well. Today, there are dozens, if not 100’s of high-paying fields and many areas with combined skills where someone with a master’s can do very well. Decades ago, most top students were aiming for maybe six fields, today it’s wide open. Plus, women have broken through in some fields where the numbers used to be 10-20%, they are now 50% ( MBA’s, Engineering, STEM, Bio-tech, etc).
We, as human beings, suffer from all the frailties associated with our species since its existence. Hubris, tribalism, violence and cruelty have always been part of human nature, whether assisted by technologies or not. A STEM education, or any education, isn’t going to change that fundamental nature. Would a history lesson stop a war, or exploitation of other human beings? I highly doubt it. History repeats itself, perhaps in slightly different forms, thoughout history, because one can’t change human nature. Another problem: we learned different versions of the history throughout the world, as they’re influenced by the persepectives of those who are in the position to write them. Their objectivities are questioned throughout history (as we’re doing so now again). A STEM education, on the other hand, teaches objectivity, and more importantly, verifiability.
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Yes, it’s essential to control for student characteristics. It’s also important to control for rate of applicants. For example, medicine was mentioned above . https://www.mdapplicants.com/search.php provides search of acceptance rate by combinations of stats + undergrad institution. If I search for White applicants with 80+th percentile MCAT and 3.75+ GPA, the number of applicants and acceptance rate are below by undergrad college. These are the first colleges I happened to search, rather than being cherry picked for a particular outcome. I chose flagships with unique names that would have little overlap with other college names in the search.
Elite Private
Harvard – 45/53 accepted = 85%
Yale – 46/48 = 96%
Stanford – 44/55 = 80%
Non-Elite Public Flagship
SUNY (all) – 33/45 = 73%
Rutgers – 24/32 = 75%
Texas A&M – 23/30 = 77%
In this small sample, it does look like the “elite” privates have a bit higher admit rate among applicants with high 3.75 GPA + 80th percentile MCAT – a median of 85% among the elite privates vs a median of 75% among the listed non-elite publcs. However, it’s clearly not just the kids from “elite” privates that are getting accepted. The reasons for the slightly higher acceptance rate are less clear. I suspect the 2 biggest factors are HYS… students have a higher median stats (the public kids are more likely to be clustered at the bottom of the listed range than the HYS… kids) and HYS… type students being more likely to excel in non-stat criteria, which often had a big influence on their undergrad admission. Of course it’s also possible school name has an influence, a non-representative sample, privates pre-med advising being more restrictive about who is discouraged to apply, or countless other factors.
It’s also worthwhile to note the far higher rate of applicants who meet the criteria above. For example, the SUNY system has nearly 400k undergrads, Rutgers has ~40k, Texas A&M has 55k All of these flagships have many more times as many undergrads as Harvard, yet Harvard had far more high stat applicants in this sample. If you look at acceptance rate across the full student body, the publics are probably abysmal compared to HYS…, but looking at just the high stat applicants suggests a very different picture.
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So - a thing to consider here, as people are talking about elite undergrad → elite grad and how hard it is to go from state U → elite grad, is that it’s also gotten harder to go state U → non-elite grad, especially if you’re going PhD rather than master’s level (meaning you want to get paid rather than pay $150K+ for a master’s degree). Grad programs are expensive things to run, and if you’re applying to Average State Grad Program, you’re competing with grads from, oh, Emory, Purdue, UVa, the odd Princetonian looking for a safety, Pomona, etc. The non-elite admissions committees are not immune to the allure and pre-sorting of the selective undergrad name, even though they themselves might be state-school products.
What that means is that if you’re at Average State U as an undergrad, where your coaching/mentoring/focusing isn’t going to be great because they’re mostly concerned with keeping you enrolled till your butt goes out the door, and you don’t have $$$ for paying for an expensive master’s, odds are decent that that’s the end of the line for you. Bachelor’s and goodbye. So there are whole tiers of jobs and professions you can’t realistically approach, even if you have the ability to do well there. Shrugging and saying, “I’ll work my way up” still works in some industries, but in others you need that ticket before HR will even pass your resume along, for good reasons and bad. And what that means is that upward mobility from middle/lower-middle/working classes is significantly hampered compared with the heyday of the state universities.