I was looking through the class profile of some of my top choices for law school (Harvard, Yale, Stanford) and was afraid to see that my undergrad school (top 50 LAC) wasn’t put in there. I have been hearing that admission into law school is about statistics (GPA and LSAT) and that your undergrad school doesn’t matter. Is this true?
Undergrad does not matter. LSAT and GPA matter.
@Mastodon97, your undergrad school probably sends someone to HYS every other year, or perhaps a few people every few years.
GPA/LSAT definitely are the most important factors, but there are other factors that also count.
A top 50 LAC is more highly ranked than plenty of schools that also send people here and there to HYS.
think about it, critically. The #50 LAC doesn’t have a whole lot of excellent test takers (2100+/32+), so their chance of acing the LSAT is not high. OTOH, top 3 Unis and top 3 LACs don’t accept any poor test takers (other than perhaps hooked applicants)
Thus, you can attend any undergrad and matriculate to YLS or SLS, you just need to be able to crack a 99+% LSAT.
What bluebayou said. If the highest ever LSAT score at your college is a 167, the problem is the LSAT scores, not the college.
It is also very possible that the super-talented students who take full rides to T50 LACs are the same types who would take the Hamilton at Columbia instead of paying full freight at Harvard.
Undergrad does matter because law schools can easily compare stats from students who apply and attend from particular schools, if only to see how well they perform, and to evaluate the strength of the applicant pool from a particular college. For example, BYU has many undergrads at HLS, despite not being perceived of as a top college. If they had not performed well as a group, future applicants would be looked upon unfavorably. They basically proved their worth. If your school hasn’t sent anyone to your target law school in years, that fact can hurt your chances, but more so at a top law school.
So I’m screwed if I want to go to HYS?
Where did you go to college?
I’m asking because even Stanford Law accepts kids from Cal State schools, which are not academic power houses.
I go to a top 50 Liberal Arts College (don’t want to get specific).
If you plan to apply to HYS, then you will need a letter of recommendation from your dean, who will be able to answer your questions. Ask her.
HLS is ~95+% about the numbers; statistically, it has to be to maintain its medians.
With much smaller class sizes, SLS and YLS can afford to be much more selective, and other stuff will come into play.
So all this time I’ve been hearing it wrong then? It’s not just GPA, LSAT, and extracirculars?
@Mastodon97: No, undergrad does not matter. Bluebayou’s point is that if your undergrad is filled with bad test takers on the SATs they aren’t likely to be any better when it comes time for the LSAT. Therefore you’d expect to see fewer of them in the top law schools.
Yeah, you got it now.
sure, If and only if, they are outstanding: Olympic Champion, Rhodes Scholar, published author (not self-published), rock musician with hit songs and several European tours, professional skydiver, heart surgeon, and the like.
@bluebayou: Don’t forget professional sports player. I’ve known a couple NFL players whose cycles went better than one would otherwise expect.
@Mastodon97, factors other than GPA/LSAT do matter somewhat, although GPA and LSAT count the most. Look at all of those “scattergrams” that show admissions rates versus GPA/LSAT; at top law schools, applicants even at or above a particular school’s GPA/LSAT numbers sometimes get in and sometimes don’t.
On the other hand, a low gpa but high LSAT from a top school will get you into a top ten law school. For example, some colleges don’t have high grade inflation, like Chicago. Chicago grads will get into HYS or another top law school with a 3.5 and high LSAT. The same applies to other highly ranked colleges.
No true, and hasn’t been for many years. Chicago’s mean GPA is not much different than say, Northwestern, and other top schools. (To burst that misconception, I posted the hard facts with source material on cc years ago – too lazy to search for it.)
I met several from Princeton, Yale and Chicago in law school and very few had above 3.7 undergrad but all were upwards of 99th percentile LSATs. But that was years ago and times have changed.