Hello Everyone!
I’m currently in my first semester of college and my major is currently Economics. I got an email saying that next month I’ll have to register for spring classes, so I was wondering if I should double major by adding Philosophy (Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Arts Degree seems nice), but I want to know if it would make a difference to Law Schools at all? I was told harder classes look better but I want answers from people who have been through or that are currently going through the Law School Application process, would it help? Or are filler classes the better choice?
P.S. I know I have a loooooooong way to go, however I want to set a road map for myself as well as do things right, thank you in advance for your comments.
@LeandroG: Law schools don’t care about your major. They also don’t care about how hard your classes are. Law schools care about your GPA. Do what you can to keep that as high as possible, even if that means taking a few fluff classes.
Most importantly, now is a great time to intern in a law office. You absolutely should see what the practice of law is actually like before going to law school.
Double-majoring makes no difference to law schools.
HOWEVER, advice to take “fluff” isn’t necessarily the best advice. GPAs and LSAT scores are most, but not all, of a law school admission decision. Recommendations might matter, and if you get a recommendation that says, “she was the top student in my most difficult classes” will be a lot better than “she was the top student in my easiest class”. Plus the skills that you learn from hard classes are inherently valuable; studying, performing under stress, etc. are all helpful for you overall.
I’ve seen no evidence suggesting that recommendations play any role in admissions. I expect this is because they are redundant, only serving to point out that students who did well, did well (you don’t ask for a rec from your C class, you ask from the A). That’s just my speculation. I have no data to support that either.
@Demosthenes, again, since the sole basis of your posts is Internet “scattergrams” and the like, which usually don’t have specific data about recommendations, you haven’t seen that they matter.
However, if someone applying to HLS has a 3.85 GPA and a 169 LSAT and a recommendation that says “he was a slacker”, and another person applying to HLS has a 3.84 GPA and a 169 LSAT and a recommendation from Barack Obama saying, “this is the most amazing person ever, besides me”, the recommendation will matter.
I got recommendations from professors where I had gotten the only A in the class and I’m sure that they helped, as my LSAT score and GPA were both right at the HLS median, where I could have been rejected just as easily as I was accepted, and were plenty of people with my stats were rejected.
@HappyAlumnus: I’m willing to agree that a recommendation from the sitting President of the United States could play a role in admissions. Those unicorns tend not to need to post on this forum. Mostly what we get are standard applicants whose recommendations will all be the usual “he was a fine student” recommendations from professors. As I noted in post #4, people ask the A professors for recommendations, so they always end up pretty similar.
More importantly, no evidence suggests anyone actually relies on them. It runs counter to law schools’ economic interests to care about recommendation letters, so I would demand some solid evidence that they actually make a difference.
When I applied to HLS, my GPA and LSAT score were both just about at the Harvard median for each. There were no “scattergrams” then, but I recall seeing charts showing the numbers of applicants at each level of GPA and LSAT and the number of whom where admitted. I had about a 40% chance of getting into HLS based on my numbers alone.
Yet I got in, and others with the same or similar numbers did not. (I am not a person of color, am not a first-generation college student, am not LGBT, etc.; there are no “hooks” like that in my case.)
Please explain why I was admitted and those others were not, if recommendations, major, class difficulty, etc. do not matter.
Won’t much matter for LS admissions, but one thing that Philosophy can do is to strengthen your critical thinking skills, particularly with difficult passages. (I’m a big fan of the major.)
@HappyAlumnus: I have no data and therefore make no claims about HLS’ admissions policies of 20 years ago. My data is all post-recession. You may very well be right about how HLS worked in the 90s. That does not mean it works the same way today.
@Demosthenes49, those charts are still available, so my question is applicable whether in 1990 or 2015. You can go to http://www.hourumd.com/ and see the chance of someone with particular LSAT and GPA numbers being admitted to a particular law school.
With my numbers, I’d have about a 1/3 chance now of being admitted to HLS, so my chance is somewhat lower than when I was actually admitted. Assuming that I would be admitted now, why would I get in but others wouldn’t, if LSAT/GPA are all that matter?
@HappyAlumnus: I’m not sure I understand your question. Are you asking why HLS admits people with numbers lower than its median? If so, the answer is that HLS has a big class and needs to fill it, so it needs to take a lot of splitters compared to YLS and SLS. It also loses good students to scholarship money in the rest of the T14, so it hedges against that.
Another reason you might be admitted is URM status. Law schools care a lot about that (even schools like UCLA that aren’t supposed to) and it, depending on the flavor of URM, can act as a substantial boost.
I put in my exact data (my exact college GPA and LSAT score, and lack of “hooks”–no URM status, no LGBT status, no disadvantaged background status, etc.), and my chance of being admitted to HLS is about 1/3.
You say, over and over, that all that matters are GPA/LSAT numbers (and URM status), but work experience, class rank, recommendations, major, course difficulty, etc. do not matter.
If numbers are all that matters, more or less, why would HLS admit someone like me, but not others with identical numbers?
@HappyAlumnus: That’s not an entirely accurate summation of my view. The data supports the claim that some law schools care about work experience. Particularly Northwestern and Yale. The data is shaky on SLS, which may or may not care. No data supports the claim that the rest of the T14 care, from which I conclude they do not.
Your question as I now understand it seems to be a rather improbable hypothetical. You appear to be asking why HLS would admit one student over another with identical numbers, with variance only in factors the data does not show matter in admissions decisions. However, the far more likely result is that HLS would admit both, depending on timing (place in the cycle also matters).
@Demosthenes49, you’re not following, for whatever reason.
The Internet-available admissions data for law schools shows that there are plenty of students with near-identical GPA/LSAT numbers who apply to various law schools. Applicants with my numbers (give or take just a bit) have about a 1/3 chance of being admitted at HLS. Not all students with a given GPA/LSAT combination are admitted; in my case, about 40% were when I was admitted, and now about 1/3 would be. Your statement that both students with the same GPA/LSAT numbers would be admitted–but in my numeric bracket, that’s not true.
Why is that, if numbers alone matter? (You concede that work experience matters for some schools but don’t admit that it does for HLS–even though Dean Minow herself says that the school wants it, and an increasingly large pool of admitted students has that.)
@HappyAlumnus: Be careful not to mistake correlation for causation. Just because many law students have work experience does not mean work experience is required or selected for by law schools. It may simply be that the advice of people like us, telling students to get some work experience before applying, is effective. It may also be a side effect of the recession in that prospective students want to save to reduce debt loads. We would need to see data controlling for other factors showing disparate treatment of work experience. You can find that for NWU (and Yale, kind of, though YLS is more a question of what to do when everyone has amazing numbers already) but not for other schools.
You should similarly be careful not to assume that the corollary of “we don’t know” is “[a wizard did it](A wizard did it - YouTube).” In other words, even if you propose a hypothetical where we don’t know why a school chooses between two students, it is a mistake to conclude that it happened for a reason we happen to like. The only rationally defensible position there is “we don’t know.”
Of course, I’ve seen no evidence that this actually happens in a way that cycle/URM do not account for. Looking at LSN (which I know you dislike but which remains the only decent source of information), there are relatively clear bands going across GPA and LSAT. You’re right that there is variance around the edges, but that could be due to cycle timing, admissions officer caprice, or indeed recommendations/major/whatever. This effect isn’t clear enough to provide a good basis for telling prospective students that these things matter. Certainly not in the face of the overwhelming evidence that good numbers conquer all.
You state (if I’m summarizing correctly) that we don’t know why law school admissions officers make decisions, and that LSN is the only “decent” source of information.
However, we DO know why law school admissions officers make decisions. They tell us in numerous ways: one posted pretty frequently on this board; others such as Joyce Curll (who admitted me to law school) write books; others provide all sorts of articles, in-person speeches and more. There is a huge amount of information about why they decide how they do. They tell us, pretty consistently, that GPA/LSAT matter the most but that other factors matter somewhat.
LSN is certainly NOT the only “decent” source of information. I don’t care for it first because its admissions data is only a very small subset of total admissions data (i.e., only a small number of applicants’ provide their information for it, versus a large pool of applicants whose information does not appear), and secondly because its data is self-reported, and thus open to bias (although hopefully any bias is small). Even other Internet sources are more comprehensive; the http://www.hourumd.com site I posted above has far more admissions data on it, and thus is much more useful.
Even if, for discussion purposes only, people agree that we don’t know why law school admissions decisions are made, it seems incredibly short-sighted to tell people that GPA/LSAT alone (plus work experience at Yale and Northwestern) matter. Law school admissions at top-10 schools are extremely competitive, and we lawyers know that being overly prepared is best. Being overly prepared for a law school admissions application means having great grades and test scores, plus having every other part of the application as perfect as possible: perfect recommendations, perfect work experience, perfect classes, etc. Those other things are of course secondary to GPA/LSAT numbers, but it’s not a good idea not to be as prepared as possible. Ask Donald Trump about how things went on Monday, taking that approach.
Error on my part: the hourumd.com data is aggregated from Law School Numbers. However, there are other sources of admissions data, even on the Internet, that contain more data about admissions than the small pools of self-reported data on LSN.
@HappyAlumnus: My position is not that we do not know why admissions officers make decisions. We do know: they care about numbers. We know this because when you aggregate numbers decisions run fairly smoothly along LSAT/GPA. However, I acknowledge that there is a bit of fuzziness around the edges. This is the part we don’t know. My guess is that it is based on cycle timing, but I’ve not seen any data to confirm this so it remains a guess. Similarly no evidence supports the claim that it’s recommendations, major, or undergrad institution. Data does support the value of URM status.
I agree that admissions officers at law schools say many things. I see no reason to believe them for several reasons. First, if things were as holistic as they claim you would have a great deal of fuzziness, rather than just along the edges. Second, they are happy to lie when it suits them (see median salary claims and job placement claims post-2009). Third, the things they say align directly with their financial interests (like selling books–“get a good GPA and LSAT” makes for a short read) or that of their institutions (applications are $75 a pop). If the things they say really matter then there should be data to support them. There isn’t.
I further agree there’s no harm in telling people to get good recommendations or go to a good undergrad or write a nice essay (outside of minor opportunity costs). I have no problem with telling people to hedge their bets. My issue is with the unsupported claim that these things in fact matter.
@LeandroG - A double major of economics and philosophy will probably not help much for law school, but it will probably help you in life moreso than just the eco degree.