@evergreen5 : raw numbers don’t work because you can’t compare a small college and a huge university.
For instance, if a college has a graduating class of 500 (average to large LAC) and 25 are admitted to law school, and a university as a graduating class of 8,000 and 50 are admitted to law school, where are your odds best?
And it’s be interesting to look at top 20 law schools - at law schools that publish these stats, you clearly see that students come from all over, that coming from a small or non selective college doesn’t hold you back - Berry, Hendrix, ASU, etc, but when you look at how many come from each college the picture changes markedly .
@MYOS1634 : Wouldn’t it be important for purposes of comparing LACs to National Universities how many students applied to the top law schools ?
I suspect that a far higher percentage of students at LACs intend to apply to law school then at the typical National University.
Yes it would. If you had the number of applicants, number of admitted students, you could compare odds at both types of institution.
Although colleges would quickly find a way of gaming the system as they did for led school acceptance rates.
To do a meaningful comparison, you would have to control for the student’s SAT/ACT scores and maybe GPAs, and limit the comparisons only to students applying to law schools… Then the question would be, do students from LACs have better odds of getting into law school than a student at a public university with similar entering statistics? For example, students in the top 20% of admitted students at Michigan or Cal Berkeley would likely have very similar profiles compared to students at top LACs/Ivies. But more of the Michigan/Cal students who were interested in graduate school would likely be interested in engineering degrees compared to LACs and likely to Ivies, so you would have to compare only law school applicants. The overall goal would be to see if going to an elite LAC or Ivy actually improved one’s chances of getting into law school. I expect a weak correlation at best. LSAT scores and grades should be most important. And I seriously doubt that going to an LAC would improve one’s LSAT score.
@Beaudreau I have made similar observations numerous times on this forum over the years.
Not all individuals attending a particular institution have identical capabilities or interests.
The more diverse these are, the less value there is in comparing institutions as a whole, as if all of their individual students are identical. They aren’t. In many cases different proportions of students will be interested in law school or capable of admission.
All that matters to an applicant is, given their particular capabilities and interests, the extent to which achievement of their future goals will be helped by attending a particular institution. It should not matter to them if less capable students also attending that institution will not be admitted to law school… Or if lots of other students studying at the same institution are not interested in pursuing a law degree.
I can speak to law school but not MBA programs or other graduate programs. D is nearing the end of her law school admissions cycle this month. D is in her senior year at Notre Dame with a 3.9 gpa and a 172 lsat which makes her a competitive applicant for all but the top few law schools. It is impossible for any of us to know with certainty unless we work in law school admissions, but all the data and results we’ve seen indicate that where you go to undergrad has very, very little impact on your admissions chances for law school. Indiana has a fine business program and a 3.9 there would get you into the same law schools as the same GPA at U Chicago or Notre Dame. Where you go to undergrad is important if you do not go to undergrad
While I agree that one’s undergraduate school tends to be of little importance with respect to law school admissions, often the most elite law schools show a preference for their own undergraduates with high GPAs.
@Publisher If you think there’s a preference, you miss the point we’re trying to make.
To the extent that general cognitive levels correlate with LSAT scores, it might:
Pascarella, Wong, Trolian and Blaich. Higher Education. 2013.
@itsgettingreal17 : No, I understand the point very well. I think that you misunderstand that this type of preference has been studied & discussed.
My point is that, for example, the University of Chicago School of Law accepts a disproportionate number of applicants with Chicago undergraduate degrees. I am not asserting that these admits were not well qualified, just that with equal qualifications preference seems to be given to grads of that particular law school’s undergraduate school.
That’s a really weak study, merc. The obvious limitation of the study is not that it is not representative (the only limitation that the authors found), but is it one of economics: all of the LAC’s in the study were private, while 5 or 6 of the Unis were public. Regardless of SAT/ACT scores, those are two significantly different populations matriculating to college. If they compared private LACs to private Unis, I’d bet that they’d receive a significantly different result.
The other limitation is by not parsing the data to isolate the Uni students who were in the Arts & Sciences college of the Uni; in other words, compare like-to-like. Does it really make sense to compare say, (pre-professional) Educ School or PT majors vs. a LAC major?
In my experience, LAC students read and write a lot more than university students.
In fact, amount of reading per week expected of freshmen can vary from lower ranked universities to high level ones vary greatly. Some may read 40-50 pages a week and others may read 200-300 pages… Compare, say, Princeton or Amherst, on the one hand, and your state’s flagship.
Business majors read/write the least overall and there’s probably the most variation between a Wharton or Notre Dame business major and a business major at (random names, not picking on them) Kent State or Peru State or Delta State.
The more you read, the harder the readings, the more you’re used to discussing, arguing, synthesizing long, arduous texts, the better you can handle readings for law and thus the LSAT.
Same thing for writing. If you ever compare syllabi, you’ll which places have multiple choice tests, which ones have a mix of short answer and essays, which ones assign research papers.
So, you’d need to compare Philosophy majors at various types of universities, for instance. Follow cohorts from junior year to L1.
Seems like everyone mentions reading and writing as pre-law preparation, but hardly anyone mentions logical thinking. Apparently, law schools think that logical thinking is important, based on the existence of analytical reasoning and logical reasoning questions on the LSAT ( https://www.lsac.org/lsat/taking-lsat/test-format/analytical-reasoning/analytical-reasoning-sample-questions and https://www.lsac.org/lsat/taking-lsat/test-format/logical-reasoning/logical-reasoning-sample-questions ). Those questions may be a boost to math and philosophy majors taking the LSAT.
The recognition of the importance of any aspect of a student’s undergraduate experience seems to be a positive development on this thread.
First, we should define “top law schools”. Are we discussing Tier One law schools (Top 50) ? Or just discussing top 14 law schools ? Or just a few elite law schools such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford & Chicago ?
Second, there are lists of average LSAT score by major.
Third, there is a list (provided by LSAC, I think) of the mean LSAT score by undergraduate school. May list 240 different colleges & universities.
Fourth, there are lists of the number of undergrads from each undergraduate school attending a particular law school. I found lists for Harvard, Yale & Chicago.
At the University of Chicago School of Law, the most represented undergrad schools are (list is several years old, I believe):
Chicago with 33 students attending UChicago Law: (Chicago has a strong preference for Chicago undergrads as it even has special scholarships for them)
Chicago (33)
UCal-Berkeley (22)
Illinois (18)
Northwestern (15)
Penn (15)
UCLA (14)
Wisconsin (14)
Florida (13)
Brown (11)
Georgetown (11)
Michigan (11)
Notre Dame (11)
BYU (10)
Cornell (9)
USC (9)
Duke (8)
GWU (8)
Harvard (8)
Columbia (7)
Stanford (7)
Univ. of Washington (7)
WashUStL (7)
Emory (7)
Indiana (7)
NYU (7)
Yale (7)
Princeton (5)
Dartmouth (5)
For 2008 (a decade ago), Harvard Law School students top 12 feeder schools:
Harvard (339)
Yale (209)
Stanford (125)
Princeton (97)
Penn (71)
Virginia (69)
Columbia (69)
UCal-Berkeley (68)
Brown (66)
Duke (65)
Dartmouth (59)
Cornell (59)
Yale Law School 2017-2018 top feeder schools:
Yale (78)
Harvard (70)
Princeton (34)
Columbia (34)
Dartmouth (28)
Brown (21)
UCAl-Berkeley (18)
Penn (16)
Williams (14)
Amherst (14)
Chicago (13)
Stanford (10)
NYU (10)
Georgetown (8)
Swarthmore (8)
USC (8)
Northwestern (7)
Vanderbilt (7)
Wesleyan (7)
WashUStL (7)
Rutgers (6)
Michigan (6)
Virginia (5)
UNC (5)
Toronto (5)
Johns Hopkins (5)
USMA at West Point (4)
Barnard (4)
Bowdoin (4)
Davidson (4)
Rice (4)
Pomona (4)
Peking University (4)
BYU (3)
Claremont McKenna (3)
GWU (3)
Haverford (3)
Mount Holyoke (3)
Tel-Aviv (3)
Vassar (3)
Texas (3)
Univ. of Vienna (3)
UCLA (3)
Florida (3)
Yeshiva (3)
Univ. of Georgia (2)
Would be interesting, but very time consuming, to do this for all top 14 law schools if the law schools make this data available.
Doesn’t entirely answer preference issue as students from these schools tend to score the highest on the LSAT.
This kind of goes along with the “if you want to attend a particular law school”, then go to that school as an undergrad. So yes in this instance it absolutely matters, if you want to go to any law school, then by all means go to any undergrad school.
Except, among the top 10 law schools, for Northwestern University School of Law. Northwestern prefers applicants with post undergraduate full time work experience, so an NU undergraduate degree may not be as helpful as would attending Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Duke or Virginia and even, I suspect, Vanderbilt for those universities respective law schools.
Law school admissions is still primarily, in fact, overwhelmingly, about one’s LSAT score & one’s undergraduate GPA. It is just that students at the nation’s most highly selective colleges & universities tend to be the best at scoring high on standardized tests & on doing well in school & earning a stellar GPA.
^Although even at Northwestern, the half (if it’s still that much) coming right out of undergrad also has its share who attended NU for undergrad. It’s hard to guess whether that’s an actual preference or merely due to a large subset of applicants who attended the undergrad.
@merc81 - Are you saying that going to an LAC improves cognitive skills more than at a public university?
@Beaudreau: I think it can be said fairly that I’m willing to start with the premise that different educational choices can produce different educational results, including those related to cognitive skills. This premise seems to form the basis for understanding K-12 education, and even graduate school education, but often appears to be dismissed inexplicably in these forums with respect to undergraduate school selection.