<p>Somewhat not related to the topics here. As a parent, unless I really can not afford it, I would not want to send my kid to this kind of school for undergraduate, unless my child is very self-initiative and can grab any opportunity by him/herself. I do not intend to say that the students there are not good. (Some of them are actually very good.) I am more concerned about the administration/etc. of the school. In one year, I heard horror stories about the possibility of the need to live in nearby hotels, if the student makes a small mistake of not arranging his housing properly/timely. Somebody just can not tell the difference between the quality of an “undergraduate” school and that of a “graduate” school.</p>
<p>On the other hand, going to a prestigious school can be a curse when you do not do reasonably well there. There is no lack of people in the world really take a great pleasure in seeing a student from one of these schools fall for some reason.</p>
<p>It is rumored that, for some types of work (where almost every one of your coworkers is from your local state universities) , a degree from an Ivy could be a burden rather than a blessing. So, when you decide to go to a prestigious school, you also need to be fully aware of the pros and cons of going there.</p>
<p>One more thing: For some family, it is not necessarily true that it costs more to go to a seemingly pricy private school. If yoor family has only one income earner, who has a typical professional job, it is very likely that it is cheaper to go to a selected few private school (I believe this is true for HYPS at least) than a public state school.</p>
<p>To be fair, this is not just a Berkeley problem, although Berkeley may indeed be among the more egregious offenders. The fact is, many schools, especially the top publics, have problems with graduating their students. For example, UNC, UIUC, UT-Austin, Washington, Wisconsin, Penn State, and (unsurprisingly) Georgia Tech all have graduation rates that are far worse than Berkeley does. Even Michigan and UCLA do not boast of overall graduation rates that are vastly better than Berkeley’s (although admittedly Michigan’s 4-year rate is significantly better). Of the top public schools, only Virginia and William & Mary have graduation rates that are comparable to that of the top privates. For example, Virginia’s graduation rate exceeds Cornell’s and is, surprisingly, equal to UPenn’s and Columbia’s.</p>
<p>I was simply using Berkeley as an example to illustrate the fact that not every college student will do well enough to be a viable law school candidate such that they would actually take the LSAT and apply to law schools. In fact, some students won’t even graduate from undergrad at all. Any data set that analyzes the grades of only those students who apply to law school therefore suffers from the endogeneity problem that that subset of students is an inherently self-selected group.</p>