I am a first year at a top 50 LAC. This college has around 1,400 students & has pervasive grade deflation. To provide context, only 7-9 students graduated last year summa cum laude, and 25-27 students graduated magna cum laude.
After my first semester, I have a 3.868 GPA. I am proud of this GPA (being first generation and from a large public high school), but I know that GPA is critical to T14 law school admission. Additionally, my school has not sent anyone to HLS/YLS/SLS in recent memory.
Another major concern resides in the emphasis of a social scene at my current college, and a severe lack of extracurriculars that students dedicate themselves to. My LAC is in a very small town, and opportunities within the town are limited as well.
Due to this concern and additional concerns about the social culture on campus, I have strongly considered transferring to one of two state schools.
I would love to hear some opinions on the situation , and I am completely willing to provide additional information.
Social scene does not matter for law school admissions. Extracurriculars matter only if they tie to your life’s passions and form part of your life plan/life trajectory (and even then they don’t matter much).
What matters is YOUR GPA and YOUR LSAT score. Not the scores of others. You have an amazing GPA and so I see no need to transfer. If you transfer, employers will ask “why?” and if you say that it was because of grade deflation, they’ll assume that you got bad grades.
FYI the only LACs that send a lot of students to HYS are Amherst and Williams and maybe one or two others. State schools generally send only a handful, too. My LAC did not send many but several of us from my LAC went to those schools when I graduated even though there had been a few years of nobody attending them.
3.868 is fabulous and grades like that will not be a problem for T14 admissions. No need to transfer for that reason. Contrary to what Demosthenes said, the T14 schools do care about undergraduate rigor, and favor the handful of most selective schools. As HappyAlumnis noted, places like Amherst and Williams. However, if you are at an LAC lower down in the top 50, it probably won’t be viewed as functionally any different than a state school. And extracurriculars won’t matter very much to law school admissions.
The real question is whether you are happy where you are. If not, and you can’t see a way to change that, then transferring may make sense. But don’t transfer just because you think it might improve your chances at T14 law school admission.
There is no evidence that students with equivalent GPAs that went to more rigorous schools do better in law school admissions than those who went to less rigorous schools.
Unless you can account for the difference in LSAT scores, the above is meaningless. Or, as they say in AP Stats, correlation is not causation.
Hint: AWP, being the top LACs, by definition, have the top test takers among all LACs. (Those three screen for top test takers.) So, it would be no surprise that they would have the highest mean LSAT scores which would result in…wait…for…it, the the highest admissions to the most selective Law Schools.
In other words, take those 17x test takers and send them to say, Richmond, and prove that an LS admissions difference exists.
bluebayou, I never said anything about Amherst and Williams degrees causing better law school admissions results, or anything of that sort.
The OP is considering transferring from the OP’s top-50 LAC in part because nobody else goes to a top law school from that LAC. I don’t think that is a valid reason to transfer, since no LAC, other than a handful at the top (Amherst, etc.) send a lot of alumni to top law schools.
@bluebayou you said: Unless you can account for the difference in LSAT scores, the above is meaningless. Or, as they say in AP Stats, correlation is not causation.
Hint: AWP, being the top LACs, by definition, have the top test takers among all LACs. (Those three screen for top test takers.) So, it would be no surprise that they would have the highest mean LSAT scores which would result in…wait…for…it, the the highest admissions to the most selective Law Schools.
In other words, take those 17x test takers and send them to say, Richmond, and prove that an LS admissions difference exists."
There is, of course, no way to do that. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean we can’t know anything at all.
URichmond is a very good school, and it has a lot of strong test takers at it. Not as many as at Amherst perhaps, but still a good percentage. Some of those students are also the very top of the class in GPA.
However, if we look at Yale Law School, right now, we can see that there are 18 students currently there who went to Amherst for undergrad, while there are zero who went to URichmond for undergrad. It seems unlikely that this would be due only to an overwhelming difference in LSAT scores.
Why? The LSAT is <50% of the admissions decision. Middle SAT scores at Amherst is mid-700’s. Middle scores at Richmond are mid-600’s.
At the 170+ median that Yale attracts, one test question is one point. Strong test takers beat not-so-strong test takers every time.
Based a thread running around a few years ago, the top undergrads had a mean LSAT score of 164-166; Pomona, Yale and Harvard, respectively. (Pomona has similar test scores numbers to Amherst and Williams.) A school in the Richmond caliber was 5-7 points lower than Pomona. In today’s vernacular, that is yuuuuuuuge!
Does that mean that Richmond has no 173+'s? Of course not. But they are a LOT more rare than they are from Amherst.
That being said, I am not of the opinion that undergrad does not matter; I have always believed that it certainly does, as a small soft factor. All things being equal, a 173 Amherst gets into YLS over a 173 from Richmond. No question. But, a <173 Amherst grad is gonna have a much more difficult time overcoming a 173 from Richmond. Like all LS, Yale cares about its medians. And with a small class, it has to pick and choose carefully who it admits below 173. Hooked candidates, no doubt, but then YLS – and to a certain extent, SLS – have such small classes, ECs actually matter for those two.
In contrast, HLS has such a large class, they need to look for reasons NOT to accept every 173+ that applies. (Just not enough >173’s to go around.
I think we are on the same page, but just disagree on the level that it matters. Maybe I shouldn’t have used URichmond as the example, because it’s a small school and may not be representative. Lets use a larger set of universities.
I think there is broad agreement on CC that state flagships with tens of thousands of students will have a significant subset of students who are academically elite and very good test takers. They choose to attend the large state school because of in-state tuition, or because they got a big merit award, or because it has an honors college, or because they need to stay close to home, or because they love the sports team, whatever. But they are there. The average ACT at UFlorida or UGeorgia may be a 28, but at least a quarter of the class there had a 31 ACT or better.
There are nearly 350,000 undergraduate students at the 14 schools that make up the SEC conference. In that giant mass of humanity, there are many tens of thousands of really top-notch students who do well on standardized tests, and a lot of them want to go to the best law school possible. Statistically, there have to be a significant amount of 173 scores among those hundreds of thousands of students.
Yet Amherst, with its graduating class of 450 (of which perhaps 50-75 apply to law school per year) has more people at Yale Law than the entire SEC combined. I seriously doubt that the 450 person graduating class at Amherst has more 173 LSAT scores than the combined annual graduates of the entire SEC conference.
That tells me that it has to be incorrect to say that “only GPA and LSAT matter” for admissions to the most elite law schools like Yale.
I also agree that where you go to undergrad matters somewhat. In my own experience, going to a more selective school means that you’re surrounded by higher-achieving peers who will set higher expectations for you than at a lower-ranked school. A more selective school will also have faculty members who are more familiar with getting students into top law schools. However, it’s still up to the individual student to achieve.
I doubt that Amherst has something special about it that Richmond lacks–other than lots of high IQ students, though. If someone is sharp and talented enough to get into Yale Law School, s/he would also likely have been admitted to plenty of colleges ranked a lot higher than U. of Richmond.
Another thing to consider is that it is probable that, because of this type of discussion, students who genuinely aspire to top law schools will matriculate to schools like Amherst because of statistics.
So serious top 14 pre-law students will choose Amherst rather than “Richmond” ?
Then the whole discussion is circular.
If I were to make specific recommendations as to colleges particularly suitable for pre-law, they would relate to curricular factors, such as an emphasis on writing:
Brown
Carleton
Cornell
Duke
Grinnell
Hamilton
Harvard
Kenyon
Middlebury
Princeton
Stanford
Swarthmore
UMichigan
Williams
et al