<p>“There are not enough top scores to go around”</p>
<p>Care to substantiate that?</p>
<p>Here is a comment on TLS regarding the Yale 2014 admitted class on facebook page on April 3- </p>
<p>"Someone asked how many in FB group: 186 at this moment. I think that includes the admissions staff though.</p>
<p>good grief I looked through the members and its like 90% ivy UG."</p>
<p>A follow-up post said - “lol, right? it also looks like half the people in there have some affiliation with Oxbridge. There’s a critical mass sufficient to plan a meetup at Oxford. Can’t all be Rhodes Scholars. Probably some Gates or generic MPhils.”</p>
<p>@padad: I’m not bluebayou, but the numbers are pretty straightforward. 105,000 people took the LSAT last year:
<a href=“http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/lsats-administered”>http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/lsats-administered</a></p>
<p>However, not all of them apply to law school - only about half ever do - and those who do apply are disproportionally low scorers:</p>
<p><a href=“The Wrong People Have Stopped Applying to Law School - The Atlantic”>The Wrong People Have Stopped Applying to Law School - The Atlantic;
<p>Only 659 people applied who got at least a 175 on the LSATs. Yale, Stanford, and Harvard scoop up about 900 students between the three of them, and, of course, there are plenty of splitters and people who take their 175s for a full merit ride to a school that isn’t HYS. </p>
<p>In order for Harvard to have a median of 173, it has to find about 280 students who scored at least a 173 or higher - and that’s after Yale and Stanford have scooped up their kids and Columbia wooed students with a Hamilton. Looking at Harvard’s yield rate, it has to admit least 500 173+ scorers to keep its median. The middle 50% of GPAs are 3.77 to 3.95. </p>
<p>The school has a 15% acceptance rate overall, but if a student has a 174 and a 3.85, he’s all but a sure admit - the school can’t afford to reject him.</p>
<p>To respond to both:
"8:48AM </p>
<p>No, @CityEntrepreneur : by your own stats, Yale loses 42 students a year to other schools; Harvard loses 310; and Stanford loses 202.</p>
<p>Although Stanford may not have a high yield, my statements about Harvard vis a vis Yale stand and are supported by the facts. In fact, the very same facts you cite in alleged opposition to my statement support it, i.e. that Harvard loses approximately seven times as many students to other schools as Yale does.</p>
<p>That would be a knockout punch if the issue were merely yield, not yield as a proxy for admissions (which was the issue). Yale can be more selective than HLS can - and that is well established.</p>
<p>Nice try! "</p>
<p>and </p>
<p>"In order for Harvard to have a median of 173, it has to find about 280 students who scored at least a 173 or higher - and that’s after Yale and Stanford have scooped up their kids and Columbia wooed students with a Hamilton. "</p>
<p>In your first post, you miss the big picture and all of the flows of students acceptances. Yes, some HLS prospects do attend Yale, Stanford and Columbia, But Yale has the highest yield among admitted students; HLS has the second-highest; Stanford is a few notches lower; and Columbia isn’t even in the top 10. What that means is that while there are of course some students who decline any one of those schools to attend a lower-ranked one, Stanford and Columbia lose many more students to HLS than HLS loses to them. </p>
<p>In your view of the flows of people (looking at only some of the facts), you would also say that the US lost people to Europe from the 1600s-1920s. (During that period, millions of people emigrated from Europe to the US, and only some did the reverse, but since you look only at the smaller reverse flow, rather than the whole picture, that’s what you’d say.)</p>
<p>In your second post, you don’t seem to be clear on how law school admissions work. Yale and Stanford don’t admit students first and demand acceptances. Columbia then doesn’t admit students and offer scholarships, leaving HLS then to admit people. Law school applications and admissions take place over the course of many months, and all of those schools have processes at roughly similar times. Even if they took in students in the order that you say, Yale and HLS have the highest yields, and so people would be sitting on their Stanford and Columbia acceptance letters, waiting for the one from HLS.</p>
<p>As I’ve been told in other forums: it’s silly to have to defend Harvard to someone who clearly didn’t go there. After all, it’s Harvard; it doesn’t need any explanation or defense. </p>
<p>I thought I was done here, but since this new poster is pouring out a new set of wonderful information, I will indulge…</p>
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<p>After your first job out of school (Biglaw), most of subsequent employers don’t really care if you went to Harvard Law as opposed to another lower T-14 school. For experienced hires, what really matters is your quality / quantity of job experience, networking skills, and interviewing skills. </p>
<p>This is not just specific to legal employment, but most corporate employers would gladly hire a Big State U grad who they would like to work with, as opposed to a Harvard grad with poor communication / interviewing skills or undesirable personality, provided that the formal candidate had good enough of bankground to land the interview in the first place. Whenever you get that rejection letter from an employer saying ‘despite your excellent background, we thought you were not the best fit with our team…’, this means you were good enough on paper (school, experience, etc) to at least get the interview, but you were NOT likable enough during the interview for them to hire you.</p>
<p>So I will say this. Going to HLS or YLS or whatever will give you that SLIGHT edge over NYU, Columbia, Penn, Chicago Law for that first legal job out of school, and it will give you maybe 20-25% higher chance of getting Biglaw than going to a lower T-14 like Duke or Cornell. But aside this, there is no real upside of attending HLS over another lower T-14, especially when HLS costs an arm and a leg to attend, whereas any candidate with the HLS-admit numbers would easily be able to attend a lower T-14 close to free. Hence, really is no reason to lose sleep over this silly ‘issue’ of obsessing over HLS acceptance. If you get rejected from Harvard Law despite top notch numbers, no big deal. Just go attend a lower T-14 school with a ton of scholarship money. Or go attend Columbia. Or NYU. Or Chicago. With scholarship money.</p>
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<p>your conjecture that Harvard Law wins higher percentage of cross admits compared to Columbia proves… exactly what point?</p>
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<p>That HLS acceptance may seem enticing at first, but like I mentioned earlier, many HYS grads that work in BIglaw are not as happy as other T-14 grads with less intense debt load. One guy I became good friends with at my firm is a Harvard Law grad with over 200k in debt. His words: “Every month, when I realize just how much those damned loans eat up my paycheck from my bank account, after all this crap and stress I deal with at work, I realize with much bitterness that I should’ve taken that full ride from Cornell Law. I made a terrible decision.” </p>
<p>Actually, this person in question has been regretting his decision to attend law school in the first place. He was making ~70k a year at his corporate finance job before law school, and based on 1) his dislike of the law school experience, 2) dislike of his Biglaw job, 3) dislike of the intense debt load, and 4) uncertainties over how exit-options after Biglaw will work out, he wishes he stuck with his old job and not bother with law school at all, not to mention incur over 200k with 8% loan interest to do it. People need to remember that Biglaw is a highly stressful / unstable job, and it is certainly NOT a long-term job for most people who join. It may be a good idea to minimize school debt as much as possible if you do decide to attend a law school, to allow more flexibility and financial freedom down the road.</p>
<p>Lastly, you, along with others here, seem to be arguing that attending a higher ranked undergrad has a positive correlation with getting into an elite law school, or getting an elite law job. I would argue the exact opposite is true. Actually, I am 100% sure that if I attended an easy state school like Arizona State and majored in a ‘fluff’ major like Poli Sci, I would have easily gotten near 4.0 GPA and would have virtually written my ticket into HLS given my LSAT score. Instead, I attended an Ivy that had intense competition for grades and curves, and I took many hard courses in math and statistics, which brought my GPA down quite a bit. If getting into HLS or YLS is all you care about, go attend a Big State U, save money on tuition, party a lot, and choose a fluff major. Get 4.0 GPA easy and profit.</p>
<p>“your conjecture that Harvard Law wins higher percentage of cross admits compared to Columbia proves… exactly what point?”</p>
<p>It disproves someone else’s assertion that HLS takes whoever is left over after Stanford and Columbia take people.</p>
<p>“Lastly, you, along with others here, seem to be arguing that attending a higher ranked undergrad has a positive correlation with getting into an elite law school, or getting an elite law job. I would argue the exact opposite is true.”</p>
<p>Again, see the Harvard Law Record article re: studies of the most important factors in getting top-tier firm jobs. Those studies analyzed thousands of law students and their job-placement success, and, within each law school, the #1 factor in success was law school grades, and the #2 factor in success was prestige of the student’s undergraduate school. Your assertion that “the opposite is true” just doesn’t seem intuitive, too; just why would Wachtell or Cravath prefer someone who had gone to Arizona State for undergrad instead of someone who went to Yale undergrad, all other things being equal?</p>
<p>“So I will say this. Going to HLS or YLS or whatever will give you that SLIGHT edge over NYU, Columbia, Penn, Chicago Law for that first legal job out of school, and it will give you maybe 20-25% higher chance of getting Biglaw than going to a lower T-14 like Duke or Cornell.”</p>
<p>You provide zero basis for your assertion, so I’ll consider it just your personal, unsubstantiated view.</p>
<p>I’ll leave HLS out of the picture, but Yale has a significantly sharper student body (based on undergrad grades and test scores) than UPenn Law, for example. As someone who interviews and helps hire people, I’d give a Yale grad a significant edge.</p>
<p>The article in the HL Record may have been based on Heather Woodson, Evaluation in Hiring, 65 UMKC L. Rev. 931 (1997). It’s available on Lexis.</p>
<p>@NYU, While it may be quite true that there may only be small differences in big law hiring of graduates from the top six, those in the top six clearly have wider options if they elect to follow other career paths. As you yourself had stated that clerkships and public interest jobs are more competitive than big law jobs. </p>
<p>Clerkships don’t last long and you use them to get a large bonus in BigLaw.</p>
<p>NYU’s Harvard friend should have taken the free ride to Cornell.</p>
<p>Actually, I take that back. Nobody should have to endure the weather at Cornell, so NYU’s Harvard friend should have taken a free ride at some other school similar to Cornell, but that is not in Ithica.</p>
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<p>do you even know what a clerkship stint entails? these ‘jobs’ don’t last more than 1 or 2 years at most, and most of folks who did clerkships end up at biglaw anyway. I feel like I am repeating same info again and again. You should do some research.</p>
<p>as for public interest jobs, these employers adopt different hiring standards compared to Biglaw. these guys care much more about a candidate’s PI-related work experience, track record of PI-related extra curriculars, and the candidate’s sharp networking skills, more so than one’s law school or grades. a lot of these employers don’t host massive on-campus recruiting events like Biglaw, where top school students can just drop their resume and easily get an interview. what this means is that you can’t just attend HLS and expect that a nice, interesting PI gig that qualifies for loan forgiveness will just fall on your lap. I certainly would NOT hedge my bet on getting one of these gigs, especially when I am attending a school with a massive school loan.</p>
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<p>actually, this guy shouldn’t have attended any law school in the first place. he hates working in Biglaw and he really hated his law school experience. he mentions his ex-coworkers at his old job are now making 90-120k salary, working half Biglaw hours, and these guys didn’t have to go back to school for 3 years, incurring massive financial & opportunity costs.</p>
<p>if you can get a good career-track job out of college, most of times, law school is not the answer.</p>
<p>“do you even know what a clerkship stint entails?”</p>
<p>Do you know what follows from a clerkship stint? Answer: doors at top law firms are open even wider. </p>
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<p>If the path of going to a less selective school was really the easy path to getting into elite law schools, wouldn’t we see more statistical evidence to support it? Of course HLS and YLS admit students from many different undergrads, but elite undergrads are very over-represented. </p>
<p>If you had attended an easy undergrad school, would you have scored as high on your LSAT? Would you have been as prepared to perform well enough at your T6 law school to be able to land a biglaw job? </p>
<p>My own experience might be relevant here, even though it is in engineering, not in law. I attended a non-selective midwestern state flagship in the 1980s, where I did quite well, ending up ranking #2 in my department. I then went to a very selective engineering PhD program. In grad school I discovered that my preparation was inferior to that of my classmates who had gone to more selective undergrads. I got acceptable but not great grades in my classes, but failed my qualifying exam and I ended up dropping out of the PhD program, with an MS degree. I could have re-taken the qualifier the next year, but decided that I’d had enough. I’ve gone on to have a satisfying career, but have sometimes been held back from certain opportunities because of the lack of a PhD. In hindsight, I wish that I had followed one of the following different paths:
- Attend a better undergrad, which would have required applying more widely and seeking out merit aid. (I wish that I had access to CC back then, since my application strategy wasn’t very good.)
- Attend a less selective PhD program. I’m confident that at a less selective program, I would have successfully passed the qualifying exam and finished the PhD.</p>
<p>My story is just a personal anecdote, so I can’t state how relevant it is. But I think it is a mistake to say that the path to succeed is to take the easy route. If a student’s goal is to get into HLS, it should also be part of that goal to be prepared to excel at HLS. </p>
<h2>I am fine to graduate from less slective college. Although graduating from high rank college give you prestige and more opportunity.</h2>
<p>“If you had attended an easy undergrad school, would you have scored as high on your LSAT? Would you have been as prepared to perform well enough at your T6 law school to be able to land a biglaw job?”</p>
<p>I don’t think that you don’t understand law school/BigLaw at all.</p>
<p>By which I mean that your experience applies to engineering and not law.</p>
<p>You increase your LSAT score by taking LSAT tests until your practice scores on timed sample tests are at least in the high 170’s. Then take the LSAT. I did this after bombing one of the logic sections on the test, realized that I messed up the section while taking the test, and still got a 168.</p>
<p>Your first year grades depend on issue spotting. Period. That’s pretty much it. </p>
<p>Yale is in a magical place of profound status in the legal world. You win the game by getting into Yale. </p>
<p>Also, there is really no “T6”. I am open to rethinking this if anyone has really good data to back them up, in terms of getting a BigLaw job. </p>
<p>There is Yale, as the top school, which lives in a floating world all to itself.</p>
<p>Then Harvard as the major player in terms of being a BigLaw elite school.</p>
<p>Then the national schools (commonly called the T10). Stanford is too remote geographically to NY and DC to really be as important as Yale and Harvard.</p>
<p>@CityEntrepreneur, I am aware of how law school admissions work. What I am unaware of is why you persistently mis-characterise my statements and refuse to engage in substantive debate. My point is pretty clear; why you distort it, ignore it, or fight tangential issues is beyond me. (Well, maybe you’re just a crummy lawyer, if you even are a lawyer.) </p>
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<p>I thought it was general consensus that HYSCCN were the T6 (in terms of BigLaw jobs), with Penn coming in as a close #7 and UVA as #8? The rest of the T14 varies. (Here’s some stuff to somewhat support that: <a href=“http://www.lstscorereports.com/national/”>http://www.lstscorereports.com/national/</a> <a href=“HYSCCN Forum - Top Law Schools”>HYSCCN Forum - Top Law Schools; )</p>
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<p>Well, your average guy or gal at a school like Arizona State (98% acceptance rate), who wasn’t even able to crack a 1600 on SAT (out of 2400, not 1600) when s/he was 18 years old, isn’t likely to suddenly possess the sufficient level of intellectual horsepower and requisite work ethic to score within top 1-3% of LSAT takers when s/he becomes 22 years old.</p>
<p>Also remember that the student body at elite colleges are a much more ambitious bunch, overall, compared to the student body at a Big State U. Many guys and gals at Ivies are gunning for high-end careers in I-banking, consulting, Biglaw, or Medicine. I doubt an average person at a no-name Big State U knows what exactly I-bankers, Biglaw attorneys, or Management Consultants do on daily basis, and that person probably doesn’t care to know either. </p>
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<p>I would answer ‘yes’ to all of the questions listed above, provided that neither my raw intellect nor level of motivation would have changed by attending an undergrad institution X versus institution Y.</p>
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<p>At my law school, I saw no correlation between one’s law school grades and the name of one’s alma mater. What I did observe was that there was a significant correlation between the bottom 25% group and the group who went out ‘bar-hopping’ 4-5 times a week, went out to play in one of those pointless ‘extra curricular’ activities on regular basis, or those folks who were busy recovering from high school-level relationship melodrama non-sense.</p>
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<p>A PhD by definition is an advanced specialization of your subject matter from undergrad. No doubt a better math student would have an edge over a less capable math student at a math PhD program: PhD programs demand advanced level of knowledge and instinct within that niche subject matter.</p>
<p>A law school does not require any particular academic background nor advanced functional knowledge in any particular academic discipline.</p>
<p>Apples and oranges.</p>
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<p>I would consider myself to have been an average person at a no name Big State U. I graduated with a little less than a 3.0 in Computer Science from a large state university. I was definitely far less ambitious than most of my peers in HS that went on to Ivy or Ivy level undergrads and I certainly didn’t come from a wealthy family by any means. Ibanking, management consulting, Biglaw, medicine sure sounded appealing when I was in HS because that’s what a lot of my peers seemed to be gunning for. I didn’t know any better at the time and I thought those were the most lucrative professions.</p>
<p>Fast forward to when I graduated from undergrad, I ended up nabbing a software engineer job in Maryland that started at 80k/year, worked at most 35 hours a week, excellent benefits, over 6 weeks of vacation per year, tuition reimbursement for grad school, military differential pay for training/mobilization (double pay) … all after a 30 min phone interview. Fortunately I joined the Army National Guard shortly after I started undergrad and I was able to walk out of undergrad with exactly $0 in educational loans. At the time, I was also picking up an extra $15-65k/year based on my continued military service as a Infantry officer in the National Guard and I was enrolled in a part-time MS Computer Science program (for free…again) while working full time.</p>
<p>Just based on the cost of living, I would have needed 180+k/year as an entry level software engineer in CA, NYC, (other high cost of living area) and the same work/life balance just to match my standard of living in MD. Because I had zero debts (and would never consider a full time graduate program due to opportunity cost of lost wages), I was contributing aggressively to my 401k, Federal TSP, and federal military retirement. I was watching my net worth grow quickly while my peers in HS were tied down either still in school or paying down ridiculous educational debt…in cities like LA, SF, NYC where the cost of living makes saving/investment incredibly difficult.</p>
<p>To me it didn’t make sense to go through all that trouble (bust your butt in HS … to get into a elite undergrad … to potentially start right off the bat with 200k of educational debt … for a job in a high cost of living area where it’s difficult to save even with a very high income … to go off to a MBA/JD/grad program full time where you would have a huge opportunity cost and at least another $100+k in educational debt … for a job in a high cost of living area where it’s hard to save and a culture of “keeping up with the neighbors”).</p>
<p>Will a few people in biglaw, banking/finance, management consulting, etc. be able to live a more lavish life than me in the long run? Definitely. But the vast majority won’t given the up and out progression in those fields and where the profession is geographically concentrated.</p>
<p>My goal has always been to get the necessary education (MS CS, MBA), work experience, opportunities in the Mid-Atlantic/Northeast to be able to position myself into a software manager, program manager, or higher position in a state like TX, FL, etc. where you can live very very comfortably with DC level compensation.</p>
<p>In some ways, I feel like people don’t do themselves justice if they blindly follow the crowd. For me, it’s likely that I would have never had an opportunity in finance/banking, management consulting, biglaw. Even if I did, the deck would have been completely stacked against me (non Ivy level school, no wealthy connected parents, etc.) I don’t play games where I think it’s rigged against me if there are other alternatives. Some of the biggest challenges of life are finding where you are/can be strong and exploiting those angles.</p>
<p>
Over-represented, compared to what? The numbers of graduates of elite schools vis-a-vis non-elite schools? The numbers of law school applicants? The number of 170+ LSAT scorers? </p>
<p>Let’s put some hard numbers to one facet of the latter question: average LSAT score of various undergraduate institutions. <a href=“Average LSAT by underggraduate school 2006 - Law School - College Confidential Forums”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/law-school/912674-average-lsat-by-underggraduate-school-2006.html</a></p>
<p>How many students coming out of mid-range schools even have the GPA and LSAT combo to get into a T14 school? I would wager that the answer is “not many,” which is why graduates of top schools are so “overrepresented” in law school.</p>