<p>
How do you know? Amherst and Williams are more prestigious than Cal or Michigan and the former two outperform the latter two in essentially every statistical measure even tangentially related to undergraduate education.</p>
<p>jhaverford, like I said, Amherst and Williams are neither more prestigious than Cal or Michigan, nor do they outperform them in any way, statistical or otherwise. Comparing a tiny LAC to a large research university is impossible. If you can find proof that a graduate program explicitly discriminates against an applicant from Cal or Michigan in favor of an applicant from Amherst or Williams of equal or lesser quality, provide the evidence. Having a higher placement rate into Harvard Law school does not qualify as evidence. If you can find a document published by any graduate program (including Harvard Law) that even suggests that students from Amherst and Williams should be given preference over students from Cal or Michigan, let us see it.</p>
<p>On a separate note Michigan was the #1 producer of Williams faculty. It may have changed over the last decade or so, but I doubt it. I am fairly certain Michigan’s rep is pretty solid on the Williams campus!</p>
<p>I think what law schools favor is students with high GPAs and LSAT scores. </p>
<p>To show that a college per se is favored, you’d need to show a consistently higher admit rate (accepted / applied) for applicants with equal or lower qualifications (primarily GPAs and LSATs) compared to applicants from other schools. The denominator needs to be applicants, not total college population. If you’re analyzing YLS, the denominator needs to be YLS applicants, not the number of applicants to all law schools.</p>
<p>It might turn out that an index based on the number of applicants to all law schools gives you a more or less close approximation. College rankings often do use squishy proxy measurements (guidance counsellor opinions, self-reported alumni salaries, etc.) To inspire confidence, they go for a basket of several measurements, not just one. Even then, it isn’t clear what they are measuring (academic quality or the talent of enrolled students).</p>
<p>Jhaverford4587, Post #44:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Where are you getting your numbers, especially Cals?</p>
<p>Per your [link](<a href=“http://www.lsac.org/LSACResources/Data/PDFs/top-240-feeder-schools.pdf”>http://www.lsac.org/LSACResources/Data/PDFs/top-240-feeder-schools.pdf</a>), youve obtained your numerator from reliable sources, but the bottom figure doesnt appear right. Cal graduates ~ 7200/year, and even if you took out the engineering students this figure wouldnt be reduced by that much.</p>
<p>Also, the number that apply per cycle doesnt -> total & complete recent graduates. The majority, maybe even vast majority of students dont enter L-school in the same year they graduate. Id put the percentages at maybe 15-25% of those who actually go on to L-school immediately.</p>
<p>These %s might be higher for the Ivies, but there are a lot of people who gravitate from bus-related careers to law after as many as five years in a bus sector job, venture cap, whatever.</p>
<p>Because of these things, a lot of your other things that follow obviously blow up and are useless.</p>
<p>Also between your post #44 and #48, you seem to contradict yourself wrt pub-u grads being risk averse and later, that there only being ~ 25 students who graduate with, say, summa cum laude status from Cal and Michigan. </p>
<p>Cooley L-school … worst law school in the country… You can criticize all you want but it does have many locations and flexible scheds.</p>
<p>Wayne State is in Detroit, probably downtown, which would also make it convenient.</p>
<p>And Baywatch:</p>
<p>Someone who attends L-school at Yale obviously doesnt have just fed-court appt aspirations. But rather one would best be served in attending YLS if this is ones desire. For other things less intellectually and academically weighty, the local L-schools would be good enough.</p>
<p>Ok, I guess this is what you get when a bunch of high school students and college freshmen argue about law school. I’m a 3L at a top six law school (with a federal clerkship), so let me please clear some things up.</p>
<p>First, Yale’s reputation is not “far and away better” than Stanford’s or Harvard’s. Law school prestige generally works in tiers, and for 9/10 prestige-related purposes, there’s no difference between Yale, Harvard, and Stanford (which are all in that first uber elite group). The next tier is Chicago, Columbia, and NYU, and they are followed by some group that probably includes UVA, UPenn, Michigan, and Berkeley (I feel like I’m forgetting one in the last group but it doesn’t really matter). Very few law school applicants will choose to attend “CCN” over “HYS,” even with a full ride; the vast majority of the 20% of applicants who are admitted to Yale but don’t attend Yale go to Stanford or Harvard. This is true for Stanford and Harvard as well; they lose the vast majority of their admitted students who don’t matriculate to the other HYS schools, and not to CCN. There may be 3-4 students each year who choose Michigan or Berkeley over Yale, Harvard, or Stanford, but the number is <em>very small</em>.</p>
<p>Second, an earlier poster pointed out that not everyone from Cornell applies to HYS. My sense about these things, however, is that because the law profession is far more prestige based than undergrads, the overwhelming majority of applicants who have a remote chance of acceptance into HYS apply to at least one of them; to take yourself out of the running of one of the schools in this elite group would be a pretty significant career mistake and those applicants who are smart enough to be in the running for HYS are also smart enough to realize this. This, however, is also why it’s important to look at combined data from HYS when evaluating how various undergrads do in this process; many top applicants won’t apply to all of HYS. Therefore, looking at just data from Yale likely would exclude some Berkeley folks who were shooting for an uber elite law school but wanted to stay in Cali and therefore just applied to Stanford. </p>
<p>Third, and this is a small point, but the Supreme Court doesn’t just pick among the top half of the class at Yale when they look for clerks. A prospective S.Ct. clerk coming out of Yale still needs to be one of the <em>very best</em> to have a shot. There may be a slight difference in this department between Yale, Harvard, and Stanford (although last year’s numbers revealed that Stanford, not Yale, placed the highest percentage of its graduating class–40%–into Federal Clerkships of the three), but the difference would be that the top 10 students at Yale rather than the top 8 at Stanford would be in the running. </p>
<p>Fourth, someone mentioned grade inflation at Amherst earlier…you’ll be interested to know that Berkeley Law School did a ranking of grade inflation at various schools based on students’ over-performance or under-performance of their GPAs at Berkeley Law, controlled for LSATs, and found that Amherst had some of the most grade <em>deflation</em> of all of the schools. From what I recall, Swarthmore and Williams tied for the most grade deflation, with Berkeley undergrad coming in right around average. </p>
<p>Fifth, law school admissions are 95% driven by LSATs and GPAs except for at Yale, Stanford, and to a lesser extent, Harvard. Therefore, if your goal is to get into UPenn Law School, you’ll be better off with a 3.8/170 from Eastern Kentucky University than a 3.65/170 from Amherst. However, this is not the case for Yale and Stanford (which are small enough and elite enough that they can be more discerning), and to a lesser extent Harvard (which is elite enough but not small enough–HLS is 3x the size of YLS or SLS). Therefore, given that the best law school applicants coming from any undergrad will be applying to at least one of HYS, and given that YS and to some extent H put a non-negligible amount of weight on the undergrad institution, evaluating how various undergrads place at these schools is a rough indicator of their respective prestige in the eyes of elite law school admissions officers. Nobody’s posted any numbers yet looking at combined HYS data, but my anecdotal sense is that Harvard, Yale, and Stanford undergrads do exceptionally well, followed by Williams and Amherst, followed by some other combination of top LACs and top Unis. Basically what this means is if you’re shooting for the best of the best, where you went to undergrad matters. Otherwise, it’s basically just about how you did in undergrad (and on your LSAT, which is probably some reflection of how much you learned in undergrad). </p>
<p>I’m happy to answer other questions about law school and law school admissions here. I’m not busy in law school at the moment so I’ll be able to check in fairly regularly over the next couple days.</p>
<p>“Nobody’s posted any numbers yet looking at combined HYS data”</p>
<p>I agree with your points. However, the problem is that it’s hard to find data on SLS.</p>
<p>“Nobody’s posted any numbers yet looking at combined HYS data, but my anecdotal sense is that Harvard, Yale, and Stanford undergrads do exceptionally well, followed by Williams and Amherst, followed by some other combination of top LACs and top Unis.”</p>
<p>I think HYS undergrads performs best, followed by Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, William, Amherst and Brown, followed by other top universities and LACs.</p>
<p>IvyPBear–</p>
<p>Are you at a top law school? Before attending, my suspicion would have been that Dartmouth, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, etc, were well-represented, but they’re really not at my law school (I think there are more people from Williams or Amherst–in total numbers–than from any of the above). Although this is probably what I was talking about…the problem with the small numbers associated with just looking at one of the top schools.</p>
<p>abl</p>
<p>Are you attending the University of Chicago Law School? I attended a top law school, and have friends who attended all of HYSCCN. We felt that, overall across HYSCCN, HYS undergrads perform best, followed by Princeton, Dartmouth, Columbia, William, Amherst and Brown, followed by other top universities and LACs with regards to representation.</p>
<p>Guess again :)</p>
<p>“Guess again”</p>
<p>Not a guess this time. If you are not a student at UChicago Law, then you must be a student at SLS. Based on what you have stated on this thread so far, you can only be a student at UChicago Law or SLS. I guess UChicago first because you wrote “top 6” instead of HYS.</p>
<p>BTW, congrats on the federal clerkship.</p>
<p>IvyPBear, why do you exclude Chicago and Duke?</p>
<p>University of Chicago Law School 2010-11
<a href=“http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/file/TheLawSchool%20PDF%202010-10-05.pdf[/url]”>http://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/file/TheLawSchool%20PDF%202010-10-05.pdf</a>
University of Chicago: 23
Duke: 15
Dartmouth: 14
Cornell: 14
Yale: 11
Harvard: 10
Amherst: 8
Princeton: 7
Brown: 5
Columbia: 5
Penn: 5
Williams: 1</p>
<p>At Yale Law, Duke is #6 after HYPS and Brown overall while Chicago is #9 after HYPS, Brown, Duke, Dartmouth and Columbia.</p>
<p>I’m really curious to see SLS’s top feeder schools though I must admit.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I really hope you are just being careless with the phrases you are using and you don’t really think this an accurate measure of grade inflation. I can’t for a minute imagine that Berkeley Law said that this experiment measured grade inflation from an undergraduate institution. I suspect what they said was they were measuring how students from different undergraduate institutions performed at their law school.</p>
<p>Grade inflation is not a fuzzy concept, its meaning is very clear. What is the standard and does a school inflate above that standard? I have trouble with the concept because I’m not sure what the baseline standard is. If you go to Europe or you go way back in time in this country it would be a C. Grades would be distributed in a bell shaped curve around a C, which is considered average.</p>
<p>At this time in history in this country a C is not considered average anywhere that I know of so like I said, I’m not sure what the baseline standard is. I can’t speak specifically about Amherst but it wouldn’t surprise me if on average they award higher grades than a State school because that is pretty common. (It is pretty common for private schools to award higher grades than State schools).</p>
<p>But the test that you described does not measure grade inflation from the undergraduate institution. How someone performs in law school is completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not their grades were inflated at an institution they no longer attend.</p>
<p>Berkeley Law School (Boalt at the time) did actually describe what they were doing as measuring grade inflation. If anyone was careless, it was them, although as I will describe below, I don’t actually think they were careless. </p>
<p>There are two different concepts of grade inflation, one of which you describe, the other of which Berkeley implicitly used. </p>
<p>First, your implication is that every school should award an average grade of C (or B- or pick a grade, so long as it is standard at every school). Schools that had higher averages than whatever the “standard” average was are schools that practiced grade inflation. Therefore, under this logic, if the average GPA at Amherst is higher than the average GPA at University of Tennessee, Amherst practices “grade inflation.” </p>
<p>Second, and this is the form of “grade inflation” that Berkeley Law was attempting to measure, we attempt to measure what level of performance is expected of an undergraduate institution in order to receive, say, a B+. Once we have an idea of what average B+ performance looks like, we would say that any school that awards an A- for “average B+ performance” is practicing grade inflation. Thus, if we compare two schools–say Amherst and UT–and the average performance at those schools is the same but the average GPA at UT is lower, we would say that Amherst inflates grades relative to UT. However, more likely in this hypothetical, the average performance at Amherst is higher than the average performance at UT. Even if the average GPA at Amherst is higher, we would then look to see whether it was as high as it “should” be for its level of performance. This is what Berkeley Law did–they used the admittedly imperfect measure of law school success to measure whether B+ Amherst students performed in law school at a level that would be expected of B+ students at other schools. And, they found that B+ Amherst students actually performed better than they should have (I obviously don’t know the exact numbers, but let’s imagine they performed like A- students from other institutions). This would imply that Amherst B+s actually represented the same degree of accomplishment as A-s from other schools. Thus, even if the average GPA at Amherst was higher than GPAs from other institutions, Amherst GPAs were DEflated.</p>
<p>Now, I’m not arguing that their methodology was perfect (or even good), or even that Berkeley’s way of viewing grade inflation was the right one. In my opinion, your version of grade inflation is most useful for comparing students within a college–any form of grade inflation is bad for this, as it becomes more difficult to distinguish who the top performers from <em>a</em> given institution are. However, I believe that Berkeley’s version of grade inflation is more useful for comparing students between two institutions; knowing that both the #14 and #18 students at Amherst performed better in undergrad than the #11 student at Ball State (and the #36 student at UT and the # 41 student at Virginia Tech…etc) is more useful than differentiating between the #14 and #18 student at Amherst.</p>
<p>I think this whole thread is wildly off-base in its basic premises. Law school admission at every law school in the country these days—including Yale and Harvard—is driven approximately 100% by US News rankings, in which undergrad GPAs and median LSAT scores count heavily. Yale Law School may be the “most prestigious law school on the planet” but it’s only going to admit applicants whose GPAs and LSAT scores are going to help it stay one step ahead of Harvard in the US News ranking; everlasting shame befalls the Yale Law School dean who allows YLS to fall from its exalted perch atop the US News rankings. At the very most YLS may give Yale alums a “tip” in evaluating them against graduates of other schools with identical stats. There’s no reason whatsoever it should extend that courtesy to Harvard, Amherst, or any other school.</p>
<p>Given that, if an undergraduate school has a lot of its grads attending YLS, it means only that 1) a lot of its grads applied to YLS, and 2) a lot of them had very high GPAs and very high LSAT scores. Nothing more. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>False. Most law students don’t apply to YLS, and not just because they couldn’t get in. There’s a huge amount of regionalism in this. A member of my family attended YLS some years ago, which obviously means he had the grades and test scores to get in. But he almost didn’t apply because he was newly married, he and his wife were happy living in Chicago and intended to stay there, she had a job that she liked there, and there were two perfectly fine law schools, Chicago and Northwestern, right in his backyard, with better connections in the local legal community where he saw himself practicing. It seemed to make much more sense financially (Chicago offered him a big merit award, and there were few economic opportunities for his wife in New Haven at the time) and in terms of his future plans to go to YLS, and any increment of prestige that YLS gave him over Chicago or Northwestern just wasn’t worth the financial sacrifice. But at a certain point he realized that YLS did its need-based financial aid just the opposite of other law schools: after EFC, it required students to take out loans first, then once the student maxed out on loans up the loan cap level set by the school, it provided grants to make up the rest of COA. It also didn’t expect a spousal contribution from a non-working spouse, and it added a COA allowance for the non-working spouse and any minor dependents. Which meant in effect YLS would pay the couple to have a baby and for the non-working spouse to be a stay-at-home mom. Since the couple intended to have a child anyway, and because the wife wanted to spend her child’s early years at home, the finances actually worked out better at YLS than at Chicago, notwithstanding the big merit award at Chicago. So he ended up at YLS. “Special circumstances”? Well, in a way the special circumstances of YLS’ financial aid policy got him to YLS. But the family ties and geographic ties pulling in the opposite direction are not at all unusual.</p>
<p>Bottom line, it’s not at all surprising that far more graduates of Northeastern schools end up at Yale because it’s in the Northeast. And I’d be willing to bet far more graduates of Western schools end up at Stanford and UC Berkeley because they’re in the West, and far more graduates of Midwestern schools end up at Chicago and Northwestern and Michigan because they’re in the Midwest. Many highly credentialed law school applicants attend their state flagship because it’s cheaper and because they imagine themselves having careers close to home. Many of the most highly credentialed shop around for the biggest merit awards, with an eye toward coming out of law school with the least debt; and most top law schools now “pay for LSAT scores” as a way of staying in the US News rankings game, as some law professor friends of mine describe it, but not Yale. Others are legacies at Harvard or some other school that has the temerity to think it’s on the same plane, or even a step above, YLS. Many people from all those categories never apply to YLS, even if their chances of admission are just as good as anyone else with a 3.9 undergrad GPA and 175 LSAT. And even among those who do apply and are admitted, YLS doesn’t land all of them; its yield at last report was 80.3%, higher than any other law school’s, but that still means roughly 1 in 5 YLS admits turns down “the most prestigious law school on the planet,” either for another school, a better FA package, or a different career path entirely. (And by the way, we can’t assume that yield rate is uniform for applicants from all undergraduate colleges; it might be the case that YLS has close to 100% yield from Yale alums, but only 50% from Stanford alums, a significant fraction of whom choose to attend Stanford Law School if given the chance. But that also would feed into a larger number of Yale than Stanford grads attending YLS). </p>
<p>Also wrong on Supreme Court clerkships, by the way. Harvard Law School continues to place more Supreme Court clerks than YLS by a significant margin, Harvard 74 in the period from 2000 to 2007, Yale 54 in the same period. Since HLS is roughly 3 times the size of YLS, that works out to a higher percentage of YLS graduates, but we’re still talking minuscule numbers in either case, 0.14% of HLS grads versus 0.27% of YLS grads. Chicago was third with 30 (0.15%, slightly better than HLS on a percentage basis), followed by Stanford with 19 (0.11), Columbia 17, NYU 14, UVA 12, UC Berkeley 11, Michigan 9, and Northwestern 6. So while your chances of landing a Supreme Court clerkship are a bit better at Yale, it’s not as if only YLS grads get that chance.</p>
<p>
Ummm, that may be true for all undergrad, masters, PhDs and professional degrees…but most of those peeps aren’t applying to law schools.</p>
<p>@abl – thanks for the explanation. Now I see what they were studying and it makes sense.</p>
<p>Speaking of law school yield, I found this interesting. Here are the yields for the top 20 law schools as ranked by US News: </p>
<p>USN rank / school / yield / (yield rank)
- Yale 80.3% (1)
- Harvard 67.3% (2)
- Stanford 47.5% (3)
- Columbia 34.0% (5)
- Chicago 24.1% (15)
- NYU 26.9% (12)
- Michigan 32.1% (8)
- Penn 28.9% (11)
- UC Berkeley 33.6% (7)
- UVA 39.9% (4)
- Duke 22.8% (16)
- Northwestern 33.7% (6)
- Cornell 18.9% (19)
- Georgetown 22.4% (17)
- Texas 29.6% (9)<br>
- UCLA 21.4% (18)
- Vanderbilt 15.5% (20)
- USC 15.3% (21)
- WUSTL 29.1% (10)
- GWU 25.0% (14)
- Minnesota 25.2% (13)</p>
<p>Yale Law School clearly dominates, with Harvard Law running a fairly strong second. From there it’s a pretty sharp drop. I know in the undergraduate context there are those who say you can’t read anything into yield. I don’t entirely agree with that, but law schools are sufficiently alike that I think yield is pretty telling. What this table tells me is that applicants to top law schools are extremely prestige-obsessed, with the yields for the top schools closely tracking the school’s US News ranking. But it also says that public law schools are different, with yield rankings often several places above their US News rankings, and well above private schools ranked similarly or higher by US News.</p>
<h1>7 Michigan 32.1% (+5.3% over #6 NYU and +3.2% over #7 Penn)</h1>
<h1>9 UC Berkeley 33.6% (+4.7% over #7 Penn and +10.8% over #11 Duke)</h1>
<h1>9 UVA 39.9% (+11.0% over #7 Penn and +17.1% over #11 Duke)</h1>
<h1>14 Texas 29.6% (+7.2% over #14 Georgetown and +14.2% over #16 Vanderbilt)</h1>
<h1>16 UCLA (-1.0 behind #14 Georgetown but +5.9 over #16 Vanderbilt)</h1>
<h1>20 Minnesota 25.2% (+0.2% over #20 GWU and +9.9% over #18 USC)</h1>
<p>I assume this is partly financial, with large numbers of in-state students accepting offers of admission to their local flagships in order to attend law school more economically. But it may also reflect a higher percentage of accepted students whose personal lives, family ties, and career plans tend to keep them in-state. The private schools serve more of a national market.</p>
<p>But there are also distinct regional patterns among all schools. If you break it down by region it looks like this:</p>
<p>Northeast: 1) #1 Yale 80.3%, 2) #2 Harvard 67.3%, 3) #4 Columbia 34.0%, 4) #7 Penn 28.9%, 5) #6 NYU 26.9%, 6) #13 Cornell 18.9%</p>
<p>Midwest: 1) #12 Northwestern 33.7%, 2) #7 Michigan 32.1%, 3) #18 WUSTL 29.1%, 4) #20 Minnesota 25.2%, 5) #5 Chicago 24.1%</p>
<p>West: 1) #3 Stanford 47.5%, 2) #9 UC Berkeley 33.6%, 3) #16 UCLA 21.4%, 4) #18 USC 15.3%</p>
<p>DC & Southeast: 1)#9 UVA 39.9%, 2) #14 Texas 29.6%, 3) #20 GWU 25.0%, 4) #11 Duke 22.8%, 5) #14 Georgetown 22.4%, 6) #16 Vanderbilt 15.5% </p>
<p>By region the correlation between prestige (as reflected in US News ranking) and yield is much clearer. To tie it back to the thread, I’ll bet there are non-trivial numbers of students at every one of these regional leaders—Northwestern, Michigan, Stanford, Berkeley, UVA, Texas—who had YLS-level GPAs and LSATs, but who never applied to YLS for financial, family, personal relationship, or career expectation/regional preference reasons.</p>
<p>bc:</p>
<p>don’t confuse the-‘best school on the planet’-argument with facts. :D</p>
<p>“Many highly credentialed law school applicants attend their state flagship because it’s cheaper and because they imagine themselves having careers close to home.”</p>
<p>[Berkeley</a> Law - Fees & Cost of Attendance](<a href=“http://www.law.berkeley.edu/6943.htm]Berkeley”>Fees & Cost of Attendance - Berkeley Law)</p>
<p>Total CA Resident Student Budget** $73,886.00</p>
<p>Total Non-Resident Student Budget** $78,094.00</p>
<p>[Law</a> School Facts](<a href=“News | University of Michigan Law School”>News | University of Michigan Law School)</p>
<p>Resident tuition and fees $64,960.00
Non-resident tuition and fees $67,870.00</p>
<p>[Columbia</a> Law School : Tuition and Financial Aid](<a href=“http://www.law.columbia.edu/jd_applicants/admissions/tuition]Columbia”>http://www.law.columbia.edu/jd_applicants/admissions/tuition)</p>
<p>$77,000.00</p>
<p>Law school is a horrifically substantial investment of time and money. To turn down Columbia and superior employment prospects to save a few thousand dollars when one is already ****ing away $200,000+ is a stupid decision.</p>
<p>^ kwu,
The way I read the numbers you present, a Michigan resident would save $12,000 per year attending Michigan Law as opposed to Columbia Law. That’s potentially an additional $36,000 in loans, plus accrued interest. And that’s before you consider any merit awards or need-based financial aid either school might give, which could either widen the gap, or narrow it. Columbia Law grads tend to have lots of opportunities if they’re in the top half of the class, less so if they’re in the bottom half. Same is true for Michigan Law grads. Columbia Law grads tend to have significantly higher starting salaries but that’s because most of them stay in NYC where the cost of living is extremely high. When adjusted for cost-of-living, the average starting salary of Columbia Law grads is actually below the average for top-50 law schools, according to analyses I’ve seen. Also, keep in mind that for those intending to go into public service or public interest careers, starting salaries for graduates of top private law schools are virtually identical to those of graduates of public law schools. But my broader point is that there’s no “one size fits all” right answer to this; individual circumstances will vary. For some a leading public law school will make more financial and career sense than the top privates; for others the reverse may be true.</p>
<p>Latest data I’ve seen say 98.8% of 2009 Columbia Law grads were employed at 9 months after graduation. For Michigan Law grads the rate was 98.7%. So there’s difference, but I think many people would conclude not a $36,000 difference. Especially Midwesterners who plan to stay in the Midwest, where a Columbia credential wouldn’t make a dime’s worth of difference over a Michigan Law degree.</p>