<p>you could just as easily sort undergrads by SAT scores and eliminate the Tech schools (MIT/Caltech). The point is taat since LSAT is more than half of the admissions factor, only high testers need apply. Podunk State just doesn’t have many high testers, and certainly not 10 capable of score a 174+.</p>
<p>@Catria: Numbers matter less at Yale only relative to Yale applicants. That is, Yale cares about more than numbers because to be considered you already need the best numbers around. Yale jealously guards that #1 USNWR rank.</p>
<p>^^correct. Yes, ~50 students are accepted with a <171, but those come with some pretty big hooks.</p>
<p>Absent such a hook (such as Olympic Champion), Yale cares about EC’s and everything else, if and only if (IFF), you have the numbers to begin with. But even a gold medal winner better have at least one high number. </p>
<p>Correlation does not equal causation. Go to your state school, graduate summa, do something really interesting with your life (career, nonprofit, athletics, etc.), and ace the LSAT, and you’re in a very good position for Yale. </p>
<p>Don’t forget that Ivies enroll 1,500 or so students each per year, about 300 of whom go to law school, and only a handful of whom get into Yale. </p>
<p>The relevant correction factor isn’t the number of students at the school; it’s the number who applied to Yale Law from that school. It’s just stupid to count in people at that school who have zero desire to even go to law school in the first place. </p>
<p>School A and School B have 8000 students.<br>
School A has exclusively a liberal arts focus. It has 80 kids who apply to YL; 40 get in.
School B has schools of engineering, nursing, music, art.
Within the 2000 kids in their liberal arts, 20 kids apply to YL. All 20 get in. </p>
<p>Your metric would say School A is “better” but in point of fact the acceptance rate is better from School B; it’s just that you penalize schools for having unrelated fields in their student bodies. </p>
<p>The relevant metric for any one person us “what are my chances,” not “and how many of my fellow students will be there alongside me.” This mistake is made over and over on CC. </p>
<p>Or, if looking only at LACs, Williams is significantly larger than Pomona, the top LAC on the west. Even if they were equal in LS interest, Williams will naturally have more applicants to YLS. (Note, the cutoff for this survey is 10 matriculants.) Thus, Pomona with say, 9 matriculants, would have a higher admit rate than Williams, even though Pomona won’t show up on the survey. (Statistically, the numbers are so small as to be equal, but just making the point for those NE-centric folks.)</p>
<p>And of course, there is a geographic factor in play. 99.9% of folks in the NE would say that YLS is a no-brainer (absent a full ride from C or C). But for someone interested in VC, tech, Silicon Valley, the next Twitter or Facebook, SLS might be a much better choice. (A few more votes for Pomona…)</p>
<p>A candidate who has a 3.85 GPA and a 172 LSAT might or might not get into YLS. If the candidate has that kind of GPA from MIT, s/he will certainly have an edge over someone with that kind of GPA from Podunk College.</p>
<p>Your obsession with me is starting to get a little weird.</p>
<p>To the extent that any law school cares about your undergrad, Yale will care more than anyone else. But I haven’t seen any data suggesting that undergrad plays any significant role in acceptances. After numbers are met, Yale’s admissions seem to be more eclectic. This is all anecdotal, of course, because again I’ve seen no hard evidence. </p>
<p>The original statistics don’t mean a whole lot, because - as recognized - you don’t know how many applied, and you don’t know how many of those accepted chose to attend.</p>
<p>At least in my day, Yale Law School acknowledged it was harder to get into Yale Law School from Yale College, because if that weren’t the case, their (relatively small) class would’ve been overwhelmingly Yale graduates.</p>
<p>And: of course they care where you went to college.</p>
<p>Demosthenes, I care about conveying accurate information to people. Your claim (which was also shot down elsewhere in this thread) was wrong and needed to be corrected. Now you state that law schools may care about undergrad and that undergrad could play a non-significant role in acceptances; your revised claims are more accurate. Try to get things right the first time, though, please</p>
<p>@HappyAlumnus: I said that if any law school cares, it would be Yale. However, there is no evidence that Yale cares, and there’s even less that other law schools do. Looking through Yale’s admission data shows plenty of decent undergrads, but nothing beyond what one would normally expect. The same people who got great grades/test scores for getting into elite undergrads tend to have great grades/test scores when applying to law school. The correlation is normal and does not indicate causation. If Yale really cared that much about undergrad name, you’d expect to see outliers only explainable by undergrad. I haven’t seen anything like that. So, while it is strictly possible that Yale cares about where you went to school, it is a position hovering between weak and no evidentiary support.</p>
<p>Demosthenes (and everyone), I apologize. I went way too far with posts 17 and 18 and retract them. I should not have stated what I did in post 17.</p>