<p>Exactly.......</p>
<p>Yes, in the case of MIT or Caltech (both of which have very good Pre-Law programs if you look more carefully at the statistics), there are other factors to consider. However, generally speaking, the number of Pre-Law candidates is fairly consistent across all universities and LACs. Do you really think that Harvard and Yale have 50 times the number of Pre-Law students as Cornell, Northwestern or UPenn? The percentage of pre-law candidates in each graduating class varies by small fractions, not by orders of magnitude. What this ranking shows is that the cohort of students who are good enough to make it to the best law school - the one where everyone who is admitted clearly jumps at the chance to go - have been fractionally distilled and "purified" on a logarithmic scale, based on whether or not they went to an elite school. </p>
<p>Likely this reflects the amount of academic achievement and attention from professors that they were able to garner by going to an elite institution, as well as the general caliber of the top 10% of students attracted to each particular elite institution.</p>
<p>Anyone have the statistics for Harvard Law?</p>
<p>They are readily available as well, and are similar in general (i.e., Harvard and Yale dominate). The thing is that because Harvard Law is larger and far less selective than Yale Law, I would say they are much less reliable. For example, students on the West Coast might not go there, and students who get into Yale certainly do not go there. So if the 5 top Pre-Law students from say, Swarthmore all ended up getting into and going to Yale, it would skew Swarthmore's numbers at Harvard pretty low.</p>
<p>While not as good as the Yale Law measure, I think that another good ranking might be to do a "blended" ranking based on the % of students at the top six law schools - Yale, Stanford, Chicago, Harvard, NYU and Columbia. Again, it wouldn't be as good or as reliable, but it would give you another good indication of which undergraduate programs get their students into the best law schools. Based on what I've seen, again, HYP would be at the top by a wide margin, with places like Swarthmore and Amherst following.</p>
<p>Also, with reference to a question above, the purpose of providing both the university-overall as well as the "CAS only" figures for Penn and Cornell is because the percentage of CAS students who apply to law schools is higher than the percentage of university-wide students who apply. Also, some people may feel that the CAS students should be viewed as an "elite" group that can be compared with the top LACs, whereas the non-CAS students drag down the ranking. So it helps to look at it both ways.</p>
<p>Another way to look at it is to find out what the GPAs/LSAT of the admits for, say, Harvard Law School, from different schools. The idea here is to see which schools' names carry more weight than others. If the name of school A carries more weight than that of school B, admits from school A, on average, should have lower GPA/LSAT than those from school B. This, however, would require relatively larger number of samples and that's why we can't look at those for Yale law school.</p>
<p>Nail on the head.....</p>
<p>That's such an erroneous ranking, for a couple of reasons. Here is the big one:</p>
<p>This doesn't measure pre-law programs, it measures students who get in to those schools. Law schools care about two main things: LSAT score and GPA. They don't care about knowledge of the law or preparation for a law degree. Which begs the question, is something a top pre-law program if it teaches you much about the law or if it gets you into good law schools? Furthermore, you don't even know what kind of cirriculum the students at those schools took. A great number of people don't do any sort of pre-law and go into law school. For all you know, they majored in Carpentry and minored in Russian. Or, more realistically, didn't know what to do with a bachelor's in Political Science and went to law school.</p>
<p>if you did this for harvard law, which is much bigger sample size and much more diverse in terms of undergrad institutions (except for the harvard bias), you'd get a different set of results:</p>
<p>Doing a ranking based on HLS, again, is very impractical because a good number of HLS students were rejected by YLS and/or SLS. Actually, it's kind of like a safety school. That said, again, you'll see a fairly similar ranking develop if you weight by class size, with HY leading by a huge margin, and top LACs dominating the rest (although to a lesser extent than at YLS, which really draws the creme de la creme from each school).</p>
<p>Regardless of what the OP is ranking - students or pre-law programs - the fact is that it is a ranking of your chance, as a student at one of those schools, at getting into the best law schools. Not just your chance at getting into YLS, because unlike other law schools, virtually everyone who gets into YLS gets in everywhere else and 85-90% of admits there choose to attend.</p>
<p>ugh...the yale law students are some of the most boring people out there</p>
<p>
[quote]
Doing a ranking based on HLS, again, is very impractical because a good number of HLS students were rejected by YLS and/or SLS. Actually, it's kind of like a safety school.
[/quote]
You've got to be kidding. That's such an arrogant and uninformed comment.</p>
<p>It's true that many Harvard Law students never even applied to Yale, but if they had and gotten in, I doubt they would be likely to pass Yale up. </p>
<p>Law school admissions more accurately reflect the pecking order mentality of CC than college admissions, actually. Where you go really matters; it's much less about "fit" than hierarchy.</p>
<p>While that may be true, the point of this ranking system is inherently flawed. Like Sam said, it does not show the power of the school name, as we don’t know the scores of the students in the school. And what’s more, we don’t know the acceptance rates at the respective schools. To say that Utah better prepares people for law school than Penn is a little far fetched. That is to say, without knowing all the info. All this list tells is how many people are in Yale Law school from a given institution, plain and simple.</p>
<p>What's remarkable is that the hierarchy is so pronounced at the undergraduate level, with Harvard and Yale dominating, and public universities falling way, way down the list. </p>
<p>I guess a similar situation holds true for Rhodes and Marshall Scholars - despite the fact that Yale is one of the smallest Ivies, Yale undergrads won 7 Rhodes and Marshalls last year (more than all the other Ivies put together), even though only a few of these awards are given out across the country. Public universities only won a handful, even though collectively they probably have 1,000 times more students than Yale.</p>
<p>I guess the smart get smarter, and the poor get poorer.</p>
<p>"I guess the smart get smarter, and the poor get poorer."</p>
<p>Or maybe those awards are not representative of a students intelligence?!?!?!?</p>
<p>PosterX- It's more difficult to gauge for the Marshall and Rhodes. Historically, the biggest winners have actually been the service academies. There have been years in which Harvard has come up with nothing while CUNY has taken one or two as well. Nothing like the consistency of law school admissions. In any case these awards are not an accurate measure of intelligence, but rather of students' organization and preparation. Harvard and Yale have the resources to devote to a fellowship advisor for each college/house; other schools do not.</p>
<p>What I mean is, the smart people with prestigious degrees are much more likely to "get smarter" (i.e., get advanced degrees from Oxford, Yale, Harvard, or Cambridge!)</p>
<p>As far as Rhodes, it's pretty consistent over time in that H & Y have won the most. Obviously you are dealing with much smaller numbers and from year-to-year, there are fluctuations. Yes, you are correct the service academies have won a lot of awards, and much more than most of the Ivies, but they haven't won more than HY over time.</p>
<p>posterX,</p>
<p>Weighing by class size is seriously flawed. Some schools can have much larger portion of students being prelaws than others. For example, Tufts is 4x smaller than Berkeley yet in recent years, Tufts has had almost as many prelaws as Berkeley! Tufts may easily have as many students applying to YSL as Berkeley and you'd make a HUGE mistake if you normalize numbers by class size! It's possible that LACs have significantly larger % of prelaws than large research U. That said, it may be safe to say HY's names (maybe Stanford's) carriy quite a bit of weight given their numbers being so far ahead.</p>
<p>kk,
I am definitely surprised how the list has been so over-analyzed on this board. One needs GPA vs LSAT scores vs admit rate (#admits over #applicants, NOT class size) data to make conclusion about the pecking order or how much a school's name matters. I just don't know why this seems to be a difficult concept for many when it isn't. LOL!</p>
<p>Unless of course you consider the number of law school applicants indicative of something...</p>
<p>Yes, there are flaws. No, you should definitely not choose a college based on one ranking. </p>
<p>But I would submit that, when it comes to Pre-Law, this is one of the best ranking systems out there. The reason is that people who get into YLS have their pick of any law school they want to get into but nearly all choose to go to YLS. Law schools other than Yale simply aren't as selective. So the numbers aren't skewed by "who really wants to go to Harvard" or something like that. Also, I would submit that if you dice the rankings some other way, adding in a weighting for LSAT score or what-have-you, your revised numbers are not going to affect the final results shown here in any significant way. The fact is, if you want to get into the best law schools, going to one of the best undergraduate schools will give you a huge advantage. </p>
<p>And if you read the history of admissions literature, people have been reaching the exact same conclusion on this for over 50 years now.</p>