<p>Is it even possible to transfer into Harvard Law after doing a year or two somewhere else? What does it take?</p>
<p>It is technically possible, but highly improbable. You’d have to do extraordinarily well at your lower ranked school. By that I mean, at least top 5% of your class. It is never a good idea to go to a lower ranked school with the hope of transferring to a decent one. You need either get into the decent one at the outset or to avoid law school.</p>
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Or go to a lower-ranked one for free part-time so you don’t give up the opportunity cost of being employed.</p>
<p>A neighbor’s son is hoping to do this because he doesn’t want to have to pay Harvard Law tuition for the entire time. He has a full ride to a lower ranked school.</p>
<p>There were 29 transfer students the past year and they are for 2nd year. I understand that many of them migrated from New Haven, Chicago and Stanford. In my opinion, there are better reasons not to transfer but these are unlikely what you want to hear.</p>
<p>Does he have a choice?</p>
<p>Tell your neighbor’s son not to do it. He’ll do OCI as if he were at his lower ranked school even assuming he does well enough to get into Harvard. It’s short-term stupidity to trade a year of Harvard tuition for the ridiculously increased chance at OCI. Some exception may be if the lower ranked school is something like NYU or Cornell.</p>
<p>ABA rules require that you do four full-time semesters at one law school, and that law school is the one that grants your degree. (I do not know what the part-time rules are.) If you want an HLS degree, you need to do at least four semesters at HLS. </p>
<p>Ergo, you can transfer into a new law school after your first year ONLY; you cannot “transfer” after you’ve started your 2L year, unless you want to repeat a semester. If you leave for your third year, you are technically “visiting” and often need your dean’s approval to do so and get your credits transferred back to your home institution.</p>
<p>Incidentally, this did come up when Katrina hit the New Orleans law schools; those students spent their fall semesters at various law schools around the country. A 2L who had transferred to a NOLA school was shipped up to my alma mater, which agreed to let her finish out her entire legal education there and gave her a degree. </p>
<p>Legalities aside, please remember that most people do not do nearly as well in law school as they think they will do. The group that you are competing against all have college degrees and did well enough on the LSAT to get into law school (recall that, at least in years past, something like half or two-thirds of LSAT takers won’t get in anywhere). The competition gets tougher the more you go up the ladder, as the bottom group gets winnowed out.</p>
<p>the difficulty is getting into harvard as a transfer. depending on the rank of your current school, you will have to be anywhere from top 1-5%. i am not exaggerating when i say if you are not in the top 5 people in your entire class after 1L, you will likely not have a shot, unless you are from a top 10 school (at which point it makes no sense whatsoever to even transfer to begin with).</p>
<p>however, should one be able to transfer, transfers typically do well at OCI; from my experience, they are not significantly disadvantaged.</p>
<p>If he’s already gotten into Harvard, tell him to go. The extra cost of Harvard tuition is more than worth the potential risk of not being able to transfer and then having to face a jobless foreseeable future because there are too many law school graduates in the job market right now.</p>