I think it’s smart to think about the incentives of the admissions officers — but I think it’s a bit more complicated than just maximizing GPA to boost the rankings. Yes, absolutely, they want to increase their GPA and LSAT medians. But they also want to admit people who will pass the bar and get full-time legal jobs (which also factor into the rankings). And they want people who might get federal clerkships or biglaw jobs or prestigious public interest fellowships. They want people who will have successful legal careers and who might one day donate to the law school. And to some extent, I think they want people with some interesting backgrounds who might bring something unique to classes.
So, I’m not disputing that GPA and LSAT are by far the most important factors. A garbage GPA even from a prestigious school is probably going to sink an application. But if you have a 4.0 GPA in basket-weaving from a local commuter school versus a 3.7 GPA in engineering from MIT – I do think the admissions officers are going to be weighing factors beyond just the raw GPA.
They certainly do differentiate, and any med school adcom will readily admit it.
Just look at the med schools in California, all of which are extremely competitive. Cal State students are extremely rare, and some/most? of those admits have a hook.
All of which are true, but the other factors really come into play in LS admissions for those with numbers below one or both medians. The “need” for an interesting background is much less for those above both 75th percentiles, regardless of which college that they attended.
Um, my statement was regarding the med-school rankings. How exactly do the med-school rankings differentiate GPA’s amongst various undergrad programs? For example, the USNews med-school ranking selectivity indicator utilizes no information whatsoever regarding the undergrad programs from which the students attended: all it uses are the median GPA, MCAT, and acceptance percentage. Admitting students with high GPA’s (who also have high MCAT score) from easy undergrad programs while rejecting students with lower GPA’s from difficult undergrad programs will boost a med-school’s US News ranking.
I’m not sure what that proves: Cal State premeds will have lower median MCAT scores than UC premeds. Hence, a med-school looking to boost/maintain its ranking will likely admit relatively few CalState students.
However, the relatively few CalState students who do have high MCAT scores also enjoy the advantage of easier grade curves and therefore higher GPA’s.
But the fundamental problem is that rankings don’t factor in any such ‘need’ for an interesting background. Perhaps they should. Nevertheless, the bottom line is that med-schools - or law schools for that matter - who admit too many ‘interesting’ candidates who have relatively low GPA’s and standardized test scores will suffer lowered rankings according to the extant ranking methodologies.
Which only reinforces my central point: rankings influence ad-com behavior. Perhaps they shouldn’t. But they do. As you observed, (some) law-school ranking methodologies do indeed incorporate bar passage rates and obtain full-time legal employment; law-school adcoms are therefore well advised to admit students who they think likely will pass the bar and obtain full-time legal employment in order to preserve the school’s ranking. But let’s be honest: if the law-school rankings stopped incorporating bar passage rates and employment rates into their methodology, then law-school adcoms would not be quite so keen to admit such students.
The upshot is simple: we shouldn’t be so naive as to believe that universities are entirely immune to the influence of ranking methodologies. They are influenced. And we should be willing to admit that. Indeed, academia is replete of stories of schools deliberately trying to calibrate their programs - even employing sophisticated ‘Moneyball’-style statistical analytics - to engineer a higher ranking. For example, Northeastern has enjoyed a meteoric rise over the last 20 years in the US News ranking from #162 to #39 today. Such a rise was engineered via such tactics as:
(1)No longer requiring that international applicants take the SAT so that more of them can apply and hence more can be rejected, hence ‘improving’ selectivity. International students also tend to have lower SAT scores which means that it is better for Northeastern than they do not take the SAT at all rather than take it and get a low score and thereby hurting Northeastern’s selectivity score.
(2) Allowing the Common Application so, again, more students can apply and therefore more can be rejected and hence improve its selectivity score.
(3) Increasing the proportion of classes with a maximum class size specifically and precisely capped to 19 students. A key determinant by which US News determines the ‘Faculty Resources’ metric is the proportion of classes with fewer than 20 students. So by offering more classes capped specifically to 19 students, Northeastern boosts its Faculty Resources score.
Granted, offering classes with a maximum class size of 19 to the entire student body would be immensely expensive, for a university would need to hire more faculty and build more (small) classrooms to accommodate all of the students. However, it should be noted that US News treats all classes with 50 or more students equally (that is, a class of 50 students is treated equivalently as a lecture-hall class of 500 students). In other words, instead of having 10 classes of 50 students, you consolidate them into a single class of 500 students which is counted by USNews as just one class. A university is therefore well-advised to consolidate all of its classes with 50+ students into a few large lecture-hall classes, thereby reducing the proportion of classes of 50+ students.
A university can therefore optimize its USNews Faculty Resources score by offering a high proportion of classes of up to 19 students that serve a fraction of the student body, with the remainder of the students served by the relatively small proportion of consolidated lecture-hall classes. One can then invoke an elementary optimization algorithm to determine the best proportion of small and large classes that maximize its score whilst still accommodating all of its students.
(4) Introducing the N.U.in program where incoming students with relatively low GPA’s and SAT scores can spend their incoming fall semester abroad and become formal Northeastern students starting the following spring. As spring matriculants are not included in the USNews methodology, their low GPA’s and SAT scores do not hurt Northeastern’s selectivity score.
(5) Large-scale networking (basically, butt-kissing) of Presidents, Deans, and Provosts of other universities along with the school counselors at the nation’s USNews gold/silver/bronze-medal winning high schools: the very same people who just so happen to fill out the surveys that determine a school’s USNews Peer Assessment score.
I could go on and on. The upshot is that med-schools and law-schools, like universities, are incentivized by ranking methodologies. Insofar as med-school rankings continue to determine selectivity scores by applicant GPA’s without regard for the difficulty of the applicants’ undergrad program, med-school adcoms have less incentive to consider such difficulty.
I have read over and over again on CC that law schools and medical schools do not care about where people went to UG, and the only things matter are LSAT and GPA, but at some point common sense has to prevail.
We know to get into top law schools, one probably should have 3.8+ GPA and over 170 LSAT. How many top tier college students with 3.8+ GPA want to go to law school? (probably quite a few) And if they could get into those top tier colleges then it is pretty likely they could get 170+ LSAT scores. If you were a law school adcom would you think, “3.8 from a top tier college is the same as 3.8 from community college or 2nd/3rd tier college?” If I were a top law school adcom, I would only take students from lower tier schools with near perfect stats when I have a large pool of applicants from top tier UG schools with median stats to choose from.
This is Yale Law school UG represented: https://law.yale.edu/admissions/profiles-statistics/entering-class-profile
They are schools that we are all familiar with. It doesn’t show how many students from each UG school, but years ago when they used to post it, I saw majority of students were from Harvard, Yale and other top UG schools (large percentage were from Harvard and Yale), but only a handful from outside of top 20 schools.
To carry this a bit further…I think we would agree students from Cornell, JHU, NU, Chicago are probably just as good test takers as students from Harvard and Yale, and their GPAs from those institutions are probably just as competitive as GPAs from Harvard or Yale. So why did Yale admit more students from Harvard and Yale than any other UG schools? (Last time I saw the break down with numbers was 6-8 years ago)
Hey, surely you’ve heard the old saying: Common sense is not that common.
Actually, what I as a law school adcom would be thinking is: “The extant ranking methodology treats GPA’s equivalently regardless of where they were earned. I know that top-tier GPA’s are not the same as community college GPA’s. But the rankings don’t care about the difference. And that’s not going to change anytime soon, if ever. So if I admit too many students with middling stats whereas the competitor law schools don’t, then according to the ranking methodology, my law school’s ranking will decline relative to those other law schools. I would then surely find myself in a dreadful meeting with the Dean where I would be ordered to explain why I caused the law school’s ranking to drop. I might even get fired during that meeting. From a career standpoint, it’s therefore professionally safer for me to simply admit a student body that optimizes our ranking according to the extant ranking methodology.”
Actually, I believe this premise to be flawed. Harvard and Yale are (in)famous for high grade inflation relative to NU and Cornell and certainly more so than JHU and Chicago, which are notorious for harsh grading. I would therefore surmise that equivalently strong test-takers distributed across that complete set of schools would obtain lower average grades at the latter subset than at the former.
I think you are missing my point, or maybe I am not making myself clear enough. If I have enough students from top tier schools with stats to fill my spots, why would I take students from lower tier schools with similar stats? The only reason for me to take students from lower tier schools would be if they have near perfect stats (4.0 and close to 180 LSAT) or in the top range of my school’s stats. I also believe once students have certain stats, some law schools also haver their UG preferences, like Harvard and Yale law schools.
That’s a rather serious conditional that I believes renders your point moot. The truth is that most law schools are not top-ranked law schools and therefore do not draw a large number of applicants with top-tier stats from top-tier undergrad programs in the first place. Let’s face it: If you’re Wayne Street University Law School - which I select because it is ranked #100 in the latest USNews and is therefore representative of an ‘average’ law school - you’re not going to receive many high-stat applicants from top-tier schools. Of those that you do receive and then admit, many (probably most) won’t actually accept your offer of admission, but instead will turn you down for a higher-ranked law school to which they were admitted.
The same holds true even if you’re one of the top-ranked law schools. While Georgetown Law is surely well established as a premiere law school, the fact is that many top-stat applicants from top undergrad programs who are admitted to Georgetown Law won’t actually come for they would rather attend another law school that is ranked even higher. {Georgetown also happens to have the 2nd largest student enrollment of any law school, which only compounds the problem of filling all of those seats with top-stat applicants from top undergrad programs.}
The upshot is that the overwhelming majority of law schools simply do not have the luxury of fillingl their seats entirely with top-stat applicants from top-tier undergrad programs. Choosing between an applicant from a top-tier undergrad program with middling stats vs. one from a low-tier program with strong stats is indeed a choice that they perennially face.
It is hard to get a job after law school unless one graduates from top tier law schools or well known regional schools that local law firms hire from. I think people should think hard about attending lower tier law schools.
@oldfort: What makes you think there are enough students from top tier schools? LSAT takers have had a dramatic decline. There aren’t enough good LSAT scores to go around, which is why you can watch the steady decline in LSAT medians at just about every law school over the past few years. Law schools can’t afford to care about things like ECs or undergrad name. Prospective law students slavishly follow the USNWR rankings, and those rankings care about GPA and LSAT and not any of the extra factors. Hence, law schools care about GPA and LSAT and not the extra factors.
Even then, many of them still won’t come. Some of them come from wealthy families and are therefore indifferent to the cost of law school anyway (and let’s face it: The most elite law schools such as HLS/YLS/SLS have plenty of students who come from wealth). Others are arguably foolish prestige-mongers who can’t properly calculate the cost of debt. {The stereotype of law schools is that they cater to students who don’t like math.} Whatever the reason may be, it remains true that even a school such as Georgetown Law will not be able to fill all of its seats with students with top-stats from top undergrad programs.
Even if that were true, given that there are over 200 law schools in the US, that means that the overwhelming majority of law schools will not have their choice of picks.
As I understand it the T14 schools below HYS are all price discounting (under the guise of various named “merit scholarships”) to top profile students to keep their class stats competitive for the rankings. Precisely because there are not , actually, enough high enough scorers to keep their reported stats pumped up to the needed levels without the price discounting. I am actually in contact with a relatively recent beneficiary of this process.
There are of course many attendees from families that are in a position to pay the attendance costs for the kids.
But for the rest, discounting can be effective within the top tier, past the tippy-top of it, because of the huge attendance cost which is not followed necessarily by a guaranteed pay-back anymore. Or certain/ guaranteed differential results depending on the school within the group. If it wasn’t effective, or perceived to be necessary, they wouldn’t still be discounting.
These days, getting into law school is one thing, getting employed afterwards is another. It’s possible that the developed abilities needed to get top grades at a top undergrad might better help one to excel in law school. Also, law firms can be snobby, and they don’t have to report stats to US News.
So even if the schools may not screen much by undergrad, that does not necessarily mean that undergrad won’t matter, in the big picture.
@oldfort: Not really. For HLS to stay competitive with SLS and YLS, given its large class size, it needs to pick up just about every top student that YLS and SLS don’t take. That doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room for caring about softs.
OP should also consider how much influence to give to his desire to be a lawyer, in deciding where to attend college now.
The LSATs are, by all accounts, very important for law school admission. Of course you cannot know for certain now what his eventual LSAT score will be. But I think there is a clue. My recollection is these tests are correlated to some extent. If your son did very well on the SATs it is reasonable to suspect he might do well on the LSATs. But if he didn’t, that makes the notion that he will get high LSAT scores somewhat suspect, to me. In which case, making a decision revolving entirely around future law school qualification may not be the wisest course of action.
If interested, OP can research this correlation matter more, I did it a few years ago but no longer remember much about it any more.
