<p>But the Alabama-Michigan grad could be paying full freight at Michigan, whereas the Harvard grad could have gotten outstanding financial aid undergrad, the taken a scholarship a UMich. </p>
<p>How much does Harvard undergrad help with clerkships, all other things being equal?</p>
<p>Clerkships are a judge specific process so there’s no general answer. Most of the people I know clerking tell me that judges care a lot about grades/LR/recommendations. A few judges request undergraduate transcripts as well, so my guess is they care.</p>
<p>I just finished five years as a judicial clerkships advisor. All things being equal, a fancy undergrad helps, especially with the more elite courts and judges. I wouldn’t let this be a dispositive factor when choosing a college, of course, but it can play a role.</p>
<p>“I think that if you go from Harvard UG to a less-selective law school (and all but a very few law schools are less selective than Harvard) it makes you look like an underachiever”</p>
<p>I had a only a couple of friends from Harvard undergrad who ended up at law schools outside the top 14. One went to BU, another to Rutgers-Newark. Career-wise, both have outperformed the expectations for those law schools. They also had good grades in law school, so there’s no reason to think the undergrad cachet is the reason they are having strong careers, but there’s also no reason to think that it was held against them.</p>
<p>If you can afford both go with Harvard, who knows you may not even want to go to law school in 4 years.</p>
<p>Thank you, Hanna, for that info rmation.</p>
<p>I will stop being so obtuse: most federal judges have very fancy academic credentials themselves, and some do the “hire people like me” routine. That may translate into a slight preference for people with the same undergrad - “Judge Smith went to Harvard, then Yale Law, and you went to Harvard, then UMich - he might be more inclined to hire you”. (Please note the prolific qualifiers throughout - I’m talking about marginal advantages.)</p>
<p>Also, let’s throw some numbers to Harvard UG and “not-Harvard” for law school. Yale, Stanford, and Harvard Law collectively enroll about eight or nine hundred 1Ls every year, but more than 900 HYS undergrads enroll in law school. Ergo, even if HYS Law only accepted its own undergrads (eschewing everyone from Princeton and MIT down to Salem State), many HYS undergrads would have to find a different place to go to law school.</p>
<p>Go to Harvard and get an entry level job in I-banking, consulting, or trading, and make the same level of salary as Biglaw attorneys do fresh out of college, without 250k in debt.</p>
<p>By the time you go to law school, law school tuition would be close to 80-90k a year. And, I suspect the level of salary for lawyers won’t increase much at all.</p>
<p>Law is a losing game, even for many within T-14 law schools. If you’ve got the chance to attend a top Ivy target undergrad, by all means, take that opportunity and do your best to get a good job/ career.</p>