University of Alabama (National Merit) vs T-20 School

College Search & Selection
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It makes zero difference, law firms don’t care about undergrad. They care about law school, law school grades, and whether a student made it onto a law journal. Doing well with moot court can help a litigator.

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The data certainly seems to indicate undergraduate origin is not particularly important. Harvard Law shows their current L1 class of 559 students came from 174 different undergraduate institutions. https://hls.harvard.edu/jdadmissions/apply-to-harvard-law-school/jdapplicants/hls-profile-and-facts/undergraduate-institutions/
There are some T20s in that list and some much lower ranked schools.

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However, are certain colleges top feeders to law school because law schools prefer applicants from those colleges, or because those colleges are selective enough with respect to high school GPA and SAT/ACT score that they have a higher density of students who do well on college GPA and LSAT score?

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All these things are opaque and you never know. I heard that there is a Prof at Princeton who teaches legal and constitutional history, and that he is a tough prof, and if he gives a recc to law school, you are very likely to get into H or Y law. This suggests that there is awareness of the context of a kid’s achievements outside of GPA and LSAT. Certainly in the old days if you went to the peace corps, it was considered easier to get into a top law school. But who knows?

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Thanks for this @CCdat Great data point. So this answers my first question. I also knew friends who received admittance to Tier 1 law schools from non-target undergrad back in the '90s (med school as well) but I wasn’t aware of what the journey was like for today’s students. Also great to see some Alabama biz students landing at Goldman. Learned something new today.

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The misleading part of that is that they don’t show how many come for each schools. Yale used to show it. Half of the class came from 12 schools consistently. The other half came from the other 3,000 schools. Law schools are very incestuous.

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Ivy league schools may have grade inflation because they know many of their students go on to grad school.

While technically it’s true that no one cares about where you go undergrad, a larger percentage of Ivy League kids may have really high GPA’s which makes them natural feeders to to T14 law schools. In that sense, going to a top undergrad school may have inherent advantages.

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I went to a T5 law school. The most students from any one undergraduate college were from Harvard, 7 students. No other school had more than 4 students in our class (after Harvard the next biggest group was from Michigan). The vast majority (say three quarters) of the class were the only student from their college there. Law schools are under the same pressure to increase diversity as undergrad, so I would expect to see fewer students from any one undergrad.

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They have an incentive for diversity, but not undergraduate institution diversity.

This is old because they don’t show the numbers anymore, but Yale sends about 25 and Harvard 20 each year out of a class size of 200. (Page 157-159).
http://bulletin.printer.yale.edu/archivepdffiles/Law/Law_2015-2016.pdf

45 of 310 at UCLA are from UCLA.

UChicago accepted 39 of their own students (page8).

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Does the Ivy op’s child is considering have a law school? We don’t know. Yale law school is a bit of an outlier as it tends to attract law students who
aren’t seeking jobs in law firms and tends to value credentials important in academia.

Here’s Harvard’s list of undergraduate colleges attended by members of the class of 2025, there’s 174 schools listed because they do indeed value diversity in undergradiate college attended. https://hls.harvard.edu/jdadmissions/apply-to-harvard-law-school/jdapplicants/hls-profile-and-facts/undergraduate-institutions/

UPenn law drew from 124 schools for the class of 2025 and also indicates there are representatives of 260 colleges currently attending the school (classes 2023-2025)

Duke’s class of 2025 draws from 109 colleges and Columbia, 163 different undergraduate institutions.

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Out of a class size of 560. It actually shows they don’t care about undergraduate school diversity.

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That type of reasoning wouldn’t serve you well on the LSAT.

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That is why lawyers hire expert witnesses that understand statistics.

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Well, for the career tracks that you have mentioned, there is no doubt that an ivy would be a far better choice but a few things to keep in mind:

  1. 3 out of 4 kids will change majors, direction.
  2. A lot of kids with technical backgrounds are getting into law and consulting
  3. Even at ivies, at least based on data from the time I attended, less than 10% of the student body ended up in finance and consulting.
  4. Law school – like med schools, it is becoming very diverse as someone else pointed out. Up until 2017, where a kid went to school mattered for med school, not anymore.

It is great to have choices. Not an ivy but my son chose Alabama over NC State (much higher ranked) for engineering because he felt the love and loved the school.

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