<p>Taxguy, what you bring up is important but not necessarily what we're talking about here. I think the purposes of this discussion is to talk about what are the best majors to get into law school, not necessarily what are the best to have had once you are already in law-school. Particularly the elite law schools. The flunkout rate of the elite law schools is miniscule which means that once you get in, you're pretty much guaranteed to graduate. The trick is getting admitted in the first place. What does it matter if you had such a fantastic undergraduate education that you would have graduated #1 from an elite law school if you can't get admitted to that elite law school in the first place because your grades from that undergraduate education were too low? You already lost the game before you even had a chance to play.</p>
<p>I would however argue that there are important differences in the admit rates between various schools. I agree that that the differences have to do with the quality of the student body. HYPS, for example, get lots of their students into elite law schools, and a big reason for that is quite simply their student bodies are of high quality, so they're going to get very high LSAT scores. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.yale.edu/career/students/gradprof/lawschool/media/statistics2003.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.yale.edu/career/students/gradprof/lawschool/media/statistics2003.pdf</a>
<a href="http://web.princeton.edu/sites/career/Undergrad/GradSchool/pre-law8.html%5B/url%5D">http://web.princeton.edu/sites/career/Undergrad/GradSchool/pre-law8.html</a></p>
<p>However, some schools are worse than others, even when drawing upon the same quality of student body. Again, I would assert that relative to the quality of students they have, MIT is one of the worst. The MIT law-school admit rate is significantly lower than that of HYPS, despite the fact that there isn't much difference in the quality of student in those 5 schools. Unfortunately I have the MIT prelaw data in hardcopy only, so I can't post a link. But the difference is clear. MIT students do not do well, and I believe that the reason is that MIT gives out lots and lots of bad grades, and those bad grades hurt the chances of their students in getting into law school. It is also entirely possible that perhaps it's the tremendously tech-focused education that MIT provides that does not help its students write good law-school app essays or whatever. But regardless of the reason why, it doesn't take away from the fact that for some reason, attending MIT does not seem to be helpful in getting into law school.</p>
<p>As a corollary, I would also say that, for the purposes of prelaw there is a big difference between attending a school like HYPS and a state U, because of grade inflation and retention rates. The fact is, if you get into HYPS, you're pretty much guaranteed to graduate - flunking out is pretty much impossible. The graduation rates at HYPS are far far higher than that of even the best state U. And not only are you extremely unlikely not to graduate, you are also extremely unlikely to get truly bad grades. HYPS are well known for grade inflation, which means that you are effectively guaranteed to get pretty high grades. This is certainly not true of many if not most state schools where getting bad grades and/or flunking out is a perennial danger. So by booking your ticket to HYPS, you are in many ways putting yourself in a position to at least be competitive for law-school admissions. If you go to State U, hey, you may not even graduate.</p>
<p>So I would agree with you that going to HYPS or some other program like that may not affect how well you do while you're in law school. But I would argue that they do have a profound impact upon your getting into law school in the first place. In order to do well in law school, you first have to get into law school. Hence, I assert that places like HYPS are desirable places to go for prelaw, while places like MIT and Caltech are probably less desirable.</p>