<p>Undergraduate</a> Colleges</p>
<p>I refer to this from time to time when I find a new school that I am interested in to see if it's on the list. I guess it kind of shows you that even schools like Florida State can produce kids that get into Harvard Law. In no way am I interested in Harvard or Law School for that matter, just thought it was interesting and felt I should share it with you.</p>
<p>It’s not the school you go to. It’s what you make of it. Good luck in your future endeavors.</p>
<p>@Soccerman1031, Couldn’t agree with you more. However, some institutions have pull that others don’t. By pull, I mean undeniable reputations.</p>
<p>Very true. Hope you’re doing well yourself.</p>
<p>Right, except you’d have to graduate in the top 1% of your class at Florida whatever to be taken seriously by HLS.</p>
<p>Harvard accepted just one out of forty C/O 2011 graduates from Berkeley, our nation’s best public university.</p>
<p>The average Cal needs a 3.95, while the average Eli needs a 3.75.</p>
<p>This list is a little bit deceiving because by simply listing all the schools it leaves the impression that if you go to pretty much any college you have the same odds of getting in to HLS as someone from a highly-selective college. Which isn’t the case.</p>
<p>Up until a couple of years ago HLS used to publish a much more informative list - one that not only listed all the undergrad colleges of current law students but also provided the number of law students that came from each college. And every year the Ivys and other selective schools had double digits of students at HLS, and for some schools like HYPS it was in the high double digits from each school. But the vast majority of the less-selective schools usually had just one or two. The lesson from those numbers is that from a less-selective schools you better be one of the very top kids to have a shot at HLS, but for more-selective colleges HLS will take a much deeper slice into the graduating class.</p>
<p>(cross-posted with kwu)</p>
<p>If I were interested in law school I would definitely go the LAC route–I don’t think selectivity matters as much as academic performance (as with medical school). Anyway HYPS are large universities–of course they would have more law-school applicants than a small college with a graduating class of 300.</p>
<p>Sort of scary to see Patrick Henry College on the list.</p>
<p>^^Sure academic performance matters - a lot. And it’s also true that the top LACs have a fine track record of getting their graduates into top graduate and professional programs. But don’t kid yourself into thinking that the college selectivity doesn’t also play an important role. Or that simple college size is the main thing that drives getting a lot of kids into a high-end program like HLS.</p>
<p>You can see it in the numbers (when they are presented). Selective LACs have many more graduates in high-end law schools than do less-selective LACs of similar size. And selective universities will get many more in than do less-selective universities of similar or even much larger size.</p>
<p>I would actually like to see those numbers if you have them.</p>
<p>[Harvard</a> University - Admissions Graph | Law School Numbers](<a href=“Recently Updated J.D. Profiles | Law School Numbers”>Recently Updated J.D. Profiles | Law School Numbers) might be of interest for this discussion.</p>
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<p>Perhaps this may be especially true to the extent that college selectivity is often measured by standardized test scores. While standardized test scores’ predictive power on college performance has been debated, it is likely that they are good predictors of performance on other standardized tests, including the LSAT, which is very important for law school admissions. So many more selective colleges have better standardized test takers among their students, who happen to take the LSAT well, thus improving their law school admissions prospects.</p>
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<p>This is a little dated (2007) but it’s from the era when Harvard and Yale law schools still posted the numbers of students from each institution. It shows only the top 52 schools with alumni in HLS, Yale, and Virginia, so it doesn’t bother with all the colleges that had only one law student enrolled, but it still shows what I’m talking about:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/3986135-post1.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/3986135-post1.html</a></p>
<p>Selective colleges such as HYPS gets tons of alumni into these law schools, double and triple digits, but less selective schools, even ones of much larger size, don’t do nearly as well. And it’s the same story with the LACs. Amherst and Williams are doing very well, but less selective LACs not so much.</p>
<p>If you go to the discussion boards on law school admissions, they’ll tell you law school admissions is now entirely a function of GPAs and LSAT scores. Colleges like Harvard and Yale place large numbers of their students in elite law schools because their undergraduate student bodies are already pre-selected for top grade-earners and outstanding standardized test-takers. The reputation of the undergraduate school means squat. High enough GPA and LSAT score and you’ll get into a top law school, regardless of where you went for undergrad. Off a notch on either, and you’re looking at the next tier down, whether you went to Harvard or East Podunk State.</p>
<p>I hear the same thing from my friends at our local public law school, currently ranked #19 in the country by US News, who say that even more than undergraduate admissions, law school admissions is now completely dominated by the US News rankings, in which tiny differences in the median undergrad GPAs and LSAT scores of the entering class can move a law school up or down the rankings, causing elation or wrath among current students, alums, and administrators, and affecting the size and quality of the next year’s applicant pool, with further implications for future US News rankings.</p>
<p>In that kind of hyper-competitive environment, law schools feel they have no choice but to play the US News game and do strictly “by-the-numbers” admissions. They hate it, but they feel trapped. The exceptions, I’m told, are Yale and Stanford Law Schools, which have such tiny classes and such huge applicant pools that they can afford to be more “holistic” in admissions, since they have far more top GPA/LSAT applicants than they can admit anyway, so it’s just a question of choosing among the best-credentialed. But even mighty Harvard Law School, with a class roughly 3 times the size of Yale or Stanford, is compelled to play the numbers game.</p>
<p>^ The consensus of experienced CC posters seems to be that med school admissions, too, is entirely numbers-driven. Undergraduate college reputation matters very very little, if at all.</p>
<p>I don’t know about business school admission. For earnings? Once you control for characteristics of the students, there appears to be little or no impact from college prestige on lifetime earnings. A top student admitted to Harvard and Podunk U. could choose either school and expect to have roughly the same lifetime earnings outcome. </p>
<p>There may well be good reasons for preferring Harvard to Podunk U., but it seems to be quite difficult to demonstrate significant treatment effects resulting in better post-graduation outcomes from attending a more selective school.</p>
<p>What gets confused here is whether HLS is singling out students with degrees from the usual suspects (they are not) or picking top-performing students who by and large had gone to those schools. Malcolm Gladwell points out that there are treatment-effect institutions (The Marine Corps makes you into a tough soldier) and selection-effect institutions (Modelling agencies pick the most attractive girls, they do not make them beautiful.) The big-name colleges and universities are selection-effect institutions. They do not so much make people successful as admit and graduate a very bright and driven student body that will be over-represented in Law School and other professional and graduate admissions.</p>
<p>Sort of an aside, but I wonder how many kids are actually interested in law school as high school students, and consider what might be the best path as they apply to undergrad institutions. In my experience it was mostly the people who didn’t know what they wanted to do when they graduated college who ended up in law school (and many of them are today unhappy or non-practicing lawyers). It doesn’t surprise me that a large percentage of the Harvard Law class comes from LACs and private universities rather than state flagships, since at many flagships there are more pre-professional programs–meaning a student can go right into a career after undergrad, in many cases, without needing the additional credentials of a law degree.</p>
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<p>I think colleges clearly provide both “treatment effects” and “selection effects.” To say that college is purely a selection effect institution implies that all colleges are the same - the same course offerings and requirements, the same academic rigor, the same quality of teaching, the same facilities, and the same on-campus opportunities. Under the selection effect theory the only thing that would be different is the quality of the in-coming students.</p>
<p>Anybody who has ever attended more than one college can tell you that all colleges are most certainly NOT the same.</p>
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<p>I disagree. I’ve read just the opposite from ‘experienced cc posters’. Its the numbers that score an interview for med school. But it is everything else that turns the interview into an offer. And professional schools, by definition, are prestige hounds. Always were; always will be.</p>
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<p>Exactly. LSAT is ~50% of law school admissions. And this is where it separates the colleges. A high gpa-high last from HYPS is a near auto-admit to Harvard Law (given its large class size). That same numbered-student from directional state U has to get in line, and perhaps get off the WL. I’d bet a 3.7/172 from HYPS will beat a 3.9/172 from directional state u (nearly) every time.</p>
<p>I guess I don’t understand the insistence–in the absence of evidence–that an elite undergrad education positions students better for elite law-school admission. (If anything, the link in the OP’s post, along with bclintonk’s observations, demonstrates the contrary.) Most colleges don’t have set “pre-law” curricula, meaning a qualified student can come from an obscure school with a BA/BS in whatever and still start fresh in law school alongside peers from an equally diverse variety of backgrounds. </p>
<p>It’s funny that the “prestige hounds” on this site aren’t happy with just having the prestige school on their resume or their kids’ (along with the many opportunities they believe that prestige will afford them)–they have to dismiss the possibility that “lesser” schools can also produce successful alumni who go on to great things. Not everything is an either/or proposition. The fact that Harvard Law admits kids from Campbellsville or Missouri Valley or Walla Walla College doesn’t mean they wouldn’t also like you or your kid who went to Yale or Williams, assuming a comparable level of qualifications.</p>
<p>This is a great thread. Do people know of other similar links for grad programs at other top schools? Trying to persuade H that it won’t be the end of the world if D goes to a mid-ranked school for undergrad on merit money. Most of the safety schools she applied to are on this list.</p>