<p>A few years ago I went with my daughter to a prospective students event here in San Diego sponsored by Caltech to recruit kids to apply. One of the main presenters was a UC San Diego professor who had gone to Caltech for college herself back in the day. She talked about the advantages of a Caltech education. She said one of the chief ones was a boost in grad/professional school admissions.</p>
<p>As an example she talked about the process of admitting grad school applicants to the department in which she teaches. She was on the admissions committee. And she said the committee basically had its own ranking of colleges, and they did not seriously consider applicants from colleges that fell below their cut-off. (Her point being that Caltech was a highly-selective college of great reputation that was well above any line that any grad school or medical school might have in their college ranking, and thus having attended there would be advantageous.)</p>
<p>Now, I’m sure they are many other schools and departments that might not so flatly admit that they weren’t interested in applicants from less-selective/less-rigorous colleges. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that it’s very common for some sort of similar ranking to be operating, either formally as at UCSD, or informally, or perhaps secretly, or perhaps even unconsciously, to accept the bulk of the incoming grad or professional class from a limited number selective “feeder” colleges that they highly regard. That’s how you end up with situations described by warbersrule in post #35 above.</p>
<p>It’s clear that it is sometimes possible to get into s highly prestigious grad program from a total no-name school. It happens (see post #1 above). But that tends to be an unusual event, and the applicant needs to be a complete susperstar - among the very best that school has ever produced.</p>
<p>Think about it. If grad/professional admissions were based solely on grades and test scores they wouldn’t even need an admissions committee. A computer could do it. If they really considered all colleges to be the same, if they really didn’t care where their applicants had gone to college, they wouldn’t even need to ask the name of the college you attended on the app. - just put down your GPA on the form for admissions consideration and send in an official transcript later if they are interested in you to prove you actually have to degree and grades you claim.</p>
<p>^Some of this may be true for PhD programs. But remember too that people with PhDs from top programs end up teaching at a wide range of schools. In some cases, they become conduits for their students to get to the same programs they got their terminal degrees from. They often keep in touch with their advisors and will recommend their brightest students for admission into the programs. This is why I spent time looking at the caliber of schools my son’s future professors received their terminal degrees from. At a couple of them, the admissions people specifically mentioned the personal connections the professors were able to offer their students as they applied to grad school, and as a result at even some of the less competitive schools there were a lot of kids getting into more competitive PhD programs.</p>
<p>^ What is your source for that information?</p>
<p>“They will generally accept about 5-10 people from each” does not sound like a quota. It sounds like you are describing the distribution of outcomes, not a formula for selection.</p>
<p>Yes. The college culture has a lot to do with the numbers that are being thrown around in this thread. At my LAC, which was more of a “find yourself” place than a “get a high paying career” place, only a few kids in my graduating class wanted to go to Law or Med school. But those few kids were accepted with ease into big-name programs. I also remember that for Med School in particular, our grads went to Med School in far fewer numbers proportionally than grads from Big Name Flagship State U, but our acceptance rate was higher.</p>
<p>That’s the problem. Looking from the outside it’s hard to tell the difference. Some argue that it’s a selection criterion, or at least an informal selection criterion, and others argue than it’s merely an outcome. But when the same outcome pattern repeats itself over and over, year after year, with only a little noise around the edges, it starts to look less like like an accidental or incidental outcome and more like something that was intentionally sought (see the last paragraph of post #30).</p>
<p>Not sure if it really makes sense to treat admissions for PhD programs and admissions at professional schools (JD, MD, etc.) the same, due to significant differences in selection criteria (and the different professional schools have some differences as well).</p>
<p>"^ What is your source for that information?</p>
<p>“They will generally accept about 5-10 people from each” does not sound like a quota. It sounds like you are describing the distribution of outcomes, not a formula for selection."</p>
<p>Going to Duke Law and information conversations with people.</p>
<p>It’s a feature, not a bug.</p>
<p>I know that there was pretty much a hard cap of 10% of the student body being from Duke Undergrad.</p>
<p>^That’s still a massive amount of Duke undergraduates represented although I suspect the 10% rule applies at HLS, YLS, SLS, CLS, NYU, Michigan, Berkeley, Penn, etc for their own undergraduates.</p>
<p>I don’t buy the school-by-school quota notion, which in any event seems to be based on nothing more than idle chatter among law students at one law school.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why some people on this thread seem to have such a hard time accepting what is conventional wisdom among law school applicants, law faculty, undergraduate pre-law advisers, and numerous blogs and other online information sources for law school applicants: that law school admissions these days is almost entirely numbers-driven. I’ve actually spoken to several law school deans about this in the course of doing some preliminary investigation on behalf of my daughter, who has occasionally contemplated law school as a possible next move after undergrad (though given the current state of the law job market, she’s somewhat negative on the idea at the moment). Those Deans all said the same thing: in the past we were much more holistic in admissions, but now, because of the influence of the US News rankings, it’s almost entirely numbers-driven. That’s not so say it’s a purely mechanical operation, but your LSAT scores and GPA need to put you in the ballpark, i.e., they need to put you at or above the medians the school is aiming for; “soft” factors won’t make up for sub-par numbers, though the soft factors might boost or undercut your chances once the school has determined that your numbers put you in contention. </p>
<p>Here’s how the pre-law advising office at one undergraduate institution puts it:</p>
<p>Also notice that the Law School Admissions Council–an institutional vehicle created by the law schools themselves–has an online tool that will calculate your odds of admission at various law schools based solely on LSAT and GPA numbers:</p>
<p>I would completely discount data on how the UC Berkeley Law School viewed undergrad GPAs a decade ago, as well as chatter about how grad school admissions in other fields works. Grad school admissions in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and engineering is much less numbers-driven, and factors like recommendations from top people in the field and coming out of the “right” undergraduate institution weigh heavily in that process. Law school admissions may have been more like that in the past, but no more, according to people actually in the business.</p>
<p>^"I don’t buy the school-by-school quota notion, which in any event seems to be based on nothing more than idle chatter among law students at one law school.</p>
<p>I’m not sure why some people on this thread seem to have such a hard time accepting what is conventional wisdom among law school applicants, law faculty, undergraduate pre-law advisers, and numerous blogs and other online information sources for law school applicants: that law school admissions these days is almost entirely numbers-driven."</p>
<p>As the current law school application system enters it’s terminal decline before economic implosion, I will generally agree with bclintonk above, except that, for all intents and purposes it is going to be as easy to get into HYS as it previously was to get into the T14. The law schools are currently <em>desperate</em> to keep their numbers up.</p>
<p>Law school applications are collapsing, which should lead directly to a “scholarship sweet spot” for people with good LSAT/GPAs for the next couple of years until the reset (meaning the disintegration of some law schools).</p>
<p>This is unbelievable. I’ve heard that if you work hard at any reputable institute, and exceed on your GPA and your GMAT/GRE/LSAT/whathaveyou, then you can get into a top grad school.</p>
<p>So would it be horrible to go to a school with deflated grades (U Chicago/Reed/St. Johns?)</p>
<p>Again, if you say “grad school”, do you mean PhD, MD, JD, or MBA program? All of these have different admission criteria and procedures, so it makes no sense to discuss the characteristics of their admission criteria and procedures as if they were all the same.</p>
<p>There’s been some student grumbling about grade deflation at schools like Princeton, with students expressing concerns that stiff grading policies hurt them in law school and medical school admissions. In the article linked below, one law school dean candidly admits that law schools are under “pressure” to keep their median GPAs up by "ignor[ing] differences ’ in grading policies at different schools in order to protect their US News rankings.</p>
<p>I don’t really disagree with this. It’s just that the heavy numbers of kids admitted from HYPS and other top schools make it pretty plain that one of the key soft factors appears to be the strength/selectivity of the college you went to. </p>
<p>I certainly agree that a kid from Harvard College can’t get into HLS with mediocre grades or test scores. But it’s also true that when the committee is staring at apps from two different students, one whom has excellent grades and LSATs from Stanford and the other has very close to the same stats from Cal State Nowhere, the Stanford guy, either deliberately or unconsciously, is going to look a significantly bit shinier to them.</p>
<p>If you look at [Welcome</a> to LawSchoolNumbers.com | Law School Numbers](<a href=“http://www.lawschoolnumbers.com%5DWelcome”>http://www.lawschoolnumbers.com) and its admit/waitlist/reject scatter plots, you can make a reasonable guess as to each law school’s consideration of non-GPA/LSAT criteria by the “fuzziness” of the “boundary” between the admit-dense area and reject-dense area of the plot.</p>
<p>How much that non-GPA/LSAT criteria includes prestige of the undergraduate school can only be guessed at, though the information on each student does indicate what type of undergraduate school (“top 20”, etc.).</p>
<p>^^ The LawSchoolNumbers scatterplots are interesting; thanks for the link, UCB. Need to be careful with this because it represents a smallish, self-selected sample of applicants to these schools, but the numerical relationships become fairly clear. Just as one example, at Georgetown in 2011-12, no one was rejected with a LSAT score of 170+ and a GPA of 3.0+, though perhaps 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 in this range were waitlisted; while among those with GPAs of 3.8+, no one was rejected with a LSAT score of 165+. That looks pretty numbers-driven to me. It’s also consistent with the notion that most law schools, even at pretty elite levels, will flip-flop, accepting some high-LSAT/lower GPA applicants and balancing them off with some high-GPA/lower LSAT applicants so as to maintain both their LSAT and GPA medians. So many of the admissions scatterplots look like inverted Ls.</p>
<p>I assume it’s still fairly early in the 2012-13 admissions cycle for law schools, but the early 2012-13 returns suggest both 1) some softening of numerical admissions standards, at least in the early rounds, and 2) some hardening of numerical cut-offs at many schools, especially on LSAT scores. I.e., the admitted student stats appear to be down slightly, but perhaps more determinative than ever. Both are consistent with a shrinking pool of law school applicants, with law school admissions committees being especially keen to maintain their entering class statistical profile in the face of shrinking demand, in what for law school applicants is becoming more of a buyer’s market.</p>
<p>I don’t think the numbers make it so plain. Based only on the data discussed here so far, we simply don’t know how important that factor might be. The only way to resolve this question would be to add another dimension (undergraduate institution) to the LawSchoolNumbers.</p>
<p>Selection effects include more than test-taking ability. They include ability to pay the high cost of law school as well as interest in high-status careers. All these factors together might account for the heavy numbers of kids admitted from HYPS (without any significant impact from institutional prestige).</p>