<p>To me the information shared about Harvard Law School admissions … the scattergrams and school listing … does NOT back up the claim admissions are all about the numbers. Given the assumption top students, on average, have a higher GPAs if they go to lower ranked schools then I’d expect many-many more students from lower ranked schools to be at Harvard Law then there currently are. Top students will have top LSATS wherever they go and if admissions are purely stats driven then all the 3.95-4.00s from state Us or merit scholarship Us would be driving out the 3.8 guys from the HYPS of the world. What am I missing?</p>
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<p>Where has that been demonstrated?</p>
<p>According to gradeinflation.com, the average GPA at Harvard in 2005 (the last year reported) was 3.45. The average GPA at Case Western that year was 3.25. At Michigan it was 3.24. At Colorado/Boulder it was 2.93. Unfortunately, I don’t think we have data to show average GPAs only of CW/Michigan/Colorado students who turned down more selective schools. </p>
<p>If law and med schools maintain their own detailed information about college grade distributions, then perhaps they are using it to normalize applicant GPAs. That, however, is a little different from putting a heavy thumb on the “soft factors” scale just because an applicant attended a prestigious college.</p>
<p>LSAT’s top ten</p>
<p>National Universities:
- Harvard
- Princeton
- Yale
- Stanford
- Brown
- Columbia
- Dartmouth
- Duke
- MIT
- Penn</p>
<p>National LAC’s
- Pomona
- Swarthmore
- Amherst
- Williams
- Carleton
- Claremont
- Haverford
- Reed
- Wesleyan
- Colby</p>
<p>The last three LAC’s don’t make USNWR’s current top ten, but not all LAC’s were included.</p>
<p>That is very interesting!</p>
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<p>Then why “look at” it? :rolleyes:</p>
<p>Unless you took a different stat class than I did, self-reported numbers are not data. Incomplete numbers – many WL’ed students never go back to report their outcomes – is not data.</p>
<p>LSN is just anecdotes.</p>
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<p>I agree with this. It has also been supported by posters on LSN, one of which is a former LS adcom. Many applicants on LSN also acknowledge an admissions bump for HYP grads. (Since you want to “look at” it.)</p>
<p>Ok, so I attended HLS quite a while ago, but with a class of 550 students, it was clear that Admissions was “building” a class of diverse, interesting people. I would say there were about 100 Harvard College and Yale undergrads with some other Ivies and Stanford thrown in. Then you had a bunch of top LAC kids and top publics. Then you had all kinds of kids that didn’t fit any mold, were just interesting and smart. We had students from New Mexico, all over the midwest, lots of second career people, including physicians etc. </p>
<p>Reading my alum materials, not that much seems to have changed – having top grades and stats matter, but you have to bring something more to the class. I am sure, these days, I would not have been admitted because I was just someone who loved what they studied as an undergrad and did well in school and managed to do just barely well enough on the LSAT to stay competitive. Essays and interests mattered then and must still matter. There are more than enough kids with the stats to qualify for admission, so how do you build a class? </p>
<p>Like undergrad admissions, my view is that having a strong enough record qualifies you for a lottery ticket for admissions. Maybe they pull your number out of the hat because you fill a particular need. Maybe not.</p>
<p>rhg3rd: Reed isn’t in the top 10 according to US News, but it was until they refused to be a part of the rankings. Once they came back, US News was quite vindictive by putting it in the #60’s. Also, St. Johns purposely doesn’t give US News their information (like their students being in either the top 1 or 2 percentile on GMAT/LSAT) and thus they’re in the #120’s. That’s why you need to take those rates with a grain of salt.</p>
<p>Also, US News uses acceptance rate as a part of their methodology. I will use 3 colleges to prove why this method of rating schools shouldn’t be used.</p>
<p>1.) The University of Chicago
2.) Reed College
3.) St. Johns College</p>
<p>Students who apply to any one of these three schools “know what they’re getting themselves into.” Therefore, The University of Chicago has a similar acceptance rate as Cornell University, while the credentials of the students accepted to The University of Chicago are much more impressive than Cornell’s acceptees. Reed College is considered by some (especially Loren Pope, author of “Colleges that Change Lives”) to be “The most intellectual college in the country.” The students who apply to Reed have already come to accept the fact that the students there spend on average 70 hours a week privately studying and the number of students from Reed to achieve a 4.0 GPA can be counted on one hand. St. Johns was voted the most difficult college in the country, and yet it’s acceptance rate is 86%. Meanwhile, Louisiana State University has an acceptance rate of 72%; 14% more selective than that of St. Johns. LSU is more popular because of its size and its athletics. However, I GUARANTEE you that the work ethic and intellectualism found at St. Johns is incandescent in comparison to LSU.</p>
<p>Although, I don’t particularly like rankings acceptance rate is only 1.5% of the ranking and obviously hasn’t hurt Chicago too much recently. I’m skeptical the average Reed students spends 70 hours a week per week studying as well [it seems hard to believe that Reed students work 2.5x as much as MIT students outside of class…]. I also have a hard time believing St. John’s although certainly rigorous is the most difficult college in the country as the students are considerably weaker than the students at say Caltech who work pretty hard as well. That being said those are all rigorous schools and I’m obviously not disputing that St. John’s blows away most state schools in terms of rigor and intellectualism.</p>
<p>School selectivity means absolutely nothing unless you have two identical applicants. LSAT and GPA are the main criteria. If all else is equal, then sure the MIT applicant will get the nod over a tier two school applicant. Harvard Law is large and they are interested in keeping their LSAT GPA averages. If you have a 3.9+ and a 175+ over a 96% of getting admitted. </p>
<p>[Law</a> School Probability Calculator](<a href=“http://www.hourumd.com/?lsat=175&gpa=3.9&money=no&urm=no&waitlist=no&range=no]Law”>http://www.hourumd.com/?lsat=175&gpa=3.9&money=no&urm=no&waitlist=no&range=no)</p>
<p>Top schools have top students who are more capable of attaining or bettering these threshold. Recommendations means nothing; everyone writes their own excellent letters and the faculty signs it. Community service means nothing; everyone does it. Blah, blah, blah…</p>
<p>So don’t kid yourselves that school selectivity (or major) matters because you are comparing two entirely different student populations. Again, mostly anyone can get into Harvard law as long as they have a 3.9+ GPA and a 175+ LSAT score.</p>
<p>The “waybackmachine” (an internet archive) can show past year feeder college lists, like the recent link in the OP, but with numbers from a particular college. Here’s an example…</p>
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<p>So, you’ll see that places like Duke, Georgetown, and Princeton have historically outweighed many other institutions. (Harvard & Yale take the cake!)</p>
<p>A few observations from SomeOldGuy:</p>
<p>1) Folks who note that law school admissions run largely on a GPA/LSAT matrix are right. Going to a “better” school probably gets you some slack on the GPA side but not that much. </p>
<p>2) Nobody has mentioned what I think is the most important trend in HLS admissions. According to a recent alumni mailing I got, nearly 75% of HLS’s entering 1Ls now have either work experience or a prior graduate degree. That trend had started when I was there (1990s) but has really accelerated. And I think it’s a net positive. HLS is a grueling experience – more emotionally than intellectually – and most students would be better positioned to grow from it as thinkers and as people with some additional maturity and perspective. </p>
<p>3) Consequently, I would guess that the first “tie-breaker” in admissions after the GPA/LSAT matrix is having done something interesting with your post-college time. </p>
<p>4) Anecdotally, it seems to me that HLS and other top law schools try not to overstock the entering class with their own undergrads. You can definitely get a fair shake from admissions coming from less-hallowed ground. (I did my undergraduate work at a marginally known, non-coastal state school.) </p>
<p>5) Given the debt burden from attending law school and the sea changes in the profession, anyone who is seriously interested in it these days needs to approach the decision like an MBA candidate would. DON’T plan to go to a top-tier law school immediately out of college. DO work toward having a meaningful post-college experience that shows intellectual curiosity and personal growth (and may lead you to passions other than the law). DON’T apply to law school because it’s easy, “safe,” and explainable to your parents. (The days when you could be like a classmate of mine who went to HLS because he couldn’t bring himself to tell his parents he really wanted to be at the Iowa Writers Workshop are long gone.) DO have a business plan for what you want to do after law school and how you want to use your time at law school to help you prepare for that.</p>
<p>SomeOldGuy: I agree that other than GPA/LSAT, the post-baccaulareate things you get involved in are a determining factor. There aren’t enough spots at HLS for all kids with a high GPA and LSAT. Now I begin to see why many schools offer a 5-year Bacherlors/Masters in finance program (does anybody else think that would be a good idea?) Students who do that, then work for a couple years are bound to have a better chance.</p>
<p>Wharton, which obviously isn’t a law schools (but a prestigious grad school nonetheless,) says that their average full-time MBA students have 4 years of work experience, while their Executive MBA students have an average of 10 years of work experience. </p>
<p>Good point.</p>
<p>just playing here…& this is a rough…I ‘normalized’ the 05-06 HLS feeder school enrollment data (btw, that # is all enrolled at HLS from that feeder school I believe) by feeder school undergrad population to get a sense of which schools are dominating here, although its pretty obvious. </p>
<p>Method- I divided the per-school numbers in post 70 by undergrad population found in the 2012 version of USNews rankings (it was convenient) or via cyberspace for the few not reported there (yes, the timing is off, but close enough), and converted into a percentage. I deleted the 1’s for ease. So, 1.32% for Stanford means that the Stanford-originating HLS 05-06 enrollees account for 1.32% of Stanford’s undergrad student body.</p>
<p>Again, I did this for grins…</p>
<p>SCHOOL- # in HLS -%HLS enrolled/feeder ugrad pop</p>
<p>Harvard University 232 3.50%
Yale University 126 2.39%
Stanford University 91 1.32%
Princeton University 65 1.26%
Pomona College 14 0.90%
Amherst College 16 0.89%
Brown University 51 0.84%
Duke University 55 0.83%
Columbia University 44 0.75%
Dartmouth College 31 0.74%
Williams College 13 0.65%
University of Pennsylvania 53 0.55%
Rice University 17 0.49%
Georgetown University 33 0.46%
California Institute of Technology 4 0.41%
Swarthmore College 6 0.40%
Brandeis University 11 0.33%
Middlebury College 8 0.32%
Claremont McKenna College 4 0.32%
University of Chicago 16 0.31%
Massachusetts Institute of Technology 13 0.31%
Hillsdale College 4 0.29%
Cornell University 40 0.29%
Washington and Lee University 5 0.28%
Northwestern University 22 0.26%
Barnard College 6 0.25%
Bowdoin College 4 0.23%
Cooper Union 2 0.22%
Vanderbilt University 15 0.22%
Morehouse College 5 0.21%
Emory University 14 0.20%
Wesleyan University 5 0.18%
Tufts University 9 0.17%
Wellesley College 4 0.17%
University of California - Berkeley 43 0.17%
Haverford College 2 0.17%
University of California - Los Angeles 41 0.16%
University of Virginia 23 0.16%
Austin College 2 0.16%
Alma College 2 0.14%
Yeshiva University 4 0.14%
University of Notre Dame 12 0.14%
Reed College 2 0.14%
Kenyon College 2 0.12%
Case Western Reserve University 5 0.12%
College of William & Mary 7 0.12%
Howard University 8 0.12%
Carnegie Mellon University 7 0.12%
Drew University 2 0.12%
Bates College 2 0.12%
Saint John’s College (MD) 2 0.11%
Occidental College 2 0.10%
Spelman College 2 0.10%
Washington University 6 0.10%
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor 24 0.09%
University of Texas - Austin 31 0.09%
Brigham Young University 24 0.09%
Wheaton College (IL) 2 0.08%
George Washington University 8 0.08%
Vassar College 2 0.08%
New York University 17 0.08%
University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill 13 0.07%
Hampton University 3 0.07%
Oberlin College 2 0.07%
Johns Hopkins University 4 0.07%
University of Richmond 2 0.07%
Seattle Pacific University 2 0.07%
University of Southern California 11 0.07%
Florida A&M University 6 0.06%
Tulane University 3 0.05%
United States Military Academy 2 0.04%
Boston University 7 0.04%
University of Rochester 2 0.04%
University of San Francisco 2 0.04%
University of California - San Diego 8 0.03%
University of Washington 9 0.03%
Boston College 3 0.03%
University of Florida 10 0.03%
Georgia Institute of Technology 4 0.03%
Seoul National University 5 0.03%
American University 2 0.03%
University of Pittsburgh 5 0.03%
University of Colorado - Boulder 7 0.03%
University of Georgia - Athens 7 0.03%
SUNY at Binghamton Center 3 0.03%
Indiana University - Bloomington 8 0.03%
Wichita State University 2 0.02%
University of Maryland - College Park 6 0.02%
University of Illinois - Urbana 7 0.02%
University of Miami 2 0.02%
Pennsylvania State University 7 0.02%
University of Utah 3 0.02%
University of Wisconsin - Madison 5 0.02%
University of Minnesota - Minneapolis 5 0.02%
University of Louisville 2 0.02%
Baylor University 2 0.02%
University of California - Santa Barbara 3 0.02%
University of Toronto 6 0.01%
Miami University (OH) 2 0.01%
SUNY at Stony Brook Center 2 0.01%
Ohio State University 5 0.01%
Ball State University 2 0.01%
Illinois State University 2 0.01%
University of California - Riverside 2 0.01%
University of Oklahoma 2 0.01%
University of Kansas 2 0.01%
Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey 3 0.01%
University of California - Irvine 2 0.01%
Iowa State University 2 0.01%
Michigan State University 3 0.01%
University of Houston 2 0.01%
University of Alabama 2 0.01%
University of Waterloo 2 0.01%
McGill University 2 0.01%
Florida State University 2 0.01%
University of Alberta 2 0.01%
Arizona State University 2 0.00%</p>
<p>Papa Chicken: Very nice. It’s nice to see how many kids went on to a particular school,
but nobody would be able to tell that Pomona has had better percentages than Brown, because with numbers alone (by that I mean minus percentages) it looks like Brown blows Pomona out of the water. When I finished reading that list, I saw a large number of notable schools, but I immediately went through my ‘top schools checklist,’ and thought “Where are Davidson and Grinnell, or Lawrence U for that matter?” I guess their students aren’t as driven to a law field, usually producing more students in the humanities. I did remember Grinnell being one of the top schools for sending kids to the Peace Corps,
so that could be some evidence as to what their students are interested in.</p>
<p>I’m one of the people who thinks that going to a top college does give you a bit of a bump. So, admittedly, I’m biased. However, there are lots of problems with the data people are using.</p>
<p>Looking at Brown vs. Pomona in Harvard and Yale Law Schools is unfair to Pomona because it’s going to send a lot of people who can get into both, and especially some who get into Harvard, but not Yale, to Stanford Law. More Stanford UGs will pick Stanford Law if they get into all top 3. That’s also true of Berkeley UGs; given a choice between Stanford Law and Harvard Law, many California residents (who are disproportionately represented at Berkeley) are going to choose Stanford. </p>
<p>Looking at the percentage of Harvard and Yale UGs at Harvard Law is also flawed. Yale Law is higher ranked. The ONLY UG at which Yale Law splits almost evenly with Harvard Law is Harvard College. When given a choice between the 2, Yalies generally choose Yale Law --so do students at every Northeastern college, except Harvard. So if you look ONLY at Harvard Law School data, Harvard is going to look better vs. Yale than if you look at H and Y law schools combined.
To make this data meaningful, I think you have to know the # of students from each undergrad who applied to law school–there is some data available. You should also look at YHS law school in the aggregate. (Looking at Yale, Harvard, and Virginia Law as someone did, is absurd IMO, because almost all the Yale or Harvard UGs who would choose Virginia over Columbia, NYU or Chicago, at least in the absence of major merit $, would be Virginia residents. So, leaving all the law schools between YHS and Virginia out of the calculus gives pretty meaningless results, IMO.)</p>
<p>People also forget the effect of affirmative action and “stories.” A lot of the people who get into top law schools from unknown schools are URMs. Some are “stories,” like the old poster on this board who didn’t get into YHS the first time around but spent a year as an embedded journalist in the front lines of a war zone and got in the second time around. I think that experience had more to do with his admission than his UG did. If you go to a lesser known LAC and end up as a Rhodes Scholar, yes, you’ve got an excellent shot at top law schools. But that’s not typical.</p>
<p>“So, you’ll see that places like Duke, Georgetown, and Princeton have historically outweighed many other institutions. (Harvard & Yale take the cake!)”</p>
<p>I went to a no name undergrad school and managed to go to a top 10 law school (but not Harvard). My class had a similar composition as PapaChicken’s list for HLS. Kids from all kinds of colleges (including my no name school) but with a heavy representation of kids from the usual suspect selective colleges. </p>
<p>Law school admissions is about selectivity – GPA and test scores. Undergrad admissions to highly selective colleges is also about…selectivity. </p>
<p>Ivy league schools are brimming with undergraduates who had the stuff (like outstanding standardized test taking skills) to get into the most selective colleges in the country. No surprise that that demographic of kids show up as over-represented in a very similar admissions selectivity rodeo held 4-6 years later.</p>
<p>Ivy League kids don’t get into HLS because they are Ivy graduates or what they learned while at their Ivy college. They tend to get admitted into HLS in large numbers due to the same characteristics that enabled them to get admitted into an Ivy college in the first place. Such students exist at all colleges, but there’s a higher percentage of them at Ivy-type colleges than elsewhere.</p>
<p>It’s more of a correlation relationship than a causation one.</p>
<p>These numbers aren’t perfect but they are better than total undergrad pop.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/pdfs/top-240-feeder-schools.pdf[/url]”>http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/pdfs/top-240-feeder-schools.pdf</a></p>
<p>jonri,
The table you linked do doesn’t have a clear title or explanation. What do those numbers reflect? Is it the total number of students from each undergraduate institution who applied to law schools in the year in question? That would indeed seem to be a more relevant figure than the school’s total student population.</p>
<p>jonri, I think your theories of law school attendance are totally speculative. Stanford UGs prefer Stanford Law over HLS and YLS? Yale UGs prefer YLS over HLS? In my experience as a lawyer, I think that’s not true. A Yale undergrad would be just as likely to choose HLS because they’ve had enough of New Haven for four years and welcome the diversity of experience at another school. Stanford students like to go back East for law school, especially if they are interested in being Wall Street lawyers or law school professors. Each of these schools have very defined strengths, and to reduce the choice to rankings is as wrongheaded as doing that for the college selection.</p>
<p>Papachicken - thanks for the table in post #70. That’s the much more useful list of the undergrad schools I was referring to way back in Post #6. And as I said back then, it’s true that there are bunch of less-selective colleges that get a few students in HLS, often just one or two. And as I said back then:</p>
<p>“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>