<p>^ Yes, but HLS will take a much deeper slice of the graduating class at the most selective schools primarily because a much deeper slice of the graduating class at such schools have high LSAT scores, in the range HLS is looking for.</p>
<p>re 78. The table is labeled. It is the # of applicants for admission in the fall cycle of each of those years from the 240 UG colleges which had the highest # of applicants. I think this is a more reasonable # than the total # of students enrolled. It’s not perfect, just better.</p>
<p>Re 79. The only thing I said about rankings is that it’s silly to look at admissions stats for the #2 law school alone rather than look at the aggregate numbers for the top 3 law schools. </p>
<p>Most of my other info isn’t speculative. I don’t have current data but the UG colleges all compile this data. Plus, the info has been discussed at numerous prospective student events at these law schools. It’s simply fact that Harvard College students admitted to both Y and H for law school split 50/50 or at least they did for a period of about 7 or 8 years there when I knew people who had access to the Harvard grids. Yale College’s data used to be on-line until a few years ago. Most Yalies who got into both law schools chose Yale.I’m not speculating; I’m saying what people actually did. </p>
<p>Yale Law has over an 80%yield. <a href=“http://www.law.yale.edu/admissions/admissions.htm[/url]”>Admissions & Financial Aid - Yale Law School;
Most applicants who apply to Yale Law also apply to Harvard Law. Most people who are admitted to Yale Law are also admitted to Harvard Law. There are a few exceptions,i.e., people who get into YLS, but not HLS, but they are pretty rare.</p>
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<p>Yeah, but to say that LSAT is the be-all, end-all of law school admissions and that accounts for the over-representation of selective colleges, you basically have to argue that almost all the very smart college kids enroll and graduate from HYPS and a few other of the usual highly-selective suspects. And almost none of them go to the thousands of other colleges across the US.</p>
<p>Think about it. Harvard College graduates only about 1650 students per year. Yale even fewer. And there are over 4200 4-year colleges in the US. I don’t know exactly how many thousands they together graduate every year, but it’s gotta be huge and it totally swamps out the number that HYPS put out. </p>
<p>Yet among all those thousands and thousands non-HYPS graduates there apparently aren’t more than one or two per school in many cases - and none at all for most of the colleges who can get a great LSAT score. It’s true that all the students at HYPS and other top schools got there by being able to take tests well, but is it really true that only a few or no students at all among all those thousands at other colleges have the smarts and test-taking fire-power to keep up with Harvard and Yale kids? I don’t believe it. </p>
<p>I think there is an impressive number of a extremely smart kids graduating from the many regular state schools and other not-so-selective colleges every year. Far more than enough to totally swamp out the Ivy League and its friends in high-end law school admissions if it were true that LSAT was basically all that mattered.</p>
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<p>Well, no. In the first place, the data linked by jonri in #77 suggest Harvard and Yale grads apply to law school in far larger percentages than at most schools. In 2010-11, 316 Yalies and 320 Harvards applied to law schools. That’s over 20% of Yale’s class, and about 20% of Harvard’s. And that’s down from previous years, when the number of law school applicants represented about 25%, sometimes more, of the class at those schools. Contrast that to a school like, say, Michigan, which had 777 law school applicants in 2010-11, or a little over 10% of its class. Or Minnesota, which had 300 law school applicants in 2010-11, or somewhere under 4% of its class.</p>
<p>Second, I totally agree with jonri that you can’t look at a single school—and the #2 or #3 school at that—and draw meaningful conclusions. Just as at the undergraduate level, there are strong regional skews to law school applicant pools. It’s easy for Yale and Harvard grads to apply to Yale and Harvard Law Schools because they’re staying in-region; but I’d be willing to bet that far fewer Yale and Harvard grads apply to Chicago or Stanford. Many will apply to all the top law schools, of course, but the greater the distance, the fewer the applicants as many applicants become more selective about where, and whether, they’re willing to relocate. This is especially true with older applicants (those several years out from undergrad) as many have working spouses or partners who may find it difficult to relocate out-of-region, or at least bring added constraints as to where relocation is possible. I don’t have hard data to back this up, but I know from talking to the admissions people at the University of Minnesota Law School—a top-20 law school—that their applicant pool is dominated by Minnesotans (in-state tuition), Californians (they’ll go anywhere), Wisconsinites (right next door + tuition reciprocity at a better law school than their in-state flagship), and Illinoisans (numerous, not many spaces at top-tier law schools in the state, UMN arguably better than their in-state flagship). And I know from talking to many UMN undergrads who are applying to law schools that many will apply to UMN, Wisconsin, Chicago, and Northwestern, and maybe Michigan; but if they’re going farther afield they’re more likely to try for Stanford or USC than for a school in the Northeast, because the Northeast is not as shiny an object to them as it is to Northeasterners. That said, I’d be surprised if Minnesota produced as many as 8 or 10 undergrads per year with the combination of GPAs and LSAT scores that would make them competitive at Yale, Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, or even Michigan; most of the best and the brightest are in the sciences or engineering, and of the small number who opt for law school, most are looking to stay pretty local, either because they don’t have the stats to be competitive at the most competitive schools, or because they just prefer to stay local and are confident they can get into a pretty good law school that will give them a nice price discount.</p>
<p>And then there’s just the small numbers phenomenon. About 130,000 people a year take the LSAT these days. To be truly competitive at law schools like HLS and YLS, you’ve probably got to have, realistically, a 173 or higher on the LSAT these days. That’s the 99th percentile of test-takers. So that means there are roughly 1,300 people in the country with LSAT scores in that range. That’s a vanishingly small number. YLS will absorb about 200 of them, SLS another 200 or so (though its entering class stats are a bit lower), and HLS another 550 or so. That’s most of them gone right there, leaving other top-15 law schools to fight for most of what’s left.</p>
<p>Is it so surprising that this handful of top test scores should be somewhat heavily concentrated at a handful of the nation’s most selective undergrad institutions? I don’t think so. Notice that even the median Harvard or Yale undergrad isn’t going to get into HLS or YLS. Average undergrad GPA at Harvard is now somewhere around 3.5; similar at Yale. Average LSAT among Harvard College grads is 166, at YLS 165; those LSAT average scores are the highest for any undergraduate institution in the country. But all these figures are well below the levels needed to be competitive at HLS or YLS. In short, even if you go to Harvard or Yale as an undergrad, you’ve got to do spectacularly well relative to your peers to get into HLS or YLS, not only in grades but in LSAT scores; you’ve probably got to be in the top decile or so in both grade and LSAT scores at those schools. So in a sense it’s no different from any other school. It’s just that the density of top-end LSAT scorers is higher at Harvard and Yale than at other schools (though still a tiny percentage of the graduating class), both because of their hypercompetitive undergrad admissions process and because (it may well be the case) a higher percentage of the top students at those schools aim for law school, and aim for HLS and YLS in particular.</p>
<p>FYI, the quote below is the OP from a 2011 thread (linked below), regarding 2008 LSAT score data by undergrad institution. [bclintonk, out of curiosity I was looking for a source for your cited LSAT data for H & Y.] I could not find the source on the LSAC website.
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1190895-mean-lsat-score-undergraduate-college.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/1190895-mean-lsat-score-undergraduate-college.html</a> </p>
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<p>from the above post, the top 10 scores re-ordered…</p>
<p>166 Harvard
165 Pomona, Princeton, Swarthmore, Yale
164 Stanford, Williams
163 Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, MIT, U Penn
162 Carleton, Claremont McKenna, Hamilton, Rice, U Chicago
161 Cornell, Georgetown, Haverford, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Reed, W&L, Wesleyan, Wheaton (Ill.)
160 Tufts, William & Mary
159 BYU, Bryn Mawr, Carnegie Mellon, Colby, Colgate, Colorado Col, Emory, Johns Hopkins, McGill, NYU, UC Berkeley, Vanderbilt
158 Boston Col, Brandeis, Ga Tech, Queens (Canada), St Johns Col, UCLA, U Dallas, U Michigan, U Rochester, UVa, Washington U (SL)
157 Calvin, George Wash, Tulane, UNC Chapel Hill, U Southern California, Wake Forest, West Point</p>
<p>hmmm…wonder where Amherst went to?</p>
<p>Norwesty is absolutely correct. Getting into any selective undergrad school is mostly about your SAT score. Getting into a selective law school is almost 100 percent about your LSAT score. They really don’t care where you went undergrad. It’s about your stats. Period. So the above list is roughly correlative to the undergrad admission scores as well. SAT generally correlates to LSAT. It is what it is. </p>
<p>Sadly the trend is for for profit fourth tier law schools to pop up and admit students. They give them loans. They are deluded. No jobs. High debt. Crisis. </p>
<p>We need fewer law schools. Fewer law students. Fewer lawyers. </p>
<p>They should shut down half of us law schools. And substantially reduce the incoming classes at all remaining schools. These are the facts. Law Deans are selling false dreams.</p>
<p>According to LSAC data, less than 50% of applicants having the median LSAT and UG GPA of the HLS class profile will be admitted to HLS. Likewise, less than 75% of those having stats that matched the 75% will be admitted. There are soft factors. How big of a factor is the name of an UG is debatable. Harvard Law uses two persons to conduct interviews. One is a graduate of an elite UG and HLS and has work experience at a prestigious firm. The other person has a JD from a no-name LS but has great soft credentials.</p>
<p>These issues have been discussed a lot on the law board. Search there if you want more information. A few points:</p>
<p>You definitely do NOT have to be in the top 10% of your class at Harvard or Yale College to get into H or Y law school. Far from it. BTW, this is not only true of those two colleges; it’s also true of other top schools, e.g., Williams College.</p>
<p>“Controllable” soft factors don’t matter that much at Harvard Law. The most important one is URM status. Soft factors are more important for admission to Yale and Stanford Law.</p>
<p>At colleges at which only a small number of students apply to law school, the median LSAT can fluctuate wildly. One year, MIT topped the list with a 169.</p>
<p>I can tell you that some schools do pay attention to the undergraduate institutions of applicants, after going through the law school admissions process and choosing to attend a T10 law school.</p>
<p>Applicants know (or should know) that Harvard is the one law school that really pays attentions to where students attend for undergrad. I do not know if the same is true about Yale or Stanford. I have a sneaky suspicion that they do not really pay attention. The fact that more of their students come from prestigious universities is more a function of who applies to their law schools than preferential treatment. My law school will accept just about anybody with a high GPA and high LSAT score, but has a preference towards its own undergrad alums (20% of my 1L section attended my law school’s undergrad). </p>
<p>At the same time, it is not entirely numbers (just mostly numbers) and where an applicant attended for undergrad. There is a major trend with the T14 schools (Northwestern Law leading the pack) in the number of applicants with experience beyond the 4 years of undergrad (whether professional or academic). With these applicants, it matters less what undergrad they attended and more what they did after undergrad. To be honest, these applicants blow just about all of the students coming “straight through” out of the water on paper. Even if they have lower numbers or went to less prestigious universities, we are talking about applicants who went to the peace corps, served in the military in Afghanistan and Iraq, worked in political positions in the US government (all 3 branches), started nonprofits, former professors, etc… (and these are examples of fellow classmates of mine) </p>
<p>Think of law school admissions (and law school more generally) as a checklist of what an applicant must accomplish to get in rather than an undergraduate university or GPA/LSAT carrying the bulk of the weight. At the end of the day a 3.95 from a selective university and a 172 is only half the battle. In a way, that applicant is just a dime a dozen and will get into many of the T14 schools. However, if you add work experience, significant academic experience, or any interesting story, suddenly that student is the “must have” for most of the schools. If you think about it, thats true about undergraduate admissions as well (of course, I applied to undergrad in the “dark ages” in 2005 - where clearly we were “less competitive” than today’s kids…)</p>
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<p>My LSAC Academic Summary Report offers 164 as the mean, which places Amherst right next to Stanford and Williams, and right below HYP, Swat and Pomona… since you enjoy collecting and presenting such data.</p>
<p>Thanks kwu…I am replete :)</p>
<p>It’s for different time periods though. The median LSATs don’t remain static.</p>
<p>Also, the median numbers are officially reported to the second decimal point. I don’t think test takers get that info.</p>
<p>I graduated from Penn law school in the late 80’s. Here are just a few the undergraduate institutions where some of my classmates attended:</p>
<p>University of Delaware (2), SUNY Albany (at least 4), SUNY Binghamton, University of Dayton, Vanderbilt, University of Dallas, Franklin & Marshall, NYU, Florida State, USC, UCLA, Bob Jones University(!), SUNY Buffalo, University of Miami, University of Michigan, Lafayette, University of Illinois, University of Maryland, and Brandeis</p>
<p>While the Ivies are also well represented (we had about 40 students from my undergraduate school, Cornell, and the largest feeder school was Penn itself), success at any undergraduate school can clearly open the door to any of the top graduate programs.</p>
<p>Does anyone have more recent, detailed statistics on the undergrads represented at Harvard Law? The last piece of data seems to be from around 7 years ago. </p>
<p>I’m curious because schools can move up and down over time. For example, years ago, UChicago had ~9 students at Yale Law, and UPenn had ~7-8. Now, both schools have seen a significant jump in representation, with UChicago at ~15 and Penn at ~20. </p>
<p>Again, I wonder what the current numbers are at Harvard Law.</p>
<p>Doesn’t the data that you have 2 from U of Delaware and 40 from Cornell tell you someting?</p>
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<p>Yes. It tells me that Cornell produces a lot more law school applicants (473 in 2010-11, making it the third-highest private producer of law school applicants, after BYU and USC) than UDel (209 in the same year). It also tells me that, not surprisingly given its undergraduate selectivity (middle 50% SAT CR+M 1300-1500), Cornell produces far more top LSAT scorers (mean LSAT 161) than UDel. I couldn’t locate a comparable mean LSAT figure for UDel, but given its undergraduate selectivity (middle 50% SAT CR+M 1110-1300), I’d be surprised if it’s much above 150. The University of Vermont, which has pretty similar SAT medians to UDel, has a mean LSAT score of 152.</p>
<p>And keep in mind it’s not the middle of the class but the top end that matters here. Penn Law’s middle 50% LSAT scores are 166-171, so the average LSAT-taker at Cornell (LSAT 161) is going to fall well short of what it takes to be admitted to Penn Law. Most of the Cornell applicants who are admitted are going to come from the top quartile of Cornell’s LSAT-scorers, who by and large are likely to be those who scored 1500+ on SAT CR+M. There are just far fewer 1500+ SAT CR+M scorers at UDel, and far fewer 166+ LSAT-scorers.</p>
<p>“Again, I wonder what the current numbers are at Harvard Law.”</p>
<p>Speaking as an HLS alumni board member, I wouldn’t read much of anything into those fluctuations. The HLS class is big enough, and the number of admitted students from a school like UChicago small enough, that they’re probably just statistical noise. If anything, they might reflect a change in culture at the source schools (like more aggressive prelaw recruiting/advising) and nothing about HLS.</p>
<p>@bclintonk,
Won’t that just support the argument that doing well at UDel would have little impact on being admitted to a T14 unless the student could have the SAT scores to have gone initially to an elite college anyway? On the flip side, several T14 schools favor GPA over LSAT, e.g., Stanford and Berkeley, would the student profile in these school be tilted the other way?</p>
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<p>Well, not exactly. First of all, there are some undergrads at UDel who did have very strong SAT scores but ended up at UDel–some because it’s a reasonably priced in-state option, some perhaps because they wanted to stay in the Philly area but didn’t get into Penn, or for whatever reason. There just aren’t as many top SAT-scorers at UDel as at Cornell. </p>
<p>Second, while there’s a strong correlation between SAT scores and LSAT scores, it’s not perfect. Some people do better on the LSAT than on the SAT, some do worse. In particular, my understanding is the LSAT is correlated more strongly with SAT CR than with SAT M, so you could have some “lopsided” kids who didn’t get into (or didn’t bother to apply to) elite colleges because their SAT M scores weren’t great, but who do terrifically well on the LSAT. Again, probably not large numbers at a school like UDel, but people shouldn’t write themselves off if their SAT scores were not Ivy material, because their LSAT scores might be. On average, though, a school with more top SAT-scorers is going to produce more top LSAT-scorers than a school with fewer top SAT-scorers. And that relationship can hold even if individual results vary.</p>
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<p>I’m not quite sure what your suggestion is here. First, what’s your evidence that Stanford and UC Berkeley “favor GPA over LSAT”? I’ve never heard that (which of course doesn’t mean it’s not true). Stanford Law’s median LSAT scores are a little lower than Yale’s or Harvard’s, but so are its median GPAs. #4 Columbia has higher LSAT scores and lower GPAs than Stanford, but I’d say that’s evidence of Columbia emphasizing LSAT scores over grades, not of Stanford emphasizing grades over LSAT scores–especially since high GPAs are, on a national basis, far more common than high LSAT scores, so presumably a school like Stanford could fill its entire class with 3.9+ GPAs if it were a priority to do so. Then by the time you get to #5 Chicago, LSAT scores and GPAs are virtually identical to Stanford’s. As for UC Berkeley, it does have somewhat lower LSAT scores than similarly ranked schools, but it doesn’t have markedly higher GPAs; again, I assume it could easily fill its class with 3.9+ GPAs is that were a priority, but apparently it’s not. I’d just conclude that Berkeley has a slightly weaker entering class than its closest competitors, but it apparently makes up for that with other strengths that contribute to its high ranking.</p>
<p>Also, I think there’s an implicit assumption in your question that high GPAs are more prevalent at a school like UDel than at a school like Cornell. That’s generally not the case. Median grades tend to be higher at elite private colleges than at public ones. This is a little out of date, but in 2006 the mean grade awarded at Cornell in undergrad arts and science courses was 3.36. At UDel the average undergrad GPA in the Fall of 2008 was 3.02; in 2006, the year comparable to Cornell’s figure, UDel’s mean was 2.89. Granted, these aren’t measuring exactly the same thing, but we can reasonably infer that mean GPAs are higher at Cornell than at UDel, by a considerable margin. And these are roughly similarly-sized schools: Cornell has 14,167 undergrads, UDel has 17,120. So in all likelihood Cornell produces as many or more graduates with GPAs in the range that top law schools are looking for than UDel does. I continue to believe, however, that LSAT scores are the limiting factor here, because on a national basis they’re far rarer than high undergraduate GPAs.</p>