<p>you dont have to go to a good university to get into a top 25 law school</p>
<p>A lot of people who say they applied to a school because of parental pressure and were upset to be rejected or waitlisted because they didn't want to disappoint their parents are actually just using the "parents" excuse.</p>
<p>Instead of saying out loud "I want to go to to *****" and then getting rejected and having people know you didn't get into a school you really liked, it's much easier to say "Oh, I just applied there because my parents said to so it's not that big of a deal except to them" and have people not feel sorry for you (or to have you not look down upon yourself for not being "good enough").</p>
<p>I think a greater number of people (especially those on this site) than you think actually believe the Ivys and other elite schools are exactly the best fit for them.</p>
<p>(intel)I cant tell if thats sarcasm or not, but i will say there is truth to that statement. I read that grad schools are more likely to accept you if your from another school...meaning undergrad harvard does not mean harvard law.</p>
<p>Lol. Good thing i want to go to stanford law school.</p>
<p>i plan on tranfering out of SJU or hunter or wherever i go to Columbia, Bowdoin, BU.</p>
<p>I'm not a prestige whore, OR a hypocrite but in my chosen career it matters..and i actually adore those schools.</p>
<p>Xellis,
I went to a 'top ten' boarding school and a 'top fifteen' (this year, hehe,) university for undergrad, so I'm being a bit hypocritical.</p>
<p>That said, I don't doubt that Ivy (and Ivy-esque) schools 'fit' a lot of these kids best, given what they want to do. However, I question WHY they want to do what they want to do... If it's because of social pressure, (e.g. peer pressure)--and frankly, I observed a lot of undergrads majoring in certain subjects b/c of social pressure--I think that a lot of kids in our generation are headed for early mid-life crises--or at least years of 'dead looks' in their eyes.</p>
<p>i agree! i am trying very hard to not be one of them! We'll have enough doctors and corporate lawyers. Do what you love..am i the only person that gets that? thankyou juju.</p>
<p>I actually unexpectedly got into Dartmouth; I self-chanced myself at getting rejected at most places save maybe JHU, CMU, and UCs (in-state). Yeah, I was pessimistic. Though I do understand why some people have that elitist attitude, I think it's best you ignore it and just go on with what you do. </p>
<p>I know I, along with a few others that attend my school, feel schools such as UC Davis are subpar, but that doesn't have to do with how good the school is. In a place like Elk Grove, we just want to get out of here, and for some unexplicable reason, we get the impression that anything close to home is bad. Of course, I know full well that Davis is a great school; and that my feelings toward it are really unjustified. </p>
<p>That said, when it comes to colleges, especially, I think the elitist attitude is ridiculous and not worth your time to worry about. From my high school, many students attend UCs, but even more opt to attend CSUs. I am highly respectful of the UC system and most the CSUs, regarding Cal Poly SLO, especially, as a very good school for engineering. </p>
<p>So yes, the elitist attitude is apparent, but I don't think it's quite so to the extent you portray. And of course, given that CC has some phenomenal students, there's bound to be a few here and there, but eh... that's how it is.</p>
<p>And one last note, it's very good that you're choosing (even if due to some unfortunate circumstances perhaps) to go to a school that fits you well. I know several people that have opted for Davis, LA, or Berkeley even and hated it; it's real good you're not going for a name because it is what you make of it. Nothing stops you from pursuing a "Tier 1" education later down the road should you go that path as long as you succeed where you are with what you're given.</p>
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^^ er... does it matter?
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<p>I'm sure it matters to some people. Hey, if it doesn't matter to you, fine.</p>
<p><a href="intel">quote</a>I cant tell if thats sarcasm or not, but i will say there is truth to that statement. I read that grad schools are more likely to accept you if your from another school...meaning undergrad harvard does not mean harvard law.
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<p>This seems to vary from school to school. I am convinced that Harvard and MIT, in particular, are 2 of the most incestuous schools in the world, in the sense of admitting their own undergrads to their grad schools. For example, it's an actual well-worn motto that the best way to get into MIT for grad school is to just go there for undergrad and just stay there. You also have the phenomenom of people who are "MIT-cubed" (meaning those people who got bachelor's, master's, and PhD's all at MIT). The same thing holds at Harvard - there are a number of full profs there who have literally been at Harvard since they were teenagers (i.e. bachelor's, master's, PhD, then became a prof there, then got promoted to full prof). </p>
<p>Other examples abound regarding Harvard and MIT of those who did not exhibit 'full incestuousness' (in that they went to the exact same school for grad), but they are at least "town-incestuous", in that they just decided to go to the 'other' school, as Harvard and MIT are in the same town just a few miles away from each other. So while you may not have stayed in the same school, you stayed in the same town. Larry Summers did his undergrad at MIT, his PhD at Harvard, then became a prof at Harvard. The 2 schools are so deeply tied that going to the 'other' school is basically quasi-incestuousness. </p>
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i plan on tranfering out of SJU or hunter or wherever i go to Columbia, Bowdoin, BU.
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<p>Uh, I thought you turned down BU. Now you want to transfer there?</p>
<p>"I'm sure it matters to some people. Hey, if it doesn't matter to you, fine."</p>
<p>I'd actually meant that at a previous comment, and then a bunch of comments jumped in the way.</p>
<p>"The notion that schools will admit large numbers of students only to flunk a bunch of them out is simply offensive - as it just wastes everybody's time."</p>
<p>Depends on what you mean by "a bunch." Berkeley, for example, only has 13% drop out, which is ~500 people. True, they probably shouldn't have gotten in in the first place, but (as the argument has gone) how does the school know who's going to drop out and who's not going to? One would then argue that the top privates are able to know for the most part, to which I would say that top privates have much smaller student bodies (and public schools are obviously less selective). But many schools--such as Berkeley or Cal Poly SLO--admit not-so-good students for a few reasons:</p>
<p>1) They're public. They need to serve the people.
2) The student very well may get through the university just fine.
3) Each student a) pays money (or some equivalent, such as work-study) and b) brings in money from the government.
4) Each student brings something to the campus: ability to function in a campus job, student organization membership, etc. They keep the university full of activity, as does every student.</p>
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1) They're public. They need to serve the people.
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3) Each student a) pays money (or some equivalent, such as work-study) and b) brings in money from the government.
.
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<p>These are valid sociopolitical reasons to admit lots of students, when analyzed at the first step. And I agree that public schools probably do only look at the first step. However, from a social welfare standpoint, we have to look at things beyond step one. </p>
<p>For example, take your point #1 - that they're public and so need to 'serve the people'. I would ask, exactly how does admitting a bunch of students who will flunk out later really 'serve the people'? I would argue that the people as a whole are actually made WORSE off. Hence, I think it is more accurate to revise point #1 to say that public schools need to APPEAR to serve the public. Whether they actually serve the public is an entirely different question. </p>
<p>Take point #3 - the money aspect. Looking beyond stage 1, the next level of analysis is to ask why the government allows this to happen - specifically, why is the government (and by extension, the taxpayers) subsiziding people who aren't going to graduate anyway. Hence, while it is certainly logical for a state school to want to extract as much money from the government as possible, even if doing so doesn't really help the common good, we then have to ask why the government allows this to happen. </p>
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2) The student very well may get through the university just fine.
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4) Each student brings something to the campus: ability to function in a campus job, student organization membership, etc. They keep the university full of activity, as does every student
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<p>But these reasons are just an argument for open admissions. If the above is true, then why even have an admissions process at all? We might as well just let everybody who wants to attend be allowed to attend. </p>
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True, they probably shouldn't have gotten in in the first place, but (as the argument has gone) how does the school know who's going to drop out and who's not going to?
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<p>And that's a question I've answered numerous times - statistical data mining. It's not that hard to write a piece of software that will spider all of the data for all of the former students who flunked out, come up with statistical regressions to identify those variables that correlate strongly with flunking out, and then simply admit fewer future candidates who exhibit those variables. For example, if there's a particular high school that seems to produce a highly disproportionate number of people who come to Berkeley and flunk out, then you should just admit fewer students from that high school in the future. It may be that that high school just does a very poor job of preparing its students, or maybe that school is just full of lazy kids... but it doesn't matter why. All that matters is that, for whatever reason, kids from that high school seem not to do well at Berkeley. It's like how, even today, nobody knows, from a biochemical mechanism standpoint, exactly how smoking induces cancer (i.e. we still don't know the reaction steps). But insurance companies don't need to know that to know that they should charge higher premiums to smokers, because it's enough just to know that smoking causes poor health.</p>
<p>You're a Harvard and BU legacy and are "desperately broke"? OK...</p>
<p>I sorta agree with the OP in that I don't get the HYPSM-or-I'll-throw-myself-under-a-train attitude. Or the I'll-die-of-embarrassment-if-I-have-to-go-to-Cornell syndrome. Or the I-couldn't-get-into-a-decent-school-so-I-have-to-go-to-Michigan paradigm.</p>
<p>In other words, I don't get the folks who see a major difference between, say, the USNews 1 thru 11 (better than 99.9% of the colleges in the country) and USNews 12 thru 40 (better than 99.7% of the colleges in the country).</p>
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intel23
Junior Member</p>
<p>Join Date: Sep 2005
Threads:
Posts: 178 <a href="http://www.law.harvard.edu/admissions/jd/colleges.php%5B/url%5D%5B/quote%5D">http://www.law.harvard.edu/admissions/jd/colleges.php
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</a> </p>
<p>Some of those undergraduate schools in the link have reputable law schools (NYU, University of Chicago, etc.), so many students attend their own law schools instead of going elsewhere. Hence, the numbers in the link can be misleading.</p>
<p>Elle, you sound like a really tight and down to earth person. I hope everything works out for the best and you can join me at BU sometime. Dont let anyone on this site bring you down. I do agree with pretty much everything you said. That being said, i'm very proud to be attending BU in September :)</p>
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Uh, I thought you turned down BU. Now you want to transfer there?
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<p>hopefully my current circumstance will change, and if it does i'd like to go. I also said it was a good fit for me.</p>
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You're a Harvard and BU legacy and are "desperately broke"? OK...
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<p>Someone in my family is sick. What people who go to these schools can't be poor? Or rather wind up poor? Please, if you think that you are very much mistaken. Life happens to everyone, no matter where you go.</p>
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Elle, you sound like a really tight and down to earth person. I hope everything works out for the best and you can join me at BU sometime. Dont let anyone on this site bring you down. I do agree with pretty much everything you said. That being said, i'm very proud to be attending BU in September
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<p>I hope to! Boston is a great town. Good luck to you in Sept, hope they put you in a good dorm ;)</p>
<p>Yeah for sure. I get priority for EDI though, so i'll have my choice :)
Thanks.</p>
<p>The fact is a good portion of the lower end of the admits to state schools end up graduating and improving both their lives and society. Is the proportion as high as the top 20% of admits where 80-90% graduate--no. But it is probably around 50% which is worth taking a chance.</p>
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The fact is a good portion of the lower end of the admits to state schools end up graduating and improving both their lives and society. Is the proportion as high as the top 20% of admits where 80-90% graduate--no. But it is probably around 50% which is worth taking a chance.
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<p>Well, it's not quite that simple, because 'taking this chance' is not without cost. You have to weigh the costs against the benefits. </p>
<p>The most obvious costs are the financial costs. Somebody is paying for these people to go to college. Either the students themselves (or their parents), or the taxpayers through in-state tuition or Federal student loan subsidies are covering the costs. I would argue that there is something unethical about taking tuition from a student when you have reason to suspect that he's not actually going to graduate, and that there is certainly something unethical about forcing the taxpayers to subsidize a person who probably isn't going to graduate. The taxpayers, in particular, ought to have the assurance that if their tax dollars are going to support somebody's college education at a particular college, that that person actually has a high chance of actually graduating from that college. Otherwise, that person should instead be subsidized to go to some other college where he does have a high chance of graduating. </p>
<p>A related issue to that is that of student motivation. Let's face it. A lot of students out there are lazy and immature and just not particularly motivated to graduate. The classic example of this would be the infamous Johnny Lechner, who's been attending the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater for 13 years and still hasn't graduated (he's finally expected to do so this year). While he's obviously at the extreme, the fact is, there are a lot of students like that. Why should the taxpayers subsidize people like that? {To be fair, the state of Wisconsin did institute the Lechner slacker tax to kill his subsidy - no doubt because of taxpayer outrage}. </p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lechner%5B/url%5D">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Lechner</a></p>
<p>But the other aspect is the career costs of those who flunk out (not those who drop out voluntarily). Flunking out of a college is a major problem for anybody, because evidence of that haunts you forever. For example, if you flunk out of college, you will find it difficult to transfer to another, because no decent school wants to admit a transfer who wasn't in good academic standing in his prior college. It hurts your chances of ever entering graduate school, because even if you do manage to transfer elsewhere and graduate there, grad school applicants often times ask whether you have ever been placed on academic probation or been dismissed from any of your prior schools. Basically, flunking out of a school is a black mark that haunts you for the rest of your life. It's not fatal - some people do flunk out and manage to succeed anyway. But why incur that black mark if you don't have to? </p>
<p>In other words, flunking out of a school makes you * worse off * than if you had never gone to that school at all. For example, I know a guy who got into Berkeley and Davis, chose Berkeley, flunked out, and so now can't even go to Davis because Davis doesn't want to admit a transfer student who isn't in good academic standing. On the other hand, if he had never gone to college at all and just went straight to work, he could apply to Davis right now as a freshman and almost certainly get in based on the strength of his old high school record. Hence, going to Berkeley has actually made him worse off than if he had just chosen to do nothing at all.</p>
<p>The point is, it's not a simple matter of 'taking a chance'. There are definite costs involved in taking a chance that fails. That Berkeley guy would probably have been better off if he had never been admitted to Berkeley at all, as he would have then gone to Davis (or, at worst, a CalState), and probably have graduated.</p>