<p>Pardon my ignorance of the entire law school application progess, but as a fresh admit to Williams I am very curious as to how Williams' reputation fairs among the top law schoolsand, yes, I know Williams has a GREAT reputation, but how does it fair against Cornell CAS'.</p>
<p>Of what I do know about law school admissions, I know that it is largely a numbers game. The law schools have all pre-assigned certain institutions a "number," which is later multiplied by the LSAT score, GPA, etc, and the resultant quantity is factored into the entire application.</p>
<p>My question is: WHAT IS THAT "CERTAIN NUMBER" THAT WILLIAMS HAS BEEN ASSIGNED, IF ANY?</p>
<p>I'm torn between Cornell CAS and Williams College. I'm aiming to use that certain number as the major criterion: I love both schools, visited them both, and I feel that I would fluorish at either one.</p>
<p>Last year the Wall Street Journal printed an article about the top undergrad schools and how they are feeders into the top law, medical and business schools...If memory serves me right the list went something like this: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, then Williams. Williams might have been # 6 on the list, but I am positive that Cornell was not above Williams. Good luck in making your decision.</p>
<p>Found the list for you. Hope this helps.
Wall St. Journal</p>
<p>Top 50 Feeder Schools
1) Harvard
2) Yale
3) Princeton
4) Stanford
5) Williams
6) Duke
7) Dartmouth
8) MIT
9) Amherst
10) Swarthmore
11) Columbia
12) Brown
13) Pomona
14) University of Chicago
15) Wellesley
16) University of Pennsylvania
17) Georgetown
18) Haverford
19) Bowdoin
20) Rice
21) Northwestern
22) Claremont McKenna
23) Middlebury
24) Johns Hopkins
25) Cornell
26) Bryn Mawr
27) Wesleyan
28) Cal Tech
29) Morehouse
30) University of Michigan
31) New College of Florida
32) Vassar
33 University of Virginia
34) United States Military Academy
35) University of Notre Dame
36) Emory University
37) United States Naval Academy
38) Macalester
39) Brandeis
40) Bates
41) University of California, Berkeley
42) Barnard
43) Trinity
44) Grinnell
45) Tufts
46) Colby
47) Washington University
48) Washington and Lee
49) Case Western Reserve
50) Reed</p>
<p>I am not sure what number you are referring to, but a few years back (and this may be five years ago or so) Boalt-Hall law school (from Berkeley) published an index for how schools are evaluated, and I think Swarthmore and Williams were the top two (over all the Ivies, etc.) based on how GPA is evaluated. Swarthmore is notorious for grade deflation, so that was no surprise, but I think grades at Williams are on a fairly similar scale to the other top liberal arts schools and ivies, so at least Boalt Hall respected Williams basically equal to or above every other college or university in the country. If someone is able to find it and post it, that would be great, as I don't think many schools would ever allow those numbers to be made public. </p>
<p>One thing is for certain, other than Yale Law, you can get into pretty much any law school in the country with a 3.6-3.8 g.p.a. range coming out of Williams, if your LSAT score is where it needs to be. Yale you would need at least a 3.7 and likely higher. Anything above a 3.3, along with say a 170 LSAT, should get you into at least a few of the top 15 law schools.</p>
<p>Hmm..... I know someone who went to Yale Law and really had a rough time there. Said if he had to do it all over again he would have gone somewhere else. I guess it had to do with the fact that he was a very poor black student (this was in the 60s/70s) in a largely white elitist environment. He's been quite successful since.</p>
<p>I do want to offer some words of caution regarding WSJ's list. First, the so-called top med/biz/law programs are biased towards the Ivies; for example, if I remember it right, WSJ's top biz programs didn't include Northwestern Kellogg but it had Dartmouth (ridiculous!); their top law programs also didn't include Stanford; so it's no surprised that the ranking favors the schools particularly in the northeast. However, Williams and Cornell are even in this regard.</p>
<p>Cornell, being a lot more preprofessional than Williams, are probably expected to send less people to law/biz/med programs. The stats you want is probably #applied vs # admitted top top programs though they are probably difficult to find.</p>
<p>Top 50 Feeder Schools
1) Harvard
2) Yale
3) Princeton
4) Stanford
5) Williams
6) Duke
7) Dartmouth
8) MIT
9) Amherst
10) Swarthmore
11) Columbia
12) Brown
13) Pomona
14) University of Chicago
15) Wellesley
16) University of Pennsylvania
17) Georgetown
18) Haverford
19) Bowdoin
20) Rice
21) Northwestern
22) Claremont McKenna
23) Middlebury
24) Johns Hopkins
25) Cornell
26) Bryn Mawr
27) Wesleyan
28) Cal Tech
29) Morehouse
30) University of Michigan
31) New College of Florida
32) Vassar
33 University of Virginia
34) United States Military Academy
35) University of Notre Dame
36) Emory University
37) United States Naval Academy
38) Macalester
39) Brandeis
40) Bates
41) University of California, Berkeley
42) Barnard
43) Trinity
44) Grinnell
45) Tufts
46) Colby
47) Washington University
48) Washington and Lee
49) Case Western Reserve
50) Reed</p>
<p>ChuBoi, Aside from the wicked weather, Williams and Cornell are vastly different -- in size, in teaching style, in total atmosphere. Both have very good track records for getting kids into law school. Choose the one that fits YOU best. If you are happy and do well you will get into a good graduate school. If you are unhappy you may not excel.</p>
<p>
[quote]
So for medicine, our schools were Columbia; Harvard; Johns Hopkins; the University of California, San Francisco; and Yale, while our MBA programs were Chicago; Dartmouth's Tuck School; Harvard; MIT's Sloan School; and Penn's Wharton School. In law, we looked at Chicago; Columbia; Harvard; Michigan; and Yale.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>These are the graduate schools being "fed". The WSJ seems pretty biased toward schools in the northeast.</p>
<p>In Medicine: Columbia instead of WashU???
In MBA: Dartmouth instead of Northwestern???
In Law: Columbia instead of Stanford??</p>
<p>Since many college grads tend to stick around and go to grad schools in the same regions, the more the schools being "fed" are in the northeast, the better the colleges in that region are ranked as feeders. Not a surprise since many WSJ writers and editors probably went to colleges there. Had Wash and Northwestern replaced Columbia and Dartmouth, colleges in the midwest would have improved in that feeder ranking.</p>
<p>"Most of our students go to the top law schools. Many take one or two years off before going. This year we have placed 4 students at Yale which is exceptionally good given only 17 students applied to law schools and given that Yale law has a very small entering class. Yes, we place students at Harvard, Stanford, Berkley. UCLA, UVA, Columbia, Michigan. Chicago, Duke, Georgetown, NYU and others. These are all top schools.You come to the top school, if you do well here you can go to any top school of your choice. Hope you will seriously consider williams. Good luck, Fatma"</p>
<p>That information sounds fishy to me... Only 17 students??? She must be talking about the current graduating class. I graduated several years ago, and I know at least 10 people from my class who are applying to law school right now.</p>
<p>I'm sure that number is current students. The law school admissions rate coming from Williams is about as high as it gets, as is the law school placement.</p>
<p>The WSJ "stats" are adjusted for size of undergrad college. However, they only looked at a single year of admissions. When looking at the graduates of very small schools, it is extremely flawed to look at a single year, particularly when the raw number of grads going to this arbitrary group of "top" schools would only be only single digits. Just a change in a couple of grads from year to year would have a major impact on percentages. You would really have to look at this data over a ten year period for it to be meaningful.</p>
<p>In short, even though some of my favorite schools (including Williams) are at the top of this list, the statistics in the WSJ article are so flawed as to be useless.</p>
<p>It is, however, true that the rate of placements into grad schools (of all kinds) is generally higher from top LACs than from comparably selective research universities. You see this very clearly in per capita production of PhD degrees -- something that has been tracked now for 85 years by an ongoing National Science Foundation study. In virtually every field of study, the top ten in per capita PhD production is dominated by LACs.</p>
<p>If data were available, I suspect the same trend would hold true for Law and Med. It may or may not hold true for MBAs, because of the ease of obtaining an MBA from commuter schools in so many states.</p>