“@Hanna, do you really think so?”
Absolutely. I worked at Northwestern Law for five years and have been a law school admissions consultant since 1999. Law schools, including those at the top, are under such thrall to the US News rankings that their freedom to take the students they want, as opposed to the numbers they need, is severely constrained. Everybody up to and including the dean of a law school is in danger of losing their job if lower GPA numbers cause the ranking to fall. No one, including the people implementing this system, thinks that this is the right way to admit law students.
“I know for a fact that the vast majority of national law schools review where you attended and what you studied.”
Sure, they review it. But that’s mainly for purposes for comparing one 3.5 to another. Given the same LSAT score, a 3.0 in aerospace engineering from MIT is at a marked disadvantage in law school admission compared to Elle Woods from Legally Blonde, with her fashion merchandising 4.0.
“most of those lawyers attended an elite undergrad institution as well as an elite law school.”
Most of them did…but that’s largely because of the concordance between SAT/ACT and the LSAT. People who are good at one standardized test are good at others. The LSAT is the #1 factor in law school admissions, and where are the high SAT and ACT scorers clustered?