Lots of overlap between tufts, williams & Amherst applicants and those admitted. Their high school stats are indistinguishable, and all are highly selective. You’ll be among smart peers at all these schools. What’s different is campus culture, student population size and campus size, and location. My son did a summer program at Amherst and after that realized that a remote, small town, small campus wasn’t for him. Even having just one dining hall that closed early bugged him.
He’s loved tufts and is doing a paid internship for the in-house, tufts general counsel. He’s actually doing more substantial work for them than he’d probably be doing at a law firm as a paralegal. Because he’s still not sure he wants to be lawyer vs going into consulting, he’s interviewing at Bain right now for a fall internship in Boston, another benefit to being at Tufts, or really any college near or in a city (already has a different internship lined up for summer). He’s an English major/Econ minor.
Really, you can’t make a mistake choosing either of these schools. Go for fit. If you think you’d prefer a small LAC in a small, cute town, go to Amherst. If you’d rather live on a campus that’s an easy commute to Cambridge, Somerville and Boston, and want a mid-size research university, go to Tufts. Either will get you to law school as long as you perform well academically and on the LSAT.
@thankyouforhelp-
No, I am simply saying that the mix of majors matters when attempting to predict the number of law school applications because law school is a more popular career path for some majors than others. The the numbers I provided show that the majors where law school is most popular represent a much larger percentage of Amherst’s undergraduate population than Tuft’s. This means that one would expect a higher application rate (not necessarily a higher absolute number of applications) at Amherst than Tufts.
That comment is most relevant to @merc81 tables which (because they assume an equal application rate across all majors) are biased towards schools that have a high percentage of students enrolled in majors that are popular for pre-law. (Just like starting salary data will be biased toward schools with lots of engineers, Computer Science majors, business/finance majors and nurses)
Tufts’ median early career salary is $10,000 higher than Amherst’s, but it would be misleading to claim that as a figure of merit without accounting for the mix of majors.
When looking at the undergrad populations, Tufts has about
500 Fine Arts majors
150 Child Development majors
100 Clinical Psychology majors
700 Biology Majors
700 Engineers
500 CS majors
150 Quantitative Economics majors
500 IR Majors
None of these majors (except possibly IR) is going to produce a lot of Law School applicants. Subtract these out and one is left with a big LAC. IR majors are going to be attracted to Tufts’ own Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (or one of the other top 5 IR schools in the country). If they do go to a traditional law school, one might expect them to favor a school with a strong international law program.
As far as the Yale Law situation goes, if one looks at the link I provided, the student application data shows that (for whatever reason) Yale receives the least number of applications of any top law school. (* means T14) This is why one cannot conclude much of anything from a matriculation number for a single Law School. It would be interesting to see the Amherst application numbers for Yale.
Harvard is among the top recipients of applications (about 2.5 times Yale’s number) and students who matriculate- (with seven in one year).
Int Law Rank……. School…#Applied…#Admitted…#Matriculated
………2………….GTown…53…22…5
……1………………NYU…48…18…7
………4………….Columbia…47…12…3
………7……………GWU…41…22…2
……………………BC…41…28…7
……………………BU…41…19…5
……………………UPenn…41…7…1
………3……………Harvard…40…10…7
…….10……………Duke…38…10…1
………9……………Berkeley…32…8…2
……………………Northwestern…32…11…0
…….11……………UVa…30…4…0
………6……………Michigan…29…10…0
…………………….UCLA…29…13…1
………………………NEU…28…19…3
…………………….Stanford…27…3…2
………………………Cornell…25…7…2
………………………U Chicago…25…4…0
………………………Fordham…25…14…5
………………………Suffolk…21…20…3
………8……………American…22…14…3
………………………Vanderbilt…20…12…1
………………………Emory…18…6…2
………………………Wash U…17…7…2
………5………….…Yale…17…1…1
………………………William&Mary……14…………………5…………………1
……………………….USC…15…8…2
………………………UTexas……… … 12…………………6……………………2
@Mastadon what’s the thinking behind that list of majors at Tufts? Tufts has a few dozen majors, many of which strike me as “pre-law-ish” or certainly appropriate undergrad majors for a law applicant. Where’s History, Economics, Gender Studies, Poli Sci, Philosophy just to name a few?
ETA: Oh I see you are listing majors that you think won’t apply to law school. I question a few of those but i get what you’re trying to say.
It literally will not matter for law. Law schools don’t really care about where you went to undergrad. It’s almost all LSAT+GPA. So a student at UMass with a 3.5 and 160 LSAT should basically have the same law school acceptances as a student at Tufts or Amherst with the same numbers (any boost from “prestige” will be negligible).
Neither of these are Western Hooterville State. They will both make sure you can write well and think deeply. The only variable is whether or not the student works hard and takes advantage of the educational opportunities that the classes provide.
@WildestDream that really is not the case, although a lot of people seem to think so.