BC vs traditional elites

College Search & Lists
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Well, this would be the classic example of how threads get off topic. This thread is not about law school admission practices. So I will just say I somewhat disagree, but also acknowledge I hardly have inside info. But if they are as stat driven as I have heard, then where the applicant went to school would seem irrelevant. Why take a LSAT 164 from Swat if the LSU (interesting choice you made there, red meat to a Tulane grad :slight_smile: ) grad has a 172, especially of the LSU grad also has the higher GPA. But there is the rub. Just like I said that there is a high correlation between SAT and GRE scores, there is a similar correlation to LSAT scores, especially the SAT reading section. I think we know who typically has the advantage there between an average SWAT student vs. the LSU person

That’s also why the LSAT holds such sway in the admissions process. Like I said, I don’t have inside info but my son went to a pretty obscure school in the scheme of things, Truman State, although the average test scores probably will surprise most people for a school they never heard of. MiddleburyDad will probably appreciate that they call themselves a public LAC, and it isn’t a bad description actually. He had fine grades, but he nailed the LSAT and went to a very good law school, and now practices immigration law specializing in foreign adoptions. And this was before the huge drop in law school applications.

So while I would be loathe to say that nameplate has no effect at all, I continue to think the most influential factor is that those were the better students to begin with, at least as far as stats, and they continue to be. If an Ivy stat student goes to LSU for whatever reason and does as well as one would imagine they should, they are just as likely to get into a top law school. Certainly several studies have shown that students that fit the profile I mention (accepted to an Ivy but attended “lesser” schools, usually because of cost. This was before the recent change in the Ivies meeting 100% of need) turn out just as successful in terms of earnings as their Ivy counterparts. So this is on topic to the extent that it continues to show that the nameplate is less important than the qualities of the student.

Whew!. Didn’t mean to do all that. So in the end, I think MiddleburyDad is right that for the choices this OP has, his original question is not applicable. One can argue forever when it becomes applicable, but not for these schools. Any grad school, law school or med school would say that these are excellent schools and look at the particulars, not at the school.

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MiddleDad, I just re-read all the OP’s posts in this discussion, and he’s clearly not interested in ranking these…the info he continually asks for is whether going to BC (which he clearly wants to do) will somehow put him in a category which will take him out of the running for opportunities to which grads of the other 2 have access. And the answer would almost certainly be “no.”

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@moooop I disagree entirely that “he’s clearly not interested in ranking”, and really it doesn’t matter.

as I said, he was more or less asking us to rank them. Not 1,2,3 rank, but what else does “Will grad school admissions officers value BC honors as highly as these other places?” mean then?

Read his response to my post in Post #10. He wanted to know about the pecking order … at least how the pecking order is perceived among grad school admissions types. I think you’re splitting hairs.

Also, while you may think the answer to his question would almost certainly be “no”, others, including me, disagree. BC is now a lot closer than it was when I was in school, but there are some of us who believe some admissions people would give the nod to W or P because of perceived rigor and because they know they’re both harder to get into than BC.

I respect that others, including @fallenchemist , disagree, but I disagree with their disagreement. :slight_smile:

again, it isn’t a big debate really because BC is now close enough to the others that the OP’s grad school fate is going to be much more a function of how he/she does at BC or W or P rather than the mere identity of the school.

as others have pointed out, it also does depends on what “grad school” means. if it means law school, I can say from experience that where you attended matters (see @fallenchemist 's post for a contrary view). I can’t speak for anything else with much authority.

the WSJ list, which is dominated by LACs, especially when you consider their small enrollments, is one data point, but one could argue all that means is that kids who attend LACs as a demographic tend to go on to grad school at a higher rate. I don’t know, but it’s a data point.

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Obviously I added the emphasis to point out the part I want to especially comment on.

I think this is completely wrong, because that would be saying that people don’t change in 4 years. They do, and has been observed many, many thousands of times over the years, a lot of students that did less than their best in high school blossom when they get to college. IMO it is usually because these students chafed under whatever circumstances they faced in high school, be it a home situation, the school itself, some happenstance of maturity hitting when they hit college, or a combination of these things and more. The simple fact is that a lot of students that do B work in high school become stars in college. Admissions committees for all post-undergrad schools, be it law, medicine, grad, or others know this and would be fools not to acknowledge it. For that matter on the flip side, great students sometimes crash and burn when they are given that first taste of freedom in college.

That doesn’t change what I said about there being a high correlation between standardized test scores in high school and those on the various post-undergrad tests. In fact a lot of those B students got high test scores. But even for those who didn’t and raise them 4 years later, high correlation doesn’t mean perfect correlation. So again, a student with the same resume from BC will mostly be looked at the same as those from W or P, IMO, because the schools are all way up there in quality. There might be exceptions that favor W and P for some situations, and there might be some that favor BC for some situations such as grad school in the hard sciences, if the student were able to do work at BC they just couldn’t at the others. It is so nit-picky, I think, that to choose a school based on such a consideration would be foolish. And that is what this was about, after all.

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@fallenchemist , I feel like we’re talking about two different things. My point, made in your quote from my post, is simple: admissions committees are not clueless about where people got their undergraduate GPA. That doesn’t mean that it will steer 100% of their decision 100% of the time. That would be absurd to suggest.

What it does mean is this: an admissions officer from Columbia law school, and I would suspect from many other grad programs, is going to know that a 3.4 GPA earned at Williams College is not the same as a 3.4 GPA earned at LSU (my favorite whipping post with you it seems). They know it because it’s true.

That doesn’t mean that, on the margin, a decision won’t be weighted in or against someone’s favor because of other factors. Did they overcome obstacles? Did they major in something hard? Have they shown genuine passion? What are their grade trends? When was the last time we admitted a kid from LSU? Did he win a gold medal in the Olympics? On and on and on, etc. etc. etc.

But that doesn’t mean that that one variable we’re talking about isn’t still present. I’m confident that it is.

My nephew attended law school at the University of Washington in the 90s. He used to say all the time that his class of about 150 was like a cross section of the US News rankings. Adjusting for the absolute number of graduates from the various institutions (UC Berkeley graduates a lot; Williams graduates very few), the number of kids from top schools outweighed the number from lesser schools. It’s just a fact. I saw this at Penn as well. OF COURSE we had a kid from UTEP. But we also had 18 from Princeton.

UW grad programs are notorious for positively weighting the applications from top UC schools because UW knows and respects the UCs. So my nephew’s class was full of Cal and UCLA kids. And there were like two WSU kids, a token Western kid, a token UPS kid, a token Oregon State kid, etc. etc. UW Law is top 25 and cheap, so it has always been very hard to get in. They can be and are choosy, and they definitely consider undergrad. Of course they consider LSAT heavily (all law schools do), of course they consider rigor of major, of course they consider grade trends, personal statement, demonstrated passion, history of overcoming challenges, etc. etc. This is not an all or nothing analysis.

But to say that where you went to school undergrad doesn’t matter in grad school applications strikes me as implausible and, in the case of law school admissions, I know it to be factually inaccurate. Period.

AGAIN, I say, for the Xth time in this thread, that I think BC is close enough now to W and P that the overriding factor won’t be any perceived gap between those schools and it will be 99% what the kid does at BC.

Change BC to LSU and we have a different conversation. Change BC today to BC 20 years ago and we have a different conversation.

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And I will continue to maintain that all you are citing is the correlation between the ability of students that go into schools with highly competitive admissions, and those that come out 4 years later. Of course a higher percentage of Harvard students, who went in being smarter, more academically oriented, and usually more disciplined in studying came out the same 4 years later. A post-undergrad admissions person doesn’t have to look at the nameplate, they can start ab initio and the results would be the same. The greater the gap in undergrad admissions selectivity, the more pronounced the effect, hence the obviousness of your LSU example (and I must point out the my Green Wave baseball team beat LSU for the 2nd time this year last night! Roll Wave!).

Now on the surface people might say “What’s the difference”? But there is a significant difference if your scenario means that that the Ivy quality student who chose LSU for financial or family reasons is discriminated against because he did in fact choose LSU, despite being accepted by Yale, et. al. But fortunately I don’t think he is. If he performs at LSU as well as his abilities dictate he should, he will still attend a T14 law school, and the fact that he went to LSU will make no difference.

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@fallenchemist , you may be right, but given the challenge facing ad coms and limited time and resources, my sense is that they do indeed go nameplate on that one variable more often than one might think or like. The reason is because it’s an inexact science, and they know they can’t measure it precisely. The Yale admit at LSU has to do how well? 4.0 well? I don’t know. I still think a 4.0 from LSU (you can only do so well) is at a disadvantage to a 3.6 Swarthmore kid. Yeah, the LSU kid will have choices assuming the test scores are there, but the Swat kid will have as many or more, which almost illustrates my point. If it didn’t matter, then the 4.0 LSU kid should, all else being equal, have more choices than the 3.6 Swattie. He won’t. Not in my experience.

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And while anyone is free to comment and express their views, not all views should be weighed equally. If I was considering a PhD, I would weigh more heavily the opinions of someone who knows the PhD admission process more heavily than someone who doesn’t.

Same with law school.

And law schools and PhD programs look at and weigh different things differently.

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Ad coms for law schools and grad schools don’t face nearly the kinds of number of applications to sort through as undergrad ad coms, especially these days. They can be more deliberative. In other words, that LSU student will certainly make the first cut if they have the GPA and test scores. Then the rest of their background really can come to light.