Remember that these lists are descriptive, and you don’t have enough information to assess whether there’s an advantage for graduates of elite schools. Students who attend elite schools are more predisposed to want to go to law school anyway. They are selected for their high test scores in the first place, and students who on average score higher on the SAT are more likely to score highly on the LSAT. If you have a bunch of kids who all score really highly on the LSAT, they tend to have higher admissions profiles. That does not mean, however, that an individual kid who already is predisposed to score highly on the LSAT will have a better chance at law school from UVa or W&M than Elon.
Elite school students also may be more likely to apply to law schools in the first place. For example, maybe you’ll find that, for example, 25% of the graduating seniors at UVa apply to law school but only 10% of the kids who do apply get in somewhere. But maybe only 5% of graduating seniors at USC apply but the ones who do are highly motivated and 50% of them get in somewhere. (I’m not saying that’s true or even that that’s what I believe - it’s just a hypothetical example to explain why you can’t rely on simple descriptive lists of undergrad institutions represented to make a determination about whether undergrad school matters to a particular school.)
The bottom line is - she could go to any of these colleges and get into law school.
I’m skeptical of those writing rankings…they’re derived from a single-question measure posed to high-level college officials about a very specific type of thing. I’m not super confident that the Dean of Students at Brown is intimately familiar enough with writing across the curriculum at Carleton - or, better yet, Colorado State University - to make a determination about the quality of that program. And even if they were, a single-item measure (“How good do you think the writing program is at _____?”) is a terrible way to measure that from a statistical/social science perspective.
Availability heuristic. UVa is a public university; most students at UVa are from Virginia, and probably some of the highest-achieving students in Virginia - they would pay far less for a top 15 law school education at Virginia than anywhere else. Moreover, Virginia has an obligation to serve the students of their own state. Furthermore, it’s the simple availability heuristic: If you attend UVa as an undergrad, UVa’s law school is psychologically available in your mind, so it makes sense that pretty much every UVa student interested in law school probably applies to UVa. It doesn’t prove that UVa prefers its own students. (In fact, I would expect that if they did, they would have much larger than 7% there. That means the VAST majority of UVa law students came from somewhere else.)
I mean, UCF is on the list with 5 students. UCF is a great public university, don’t get me wrong, but they have more students at Virginia than Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown, Emory, etc. Is that because UCF is better than those schools? Probably not. It’s likely because 1) UCF is enormous! and 2) HYS Brown and Emory law students may be more likely to go somewhere else (perhaps their own alma maters?) for law school. Similar story with George Mason - it’s a VA school, most attendees are residents, it makes sense. Does that mean GMU is a better choice than USC or William & Mary? Not necessarily.
If you look at William & Mary, you see the same thing. UVa leads the way (likely because of its size) followed by William & Mary (availability heuristic), and VCU (lots of VA residents + size). James Madison and Christopher Newport University show up too. Because aside from being a good law school, W&M is comparative dirt cheap for VA residents. But because there are more VCU students than, say, Cornell students, would I conclude that VCU is a better place to go than Cornell to get into law school? No.