College Counselor Sick of Reading about Golden Kids Getting into Harvard

Parents Forum
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“@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?

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It’s the same thing with medical schools. Why is that exactly? Does anybody know?

That’s certainly the way the schools market themselves. And yet we read all the time about how an upper-middle-class family can’t afford their EFC or that two comparable elite schools offered very different FA packages. I think the reasons for that are numerous, not the least of which being that each CSS profile school has its own formula for determining “need.” Some schools see a lot of home equity and assume a family can tap into that, which may or may not be possible. Private business owners frequently get hit with the full-pay bill too, even though the vast majority of their assets are tied up in companies where they may not be the sole owner, etc., so they can’t tap into it.

Where did anybody in this thread make that claim? I’ve seen some people disputing this imaginary claim, but I haven’t seen where anybody actually claimed or even suggested that “everything is the same.” There’s a difference between claiming that, for SOME students, the OUTCOMES might be the same (if the measurement is graduate school acceptances or first jobs out of college), but nowhere has anybody claimed that the colleges themselves are all “the same.”

It seems the original topic of this thread left the building back around p. 3.

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Hanna, not to argue with your expertise and experience, but the admit charts that MIT publishes on law school seems to suggest that not every 3.5 is the same. There are kids getting accepted to T-14 law schools from MIT with GPA’s that suggest that they shouldn’t be admitted. And I’d love to see data on how many kids Stonehill has gotten into T-14 law schools over the last decade.

Everyone may be intimidated by the rankings… but Elle Woods is a fictional character after all.

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@Hanna,

I am not disagreeing with what you say, but I would have thought that Yale, Harvard and Stanford really don’t need the US News stamp of approval. Are they just naturally at the top of US News because they automatically get the best students, or would they need to pay attention to the numbers as well?

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How surprising that it’s a bunch of lawyers…which emoji is the sarcasm one?

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Just looked at the US-News ranking methodology for Law School & Medical School.

For Law schools, student selectivity is 25% of the total assessment, with LSAT being 12.5%, GPA being 10.0%, and acceptance rate being 2.5%. This is a big chunk of the total.

For Medical schools, student selectivity for research schools is 20% of the total. MCAT is 13%, GPA is 6%, and acceptance rate is 1%. So GPA still matters, but MCAT matters much more.

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@LucieTheLakie, my point about financial aid was that when we see these posts about someone being “middle class” but not being able to afford full pay at an Ivy that in reality that particular family is not in the middle class. Also, if financial aid is unaffordable at schools with “billion dollar endowments” which is where this particular digression started from, it is likely to be unaffordable anywhere.

@hanna, interesting point about the relationship between SAT/LSAT results driving the fact that quite a lot of elite law schools are populated by Ivy and other elite grads. I pulled up a scatter gram of the 2013 entering class at Harvard Law, and while there were a smattering of admits in the sub 3.5 GPA category, there were precious few under @170 on the LSAT.

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Do schools take into account COL when deciding aid? I mean 125K salary in the Bay Area or Brooklyn is not the same as in rural Arkansas.

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Agreed, @Ohiodad51. And the opposite is true too, that a lot of actual middle-class families say they “can’t afford” an Ivy without realizing that (assuming their student can get admitted), it may be far cheaper than the state flagship.

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@Hanna, that is quite different from my experience at Penn, though that was now a long time ago. As a law schools admissions professional, I’ll have to defer to your view.

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Stop by the law school admissions forum here on CC. You don’t have to take my word for it.

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“Where did anybody in this thread make that claim? I’ve seen some people disputing this imaginary claim, but I haven’t seen where anybody actually claimed or even suggested that ‘everything is the same’…’’”

@LucieTheLakie , hopefully this will clear things up:

Essentially what I wrote is, all else being roughly equal, some schools provide a better education than others. And at least a handful of posters agreed with me.

You seemed to take issue with it. You have written about great outcomes for kids from State U, proud parents, questioned the “need” for a superior education, pointed out that everyone has to make their own financial decisions, etc. etc. etc. You also at least strongly implied that I’m a snob obsessed with ranking.

My comment about “all the same” was a sarcastic generalization for several of the posts in this thread devoted to disputing my view. Of course, nobody actually said those words.

Yes, there are brilliant kids all over the place.

Yes, there are many, many, many super successful kids who came from schools that are not very selective.

Yes, everyone has to make their own financial decisions.

Yes, everyone should go where they think they fit best.

Yes, great outcomes happen everywhere.

My view, again, is that on balance Dartmouth offers more to the undergraduate than Alabama. I’m not focusing on “Some”. I’m focusing on the typical case. By the vast majority of measures, it’s better. That’s all I’ve said.

There was a disagreement about debt/financial aid. I’m no expert so I let it go, though others disagreed with you.

With having repeated that again, I think we can probably let this die now, and perhaps avoid each other in the future.

Thanks.

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@Hanna , I am taking your word for it. That’s what I meant by saying I defer to your view. I don’t work in LS admissions. There’s not much more to say. If you say it’s true, then it’s true. It wasn’t when I was in LS, but things have obviously changed.

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You think Yale isn’t watching UChicago in their rear view mirror? UC has been on a tear to knock Yale off for the past few years. They are breathing down their neck right now (Yale at #3, UC tied for #4 with Stanford and Columbia).

Which does bring up the point that I don’t think we have talked about that much. There are certainly other colleges ranked higher than some of the Ivies. And sometimes students pick them – our neighbor kid picked UChicago over Harvard a few years ago. Ivy IS still at the end a sports league… their colleges are certainly highly ranked, but they are taking 8 of the top 17 college slots in US News (including ties). But they aren’t alone at the top of the heap.

Not that the original article was talking about top 20 universities, because they weren’t. But there are a lot of top colleges besides the Ivies.

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@intparent One of my students was just denied by all the Ivies and Duke, and got into UChicago.

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"Which does bring up the point that I don’t think we have talked about that much. There are certainly other colleges ranked higher than some of the Ivies. And sometimes students pick them – our neighbor kid picked UChicago over Harvard a few years ago. Ivy IS still at the end a sports league… their colleges are certainly highly ranked, but they are taking 8 of the top 17 college slots in US News (including ties). But they aren’t alone at the top of the heap.

Not that the original article was talking about top 20 universities, because they weren’t. But there are a lot of top colleges besides the Ivies."

I think most people who are applying to, and have any kind of a shot at, any Ivy League school, are aware of MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech, Chicago and several other great schools that belong in those discussions. I myself would probably choose to attend Chicago over several of the schools in the Ivy League. It would be a great place to study economics; that’s for sure.

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“I would have thought that Yale, Harvard and Stanford really don’t need the US News stamp of approval”

If you’re talking about the law schools, their standing relative to one another is life and death for the people in charge. You’re right that if they just coast, they are always going to be good law schools and attract strong faculty and students. But that’s not the standard given to their leaders. The mission is to innovate, lead, excel, and grab ALL the headlines. Harvard Law had one of its great moments in 2009 when one of its graduates swore in another as POTUS. Yale had a great season a few years back poaching HLS women professors (notably Heather Gerken and Christine Jolls). There are big grants and donations they compete for, too.

You could make a good argument that HLS was #1 50 years ago and YLS passed it because HLS was resting on its laurels and not striving.

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@Ohiodad51 It all depends on how that " need" is met. If there are no loans, then yes it may be a better option, but needs being met through parental contributions , work study etc may not be a better alternative for students that can go on a full ride with no loans. Again, case by case basis. There is no right answer for every student.

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I would so watch the thinly-veiled fictitious version of this on premium cable. When will it be available? :slight_smile:

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@MiddleburyDad2, if you would pick UChicago, why can’t you believe a student might choose to apply to Chicago instead of Ivies? One of mine did, and got into Chicago with merit aid (unhooked). And then turned them down for her one true love (Mudd). And she was a physics major, so it wasn’t the presence or lack of engineering that mattered. Not everyone is, or should be, smitten with the Ivies.