I’m over caffeinated as well and agree with everything Evergreen has posted. But I will add- Peace Corps, TFA, Americorps, a random non-profit in your hometown that resettles political refugees, a random non-profit in your college town which advocates for disabled children getting the services they need to get an appropriate education… all of these are fine. Doesn’t need to be work experience in a business.
Back to my coffee…
No need. See Law School Transparency.
Outside of Yale, Stanford and Chicago – bcos they have small classes, they can be more choosy – law school admissions is basically two numbers: GPA & LSAT. Of course, Yale & Harvard & Amherst grads do well in professional school admissions, as those schools select only students who are excellent test takers, i.e., they have some of the highest average SAT/ACT scores in the nation, so those same students will ace the LSAT. Said another way, a student with a 173+ from Willamette (the last school on your list) and a 3.9 GPA will not only have a great shot at most of the T14, i.e., high probability of admissions, but will also be extremely competitive at Harvard Law.
Concur.
College Transisiotn is making a big stretch. Correlation does not equal causation.
Look at the labeling of their tables – Attend Any Law School – which is rediculous on its face. “Any” law school, includes part-time, night, and non-accredited, most of which are relatively easy admits. There are 300+ accredited law schools, and those down in the bottom third have admit rates above 50%, with below average GPA’s and below average LSAT scores. No special undergrad program needed.
And all of this comes out of a applicant’s 2-page essay?
Here’s an old report of LSAT by undergrad. Hasn’t been updated to my knowledge but doubt is has changed much. As Homer would say, Doh!
To my knowledge, they do not do so by undergrad of applicant. That is the information we would need to know for present purposes.
Well, for sure I think the intention of this thread is NOT to do that.
Like, the explicit point of this thread is to try to identify colleges which are not hyper selective and yet still a relatively high percentage of their graduates go to T14s. To me the very point of that exercise is that undergrad selectivity is very likely something we should be controlling for as a NOT value-added factor.
This does invite the further question of whether there are OTHER sorts of things we could look at besides selectivity that could help explain why similarly selective colleges could have very different percentages of T14 graduates.
And I gather some people believe the answer should be no, that there is nothing worth looking at. And some of us believe tentatively that maybe yes, there could actually be some things besides selectivity worth considering.
But again the whole premise of this thread is that concept, of looking beyond just selectivity to see if anything else might help guide college choice for people with possible T14 interests.
I see that, but maybe my problem is the title being about undergrad admission rates to T14s. I don’t think such data are a valid approach to the question of undergrad choice.
FWIW, I might suspect that at least one difference between a Sarah Lawrence and a Penn State is the number of students that chose to go to their undergrad based on cost. If you chose Penn State because it was your in-state flagship and cheaper than private colleges, then you may also choose a lower ranked law school that gives a scholarship or otherwise has a lower cost of attendance.
Perhaps bcos undergrad doesnt much matter. GPA+LSAT scores do matter. A lot. Recs may help on the margin – and good recs maybe easier to obtain at a private college with small class sizes – but with below average numbers, a superlative rec won’t help.
So unfortunately the information linked there does not seem to have good coverage for smaller and not highly selective colleges, presumably because they are not in the top 240 law school feeders by volume. I spotted Wesleyan, Colgate, and Amherst, but that appeared to be about it.
Just to be clear, though, the title is about finding colleges with higher admissions rates for college, and that separately have relatively strong T14 records.
I suspect this is quite right and controlling for that is going to be very tricky. This is part of why I have zero problem with College Transitions suggesting a well-regarded public could be a good choice depending on your individual needs and goals. I do think there can be some tradeoffs involved, but I would not advise people to pay anything more than they can comfortably afford for college. Or even if they just want to take the best offer and bet on themselves.
% of graduates attending T14 law school out of cohort attending any law school
Yale 72.6%
Harvard 70.0%
NYU 69%
Columbia 66.7%
Stanford 65.3%
Princeton 60.9%
Williams 59.0%
Brown 56.8%
Dartmouth 56.8%
Amherst 56.4%
Swarthmore 52.7%
U Chicago 49.0%
Duke 47.7%
Georgetown 47.0%
U Penn 45.9%
MIT 45.4%
Cornell 40.0%
Northwestern 38.0%
WUSTL 37.5%
Johns Hopkins 35.1%
Tufts 25.9%
Vanderbilt 23.0%
Notre Dame 21.8%
USC 21.4%
Emory 20.8%
George Washington 16.6%
Boston College 15.8%
Boston University 11.1%
Tulane 10.0%
Syracuse 7.40%
Villanova 6.81%
It’s a very big spread.
there are so many factors here that aren’t accounted for. one that I can think of is the gunner factor- many students at top undergrads are at those schools because they hunt for that prestige and that brand name and they have that same drive for law school (or med school or whatever). and more students (maybe) at less prestigious colleges are less hung up on the name brand thing and might be more focused on keeping costs low or on geographic preferences…
?
I see what you are saying. My issue is the premise that an undergrad’s T14 record is meaningful for a T14-aspiring individual student.
probably the ‘best’ proxy, which is readily available, would be top quartile of SAT/ACT scores. (and yeah, they’ve been inflated due to covid Test Optional.). Regardless, someone attending say, Sarah Lawrence, and pining for the T14, had better be a strong test taker to be able to do well on the LSAT. And a top quartile SAT/ACT would be a start.
Yup, as are their test scores.
It sure is!
Among other colleges on the OP’s list, just doing a few, it is:
Brandeis 22.3%
William & Mary 22.3%
Bryn Mawr 27.1%
Reed 30.0%
Oberlin 29.4%
Of course we would expect these to be on the higher end since we are looking at the top. Toward the bottom it is:
Lawrence 17.3%
Rhodes 9.2%
Fordham 4.7%
BYU 18.4%
Willamette 15.8%
I think Fordham, and really even Rhodes, suggest why it might be important to consider this denominator.
Sarah Lawrence College is an arts and (some) humanities focused school, which makes its student cohort (both overall and among those considering law school) different from that of a more generalized school.
Yeah, I’d be fine substituting that for WalletHub.
And we can see what difference it makes with a few examples.
So we did Sarah Lawrence–per the 2023-24 CDS, they were 1400 and 33. I note only 10% and 8% respectively submitted SAT/ACT.
Penn State was then 1390/32 (33% and 6% reporting). UMass was 1460/33 (27% and 4% reporting).
I would suggest this has not really helped us explain why Sarah Lawrence has such a higher percentage of its law school bound graduates ending up at T14s specifically. Indeed, if I had nothing but those numbers to go on, I would have bet on UMass.
That said, this is all somewhat problematic because we are looking at 2023-24 college admissions data, but then law school enrollment data going back to 2005. If we were serious about this, we would have to try to match up the data in terms of timing better, which I am absolutely not interested in attempting.
With some exceptions, I tried to list very selective private universities with similar tuitions and with their own law schools. Do you really think the test score differences among these schools are so great that it is responsible for this big spread in law school outcomes?
So we discussed this a bit in later posts. Penn State has the College of Liberal Arts which contains most of the most popular law school majors. UMass as I understand it basically has two most-relevant colleges, Humanities and Fine Arts and Social and Behavioral Sciences.
They then both have other undergraduate programs Sarah Lawrence does not have at all, including entire specialty schools. But to the extent we are controlling for how many people go to law school, this might at least help control for the presence of those other programs.
However, you are apparently also hypothesizing that even within the similar undergrad programs, and even limiting it to people who end up going to law school, there would still be differences between Sarah Lawrence and Penn State/UMass students within those limits.
And I strongly suspect that is right. The question would be then what role any such differences are playing in terms of T14 enrollment–which is not just an admissions question, but also a choice question.
And I do not know of any way to really reliably investigate all that.
This is part of why I try to be really careful with my takeaways, and what I meant about being inclusive as opposed to exclusive. Like, I think if you are a person interested in studying liberal arts stuff, and are also interested in maybe applying to T14s some day, and you like smaller colleges, and you specifically like Sarah Lawrence, and you can comfortably afford it–you might want to consider Sarah Lawrence! That is inclusive thinking.
In contrast, if, say, you get a great deal from Penn State or UMass, you think they would be a lot of fun, and so on, but you also are interested in liberal arts and possible T14 admissions–I would NOT say you should rule them out because of this data. That is exclusive thinking.
Thinking that way relieves you of being sure why the data looks that way. You don’t have to be sure it means a lot. You also don’t have to be sure it means nothing. Which is good, because I really don’t think anyone is in a position to be sure either way.
In the case of Fordham, I’d be very surprised if less than 90% of their prelaw students didn’t apply directly to Fordham Law which for anyone wishing to practice in NYC is a pretty good place to get started. I suspect a similar bias may be a factor in where BC and BU pre-laws apply,
Are you saying that applicants prefer to attend the law school of their alma mater over a T14 school, so they chose to attend their alma mater over a T14 school when given a choice? Or they didn’t even bother to apply to any T14 school at all?
I’m not aware of any data that would be granular enough to decide that question. I just know that if you want to practice law in NYC and/or Boston that the bar passage rates are competitive with the T14 law schools.