I’d be shocked if a very high percentage of Fordham undergrads who attend Fordham law didn’t at least apply to either Columbia or NYU, or possibly both.
Fordham is a terrific option. But as they say- if you don’t have at least one rejection, you haven’t aimed high enough…
True, but what are the odds that they are being squeezed out by any but Columbia or NYU undergrads?
For sure according to the pipeline chart, a lot of Fordham grads are going to Fordham Law, and then the other named law schools are clustered in the NY/NJ area.
This is not unusual for NYC, apparently. Among T14s, for example, it looks like the two biggest such effects are at NYU and Columbia, more so even than the publics.
I’m not sure what that means in terms of Fordham’s T14 ratio. But I note with NYU and Columbia, this might be increasing the T14 ratio. Hard to be sure but Columbia, and even more so NYU, is maybe a little higher on that T14 ratio list than I might have expected.
If that is right, my guess would be the Fordham to Fordham connection is also increasing the ratio of grads who end up at Fordham’s level of law school. Which is no small thing, incidentally.
But I am not sure that is so much coming out of what would otherwise be T14 enrollments. Obviously anything can happen in individual cases, though.
Edit: Oh, I checked some of the Boston schools–Harvard, BU, and BC. Harvard has the biggest such effect, and even so it was nowhere close to Columbia or NYU. BC was next, but nowhere close to Fordham. And then BU was not actually the top law school destination for BU (it was Suffolk).
Having looked around a bit, colleges in major legal markets do tend to have a lot of records for law schools in those same markets. But I am not sure there is anywhere else like NYC where these law schools get so many students from the same college.
There’s no “squeezing out” going on. Applicants who are below the stats are usually rejected-- no surprise. So reaching for NYU and ending up at Fordham isn’t a judgement on Fordham undergrad- it’s just reality of law school admissions. It gets interesting when a Fordham undergrad kid decides NOT to apply to Georgetown (a T14 law school with a skootch easier admission than NYU or Columbia) and would rather stay in NYC at Fordham vs. reaching for a potential admission to Georgetown (or Northwestern for that matter…)
Again, I would look at the bar passage rates. Not sure if Georgetown or Northwestern are as well versed in NY Civil Practice which is a good chunk of the exam, IIRC.
Not sure about the make-up of the NYS bar exam, but Northwestern and Georgetown students pass the NY bar at a similar rate to Fordham (and Cornell Law). But yeah, for NYC Big Law, Fordham punches above its weight.
Every law grad is going to take a bar review class. None of the top law schools “teach to the test”, even within their own geographic area. So I’d say this is a non-factor.
Why do so many NY firms recruit at Stanford law? They aren’t worried that their grads can’t pass the NY bar…
And given what we are looking at, if you are interested in NYC Big Law as a possible ultimate destination, I think that is a good reason to consider Fordham for college too, at least among broadly comparable colleges and possibly quite a bit more. No guarantees but with so many kids continuing on to Fordham Law, that seems worth considering to me. And just anecdotally, I know people who started networking in legal markets before actually going to law school in those markets.
I think the point here is that there’s a fair amount of overlap, in terms of destination, between IvyPlus law grads and Fordham law grads.
Agree. I just think that given the relatively straightforward nature of law school admissions, some folks are trying to muddy the water with a lot of extraneous analysis. And some of the conclusions being drawn (or suggested) are downright outlandish.
yup, Fordham Law with merit is a great opportunity for NY Big Law. (will always have a soft spot in my heart as they offered my son a full ride Mordecai scholly.)
To clarify, I selected the T14 column, not because I think that they should be the target of any students interested in the law, but because nearly everyone will agree that they are high-quality law schools, so would not question the academic quality of a student who matriculates to one. Additionally, it seems to fit in with the goals of many students/families who come to this board wanting a top name with a high rank and a low acceptance rate.
I apologize if the arrangement of the words in the title was misleading. In case it was not clear from the first post, this is not about the admission rate to T14s. It is about what colleges that have undergraduate admissions rates of 20% or higher that have relatively high percentages of its alumni who have gone on to attend a T14 law school. I have edited the title to reflect that.
Rather than taking this thread off-topic, as I had wanted the thread to discuss college options that admit more than 20% of their students that have graduates who have gone on to top law schools, I have started another thread regarding some of my thoughts:
Point well taken. And Namaste.
Thanknyou so much for collecting this data and for posting here. Very very helpful!
My apologies if it’s stating the obvious or a point made elsewhere, but one difficulty with this approach is students may actually prefer a lower ranked law school if closer to where they expect to live. For example, 17% of Carleton students come from Minnesota and about 37% come from the Midwest overall. I can absolutely see how a student from MN or the broader Midwest would prefer to attend #16 Minnesota over #14s Georgetown or Cornell. Unsurprisingly, Minnesota’s law school is easily the most popular destination for Carleton alumni.
A second problem is collecting data from LinkedIn does not appear reliable. I commented on this in the similar med school thread but it appears in the case of Carleton almost 90% of their relevant alumni were missed in the tally. I will attempt to link to that post below.
By definition it is worthless. (As any student in AP Stats will know.)
Very true! In fact, I mentioned that in the OP.
But I selected the T14 metric as there had been a thread a while back where we were discussing college graduates going on to earn doctorates, and there were people disputing the results because the alums may not have been selecting academically rigorous grad schools. Thus, to blunt that particular criticism with the sharing of this data, I went with the T14 schools as I don’t know of anyone who believes that T14 law schools are accepting students that are less than academically excellent.
Linkedin data is far from perfect. However, I was trying to prevent the perfect from being the enemy of the good in this case. Families and students may be looking/browsing for data relating to being pre-law or T14 law schools, and the schools I mentioned above would be options that seem to prepare students well enough for grad school outcomes without being as exclusive as more popular (on CC) options.
In fact, the vast majority of the schools in that first post get playtime in various threads as recommendations for students. Thus, this seems to be a sort of confirmation of the original data, that experienced posters have recommended the vast majority of these schools for individuals interested in serious academic study. Since more than 90% of the list seemed to align with general CC wisdom, I felt confident enough that the list of schools would be quality ones for families to consider.
Correlation is not causation. Wisdom is not data.
Law school admissions is a much, much different beast than Grad and other professional schools in that LS is numbers focused: undergrad GPA + LSAT. So yes, statistically you can get into Harvard Law from a low selectivity undergrad, and Harvard posts them on its website. The key is earning a high undergrad GPA and acing the LSAT. It’s just that low selectivity undergrad college has fewer folks (as a %) that have teh chops to ace the LSAT than do students attending the highly selective school. (Again, other professional and doctoral programs are different in that they are holistic, and not so numbers-focused. For them, pedigree can help.)
btw: using Linkedin and social media as “data” sources, fails most of these:
I concur. I’m not sure where anyone insinuated anything but that, but yes, students would need a high GPA and LSAT to get into a T14 law school.
The data are not being used here to determine grant funding, accreditation status, or any kind of awards. Nor is anyone saying that the percentages here are perfect and absolutely correct. The information was shared here so that families and students could have suggestions of less selective schools that they may want to research to see if they might be a good fit for their student.
Since you have expressed your concerns about the quality of the data so many times, then perhaps you could do the following:
Name the schools from the first post that you question/doubt/have concerns as to whether or not that school can provide a solid foundation for a student who wants to attend a T14 law school and/or if you doubt those schools have ever sent a student to a T14 law school.
Provide evidence from other threads on the forum where the bar for recommending schools for families to investigate is as high as it is in this thread (or the related med school one).
For convenience’s sake, these are the schools in the first post:
After all of this analysis… you’ve proven that “all things being equal, you can get anywhere in the law from anywhere”, and has anyone EVER disputed that?
The problem is that all things are usually NOT equal. And so a kid with middling SAT scores and an OK GPA from HS is going to need to significantly ramp up in college (no matter which college) to get to the LSAT/GPA level they need to make a top law school happen.
Does it happen? Yes. And nobody is disputing that. But as I’ve already noted, law school admissions are so transparent compared to other grad programs, that telling people “Your kid can get to Chicago Law School from Brandeis” is like assuring people that the sun will rise tomorrow.