Tough crowd! I think you guys are being a little harsh to @AustenNut
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Relevant pages are 116-118.
In the fall of 2018, there was 1 Brandeis student (along with 90 Yale and 54 Harvard students) attending Yale Law School.
I think it is probable that law schools exhibit some degree of institutional preference in their selection of applicants because I think that is highly improbable that the top LSAT scorers are heavily concentrated in only a handful of small, private schools.
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That might be true for regular posters on CC, but how many Chance Me/Match Me threads do we get where families are only looking at the Top X schools. The ones that the parents have heard of. The ones that their immigrant families back home have heard of. For them, Brandeis is not on the radar. How good of a school can it be if they have not heard of it? Sharing information to show that that students who are successful at these schools can achieve high outcomes is important for these populations.
There’s the kid that @thumper1 likes to refer to…the awesome kid who got totally shut out despite being totally amazing. Or other kids who are awesome and amazing but don’t make it into a school with a sub-20% acceptance rate. These are all students who would be able to go to any one of the schools on the list above, do well, score high on the LSAT, and still have great grad school options open to them.
These kids often only know about the Top X schools. Getting additional schools on their radar that are likelier to give them an acceptance and where they can still achieve their dreams is the only purpose of this thread…that keeps getting tons of pushback for reasons that are beyond my understanding.
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Law school admission stats suggest that “T14” law school admission is largely a function of LSAT score, undergrad GPA, and demographics (mostly URM status). Undergrad school name is not particularly important.
For example, in another thread, I looked up self-reported scattergrams for Chicago at University of Chicago Law School - Admissions Graph | Law School Numbers . When you exclude URMs, international, and non-traditional, there is a clear correlation with stats and decisions. At the time of the thread, acceptances were generally 3.8+ GPA and 170+ LSAT or 3.9+ GPA and 167+ LSAT. Rejections were generally <= 170 LSAT, particularly with lower GPA. Waitlists are typically borderline. These generalizations hold true regardless of name of undergrad college. Other T15 law schools I checked at the time formed a similar pattern. The outlier exceptions occurred at both highly selective undergrad colleges and less selective undergrad colleges. There didn’t appear to be a clear correlation with undergrad college name, after controlling for stats.
Consistent with this selective law schools, have matriculating students from a wide range of undergrad colleges – selective colleges, not selective colleges, big colleges, small colleges, public colleges, private colleges, … variation among almost any dimension you can think of. Of course, students attending highly selective undergrad colleges show disproportionately high rates of admission to highly selective law schools. These same undergrad colleges are also the ones where students are likely to have the LSAT/GPA stats necessary for admission. Most students at Yale/Harvard/… might have necessary stats, while extremely few would have necessary stats at non-selective open admission colleges. There are also widely varying rates of students who choose to apply to law school, as well as varying rates of students who choose T14 prestige over a big scholarship or full ride at a non T14.
For a good estimation of how college name may influence admission, it is important to control for both stats of applicants and % of students interested/applying. The ABA publishes some information about stats. One example list is at https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/council_reports_and_resolutions/May2018CouncilOpenSession/18_may_2015_2017_top_240_feeder_schools_for_aba_applicants.authcheckdam.pdf . This list includes number of applicants, mean LSAT, and mean GPA. Only top 240 colleges with most applicants are included, so Williams, MIT, and similar are not listed. Among this group, the undergrad colleges with highest mean LSAT score in 2015-2017 are below. All stats are the median among these 3 years:
Undergrad Colleges Whose ABA Applicants Have Highest Mean LSAT Score
- Yale Undergrads: 12% of students apply, LSAT = 167.8, GPA = 3.73
- Harvard Undergrads: 11% of students apply, LSAT = 167.4, GPA = 3.69
- Princeton Undergrads: 10% of students apply, LSAT = 167.1, GPA = 3.53
- Chicago Undergrads: 9% of students apply, LSAT = 166.0, GPA = 3.59
- Dartmouth Undergrads: 10% of students apply, LSAT = 165.9, GPA = 3.66
- Columbia Undergrads: 11% of students apply, LSAT = 165.8, GPA = 3.70
- Stanford Undergrads: 6% of students apply, LSAT = 165.7, GPA = 3.71
- Penn Undergrads: 6% of students apply, LSAT = 164.6, GPA = 3.63
- Duke Undergrads: 9% of students apply, LSAT = 164.4, GPA = 3.61
- Brown Undergrads: 7% of students apply, LSAT = 164.3, GPA = 3.75
- Amherst: 13% of students apply, LSAT = 164.1, GPA 3.63
- Georgetown: 14% of students apply, LSAT = 163.9, GPA = 3.63
Looking at the list above, one would expect that Yale would have the largest % of students matriculating to T14 law schools by a good margin. Yale undergrad have the highest average LSAT scores, a larger portion applying than any other of the top 10 highest LSAT score colleges, and are second only to Brown in undergrad GPA. After a good sized gap gap below Yale, Ivy+ colleges without a strong tech/engineering presence are also expected to do well (Harvard/Princeton should do well, but Stanford/Penn should be lower). Some non-Ivy+ colleges with a relatively large portion applying are also expected to do well, particularly Amherst and Georgetown. This is exactly the type of pattern we see in the list from original post. It appears to be largely a measure of what portion of students apply and their stats, rather than a list of which colleges best prepare students for law school.
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I agree that Ivy League schools possess top academic students and as a group should significantly outperform most competitor schools in terms of elite graduate school admissions. My point (although there is insufficient accessible data to prove it) is that they outperform their peers in excess to what I would expect it to be.
In your attachment, Top 240 Feeder Schools for ABA applicants 2015-2017, the Ivy schools have significantly higher mean LSAT scores (ballpark difference is an increase of 5-10 points). But a large number of Top 240 feeder schools have maximum scores (173-180, 98-99.9th percentiles) that significantly exceed those means. Assuming a normal distribution of LSAT scores, there should be a significant # of LSAT takers from non-Ivy league schools whose scores significantly exceed the Ivy League mean of ~ 165, especially considering the fact that the non-Ivy League law school applicant population greatly dwarfs the Ivy League. There aren’t many non-Ivy League matriculants on the T14 law school class lists (that are accessible to me). Most schools have zero representation and those that do typically only have 1 representative.
Here’s an example using a 3 year average from your attachment.
Florida State University
applicants/year 574
MCAT mean 157.43
MCAT max 179.33
Yale
applicants/year 190
MCAT mean 167.99
MCAT max 180
According to the Yale Daily News, 25% of the Yale Law students in 2011 attended Harvard or Yale and 50% attended an Ivy League school or Stanford. I think those are disproportionately high numbers if the selection process is solely based on GPA and LSAT score.
This topic has also been brought up previously.
Based on the above list, Yale had 162 alumni attending Yale/Stanford/U Chicago. Yale had the most representatives for both Stanford and Yale. It was ranked #4 for U Chicago. FSU only had 5 alumni attending those 3 schools- even though FSU probably had 3 times as many law school applicants as Yale.
**Yale and Stanford Law Schools are no longer publicizing the actual # of matriculants with their college of origin.
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Just to be clear. After a well thought out gap year Andison got accepted to MIT where he did both his bachelors and masters.
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Moderators, can we please close this thread? No matter how many times that I (the OP) keep on mentioning that I want the focus to be on schools with admission rates above 20%, the conversation continues to go to schools with very low acceptance rates.
I have repeatedly mentioned how the thread is not about the precision of the data, but a way of suggesting more accessible schools to families that are not all household names with single-digit acceptance rates. Despite that, the overwhelming majority of the posts have ignored that. Even if every post from here on out was relevant to the intent of the thread, few readers would wade through 66 posts to find where the thread becomes relevant to its title.
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Closed at the request of the OP.
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