Colleges with Admissions Rates Above 20% with Strong T14 Law Records

College Search & Lists
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I recently started a thread about schools with admissions rates above 20% that send a good number of students to med school, and this is the law school version.

Some students who think of themselves as “pre-law” have a desire to attend a T14 law school. @NiceUnparticularMan shared a link on law schools with breakdowns on alumni from an undergraduate institution who went on to attend law school, with a special category for the “T14” law schools.

The ranks I pulled from this Tableau page while I pulled the percentages to the hundredth place from this Tableau page (these are the sources for the info in the article linked above). For some reason Wheaton wasn’t listed in the ranked page but was in the percentages to the hundredth, so in the table below I indicate its rank as “unlisted.”

To give some framing, here’s some ranges of percentages of alums followed by what “rank” of colleges there were for that range:

  • 6.09%: #1 (Yale)

  • 4.56-4.76%: #2-3 (Amherst & Harvard)

  • 3.18-3.98%: #4-11

  • 2.09-2.94%: #12-18

  • 1.0-1.99%: #19-#55

  • 0.5-0.9%: #56-97

  • 0.01-0.49%: #98-#375

Students and families tend to have an easy time finding low probability colleges, which are those that have acceptance rate of 20% or less (i.e. rejecting at least 80% of their applicants). Thus, I want to focus on schools that have more approachable acceptance rates that still have a number of alums who have gone on to a T14 law school. Additionally, it should be noted that the T14 law schools have little geographic diversity, so there are many strong students who choose to attend a different law school due to geographic reasons.

Rank School (State) % of alums who went to a T14 law school Fall 2023 Undergraduate Acceptance Rate
#24 Carleton 1.83% 22%
#30 Brandeis (MA) 1.59% 35%
#38 College of William & Mary (VA) 1.40% 33%
#43 Bryn Mawr (PA ) 1.28% 31%
#44 Reed (OR) 1.27% 31%
#46 Oberlin (OH) 1.25% 33%
#48 George Washington (D.C.) 1.24% 44%
#49 Bard (NY) 1.14% 46%
#50 Morehouse (GA) 1.11% 52%
#52 Scripps (CA) 1.06% 34%
#53 Mount Holyoke (MA) 1.03% 38%
#54 Occidental (CA) 1.01% 40%
#55 Sarah Lawrence (NY) 1.00% 59%
#59 Whitman (WA) 0.91% 50%
#60 American (D.C.) 0.89% 47%
#61 Wake Forest (NC) 0.89% 22%
#62 Macalester (MN) 0.88% 28%
#63 Connecticut College 0.86% 38%
#65 Kenyon (OH) 0.82% 31%
#66 St. John’s College (MD & NM) 0.78% 44% (MD) & 49% (NM)
#70 Spelman (GA) 0.71% 34%
#71 Yeshiva (NY) 0.70% 64%
#73 Kalamazoo (MI) 0.65% 76%
#74 Dickinson (PA ) 0.63% 43%
#75 Trinity College (CT) 0.63% 34%
#77 Santa Clara (CA) 0.62% 44%
#78 Howard (D.C.) 0.62% 35%
#81 U. of Rochester (NY) 0.61% 36%
#82 Franklin & Marshall (PA ) 0.61% 32%
Unlisted Wheaton (IL) 0.58% 90%
#84 Lawrence (WI) 0.58% 63%
#85 Rhodes (TN) 0.57% 50%
#86 Fordham (NY) 0.57% 56%
#87 Brigham Young - Provo 0.57% 69%
#88 Willamette (OR) 0.57% 79%

Missing ranks are for schools whose acceptance rate is 20% or below. And I went through all schools that rounded to a 0.6% of alums who went to a T14 law school, as I needed to stop somewhere, but there are schools with sub-20% acceptance rates that fall below this rate. That is not to insinuate that those schools have poor outcomes, but rather is an indication that the schools included in this table have strong outcomes.

Admissions rates came from this aggregator, last updated October 2024, unless the school was not included in which case I used College Navigator (the feds’ website).

Essentially, I hope this helps students and families to realize there are schools at a range of selectivity levels that can get them to a T14 law school. Most of these schools also offer merit aid, which can provide significant savings to either 1) afford college and/or 2) save money for law school (which is not cheap).

Others are welcome to share resources or information on schools that have acceptance rates above 20% that are doing well at sending their graduates on to T14/top law schools.

Edited to add Carleton and to correct the percentage for Brandeis.

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Re: your methodology- does this include ALL alums, regardless of how many years out they graduated or just recent alums (the trend for law schools has been older, more seasoned applicants than when we were graduating)? And how have you corrected for size of the alumni population? For a small school, you could be referencing two or three students… each with their own story to tell. So your analysis might reflect the undergrad college’s effort to admit First Gen students (for example) and not any particular experience that these students had at the particular college.

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Also, the nature of the undergraduate school is related to the percentage of students interested in law school and law careers. For example, Caltech and MIT are both below your 0.6% to top law school threshold.

The total law school rate relative to top-14 law school rate may be more interesting, in that it somewhat adjusts for levels of student interest in law school. But then the result may reflect mostly the strength of students admitted and enrolled and the level of grade inflation at the college.

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Something else to consider: Professors who dont give out an A+ even if a student aces a class because many schools dont recognize an A+.

LSAC converts an A+ to a 4.33.

History/Govt professors may be more cognizant of this since a larger percentage of students taking those classes are interested in law and will give an A+ even if the school only grades on a 4.0 scale.

Professors of other majors may not consider this (and even if they would give an A+, it may be almost impossible because the classes grade on a curve or are incredibly difficult to get that grade).

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There are more methodology details in the College Transitions article associated with the chart:

In terms of timing, it is college graduates since 2005.

In terms of scale, you can look up any given undergrad in the study. I spot-checked Rhodes–they reported 163 law school records found for Rhodes.

As a general observation, for sure there are so many other possible factors involved this should not be used as a definitive guide to actual value added.

The way I would suggest thinking of it is just inclusively. Like, if a college you are looking at does relatively well in a study like this, you could reasonably think that it is among the colleges doing relatively well in supporting students with T14 law school ambitions. But those are not necessarily the only colleges that would serve this purpose well for any individual, just potentially among them.

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I note we were just sort of discussing this on the specific applicant thread where I linked this study.

In a way we have already controlled for this a bit just by filtering out the lowest admissions rate colleges.

And then what I informally suggested doing in the other discussion is using WalletHub’s Selectivity rating to control further for that effect. That is still pretty crude but their formula adds 25/75 test scores and top 10% of class stats to admissions rates.

Again, I am not claiming this is going to get you all the way to a reliable value added measure. But if you were looking at colleges of comparable Selectivity by such a measure and one was notably higher in terms of the portion of law school bound students going to T14s–that might be worth considering among other factors, assuming future T14 applications were something you might be contemplating at all.

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While I applaud the effort here, this line in particular is really a stretch… no college “supports students with T14 law school ambitions”. There are no committee letters, no gatekeeping, and no standardized “prelaw” curriculum in the way that there is for med school. And even the biggest “gunners” for law school recognize (after a semester or two in college) that majoring in philosophy or history prepares you just as well for a T-14 as does a major in poli sci or government.

So I question what “supporting students” in this context means. Admitting students whose SAT scores suggest that they are good at taking standardized tests? Yes, that’s a big factor. Admitting students who are willing to work hard? Yes, that’s a big factor. But what kind of support exactly do you think that Bard or Sarah Lawrence is providing to its T-14 cohort???

And while we’re on the topic… the premise here is “assuming facts not in evidence” as the law school students would tell you (whether they are at a T-14 or not). Almost by definition, this “study” as you call it, is doing a micro-dive on the tail end of the distribution. So learning more about the outliers is fascinating as a matter of curiosity to geeks like us. But it won’t change the reality that if you examined the class composition of Harvard, Yale, NYU, Columbia, Etc. first year law students, you would see a heck of a lot of “does not appear in your analysis” names, and not very many Bards and Sarah Lawrence grads.

I’m not picking on these two colleges btw… both exceptionally fine institutions IMHO. But what has been (numerically, not percentage) their entire “output” into the T-14 over the last 20 years? Are we not looking at a tiny, tiny number of outliers which is likely not at all going to be representative/predictive going forward? And might that not apply to a dozen other institutions on this list?

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So personally, I very much disagree with this.

Here is what the College Transition article says on the subject:

After sifting through this data, what can we conclude? Here’s the takeaway: while attending a prestigious, selective undergraduate institution can give you a leg up in law school admissions, it’s far from the only path to a legal career.

Strong liberal arts programs, well-regarded public universities, and institutions with robust pre-law support all offer viable routes to law school. Your undergraduate choice matters, but it’s not destiny. Factors like your GPA, LSAT score, extracurriculars, and personal statement play crucial roles in shaping your law school journey.

The key is to choose an undergraduate institution that will challenge you, help you develop critical thinking and writing skills, and provide opportunities for personal growth. Whether that’s an Ivy League university, a small liberal arts college, or a flagship state school depends on your individual needs and goals.

I personally think this is all essentially correct. Specifically, I think there are in fact institutional differences when it comes to things like the curriculum structure, the faculty norms for teaching undergraduates, the norms for undergraduate participation, the norms for writing specifically, the quality and focus of the pre-law advising, and so on. And I think all this can end up relatively more or less supportive of students interested in T14 applications.

So the article lets you look at “pipelines” in both directions. If you look up, say, Bard, there were apparently 189 total records. For Bard, it had a really high “other law school” pipeline, which means Bard grads apparently scattered a lot between different law schools. Nonetheless, it broke out four–Georgetown, Brooklyn, Columbia, and Michigan. Of those, three are T14s, and then Brooklyn is a regionally important law school.

Sarah Lawrence, 53 records, and this time there were more individual law schools listed, meaning it appears their grads were more concentrated than Bard grads. Of the 10 listed, four were T14s–Harvard, Georgetown, Cal, and UVA.

Of course none of this means much without comparable context. Unfortunately, it appears Bard is not on the WalletHub chart I suggested for context. Sarah Lawrence is, though, at #171. Looking up that list, at #163 you have Penn State, and #164 UMass. These might be interesting to compare in the sense they are similarly selective overall, also at least somewhat nearby, but then of course are radically different types of institution.

OK, Sarah Lawrence, overall law school rate is 2.79%, Penn State, 2.02%, UMass 2.21%. Bit of a difference, but not huge.

For T14s, though, it was Sarah Lawrence 1.00%, Penn State 0.17%, UMass 0.16%. Of the specific law schools broken out, again for Sarah Lawrence, it was 4/10 T14s, for Penn State it is 1/9 (Penn), for UMass it is 0/9.

These are much bigger differences. Again, these are are least roughly similar institutions by undergrad selectivity. They are at least relative close in terms of people going to law schools per capita. They just have far fewer people per capita going to T14s specifically.

Again, I don’t think this means you absolutely have to choose Sarah Lawrence over Penn State or UMass. I just think it is in fact information worth considering if you might be interested in applying to T14s some day.

I think if we were only looking at Sarah Lawrence, then it could just be some statistical fluke it was so different in this way from, say, UMass (UMass and Penn State being similar, though, is less plausibly a statistical fluke). I am not sure, though, actually. You would have to do some real stats work to figure that out. But just intuitively, maybe on this data alone you could not rule out Sarah Lawrence had just randomly placed such a larger percentage in T14s than UMass and Penn State.

However, Sarah Lawrence is in fact just an example of a generally observable effect of colleges with a similar format to Sarah Lawrence placing more grads in T14s than colleges with a similar format to UMass/Penn State when controlling at least roughly for the total going to law school and student selectivity.

Like this all started in another thread when I was comparing the numbers for Macalester and Texas. Again, if it was ONLY Macalester, then who knows, maybe that could be just a fluke. But now we know it isn’t just Macalester, it is both Macalester and Sarah Lawrence.

And of course it isn’t just those two either. I am quite confident looking at that data that if we compiled it all, we would end up with a very large body of data showing this effect across many different colleges with a format like Macalester or Sarah Lawrence.

So personally, I do not find it plausible this is just a small sample size fluke. There is definitely something going on here, although exactly what is going to be a lot harder to nail down.

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I’ll take a stab at what’s going on.

Students who major in philosophy, history, etc. are more likely (overall, not just at LAC’s) to eventually end up in law school than students who major in chemical engineering or agronomy. Which suggests a higher concentration of these 'types" of students at Sarah Lawrence and other LAC’s than at large public flagship U’s which teach everything from Accounting to Hospitality.

So factor number 1.

Factor number 2- Law school (in general, not just for LAC’s) is still a “fallback” career path for young people who haven’t clicked with another professional path yet. No blood for the faint hearted. No calculus beyond what you needed (if it was needed) for a distribution requirement so for anyone ruling out engineering or CS- it’s still viable. Etc. So you are getting the “none of the above” crowd applying to law school, in addition to the truly passionate, core law school types, which greatly favors LAC’s over the larger schools, where the pre-professional types already congregate if they know they want to become accountants or what-not.

I think it’s a leap to conclude that the answer must be “Sarah Lawrence (et al) are better preparation/support for a T-14 than other types of schools”. I think it is fair to say that for a 17 year old who has no clue what they want to become when they grow up, the Sarah Lawrence type experience could be transformative. But that’s not what you are claiming.

The mere fact that the small LAC’s don’t admit by major is a big factor IMHO. Which has nothing to do with law school, except that the law is still a great career (all things being equal) for the “academic generalist” even as other career paths require earlier and earlier specialization. But that’s not what you are claiming the number show…

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So far our “control” for this is just looking at the total percentage of grads who go to law school. And you are right, it was a bit higher at Sarah Lawrence than UMass/Penn State. So we should keep that in mind.

I’m not sure it is actually true this happens more at LACs than flagships, but in any event it would seem this effect was also subject to our total law school control.

In the end if you are not persuaded, you are not persuaded. I just personally think it is extremely hard to explain in these ways why in our Sarah Lawrence versus UMass/Penn State mini-study, it is like a 6:1 ratio for T14s, when it is only like 4:3 for law school generally.

That indeed could be a factor, but I note that at most large publics, the Arts and Sciences schools (or whatever they call them) mostly don’t admit by major either. Of course they do tend to more often have specialty schools which may have first year admission, but then how many of those kids are going on to law school?

So while I think it is relevant in some ways that, say, Penn State has a College of Engineering and Sarah Lawrence does not, I think we have again mostly controlled for that effect simply by looking at overall law school attendance.

And then most of the popular pre-law majors are just in the College of Liberal Arts at Penn State, and not among the direct admit majors. And so I am not sure it is plausible that this is a promising explanation for that large difference in T14 placement specifically.

Edit: By the way, I would suggest in these conversations we remember there is no particularly higher burden of proof for one sort of hypothesis than another.

Like, I fully admit that proving any one hypothesis to a peer-reviewed scientific standard would be very hard. But that goes just as much for ANY of these hypotheses.

So if people want to insist it is ALL just some one set of possible effects, to the exclusion of some other set–OK, but that isn’t like something we should assume by default, you have to prove that just as much as any other theory.

And personally, I think it tends to end up less like that, and more like that most of the plausible effects are in fact contributing in some way. The more interesting question is how much for each.

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Namaste.

T14 law school admissions is remarkably transparent compared to other types of higher ed/post grad, so anyone who is making decisions has abundant data and relatively less noise to contend with. And given the fact that there are zero curricular requirements for law school, young people can make "9th inning decisions) about law school (after working for a few years for example) without having to do the legal equivalent of a Post-Bacc.

So making a T14 prediction at age 17 about where to matriculate for a BA given how much data there is out there-- hey, if that’s how someone wants to roll, go for it.

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Please take the back forth to PM. Thank you!

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Am I interpreting the graphs in your linked article properly?

Yale University sent 6.1% of its graduates to a Top 14 Law School in “Feeders to Top Law Schools.” Meanwhile, 8.4% of its graduates attended any law school in “Top Feeders to Law School.” Can we assume that ~ 72.6% of the Yale University graduates who were admitted to law school and chose to attend ended up at a Top 14 law school?

This graph is also pretty impressive.

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I don’t think the proper data are available to actually compare undergrads for T14 admission. You would have to control for LSAT, to start with. Higher LSAT will be correlated with more selective undergrads, and to be clear, this would simply be due to the admission selectivity of the undergrad and is not causative of an individual student’s LSAT score. Generally, better students on average would be applying out of more selective undergrads, but that does not mean that attending a more selective undergrad will increase law school admission chances for a particular individual student.

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That’s how I am interpreting them as well.

I think part of where this discussion as evolved falls under the OP’s invitation:

Others are welcome to share resources or information on schools that have acceptance rates above 20% that are doing well at sending their graduates on to T14/top law schools.

Obviously Yale doesn’t fit, but I think to the extent we can put the reported T14 placement rates into the context of overall law school placement rates, that information will help kids and parents further investigate that concept of “doing well” in sending graduates to T14s.

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Yes, it would be ideal to simply control for LSAT scores of law school attendees from each undergrad, but to my knowledge that information is not widely available (I would be happy to be wrong!).

Instead, we do have some easy sources for undergrad selectivity, so I was using those as basically a proxy. I was specifically suggesting using WalletHub’s index, but that isn’t the only source we could choose. Like, a case could be made we should maybe be focusing just on test scores (although that case has been complicated by COVID and test optional).

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So when I was looking at this data, I thought it might be important to consider what proportion of the undergrads going to law school go to a T14 school. So like, Fordham has a very high proportion of their undergrads going to law school (like 12% if my memory serves), but only like .5% of their undergrads go to a T14 school, which means around 4% of their pre-law students go to a T14 school. Which could be helpful for someone shooting for that experience. Contrast that with, say, Macalester, which only sends 4% of their undergrads to law school, but sends .9% to a T14; implying that 20-21% of their pre-law students go to a T14 school.

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Why do you need a proxy for anything when the law school’s themselves publish granular information on the scores and GPA’s of those that are admitted? And the “other factors” are not really things that students can manufacture for the sake of admissions. You have a parent who was incarcerated while you were growing up? That’s relevant for T-14 admissions. But not something you can fake. You grew up in a homeless shelter and made numerous appearances in court with your Legal Aid society lawyer to argue about an illegal eviction? Relevant for admissions- but not something you can conjure.

Etc. The data on who gets in and from which undergrads is also not hard to find! No need for a proxy!!!

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I bristle at the phrase “T14 placement” as implying some sort of action on the part of the undergrad. Maybe I’m overcaffeinated today.

This entire concept (of this thread) bothers me because I think it may mislead families of T14 aspirants into thinking their chances for T14 admission are higher from a more selective undergrad when I don’t think there is any proof of this whatsoever due to the correlation problem.

My advice to any T14 aspirant would be to attend a good-enough college (perhaps T200?), get great grades, prepare for the LSAT (even though we didn’t back in olden times), and get some post-college work experience in a business of some kind.

As an aside, thinking out loud with regard to test scores generally and correlations (higher test scorers on SAT/ACT being somewhat correlated with higher LSAT scorers - a logical assumption in my opinion), I wonder whether the blip of, say 2021-2024+ undergrad admission cycles with widespread test optional admissions might alter some of this correlation, more students attending selective undergrads TO, though perhaps this is leveling-out now, with many selective undergrads having large % test submitters.

A different thought, again just thinking out loud: I don’t know what the correlation data between SAT and LSAT look like these days, and some people definitely perform better on one vs the other, but overall, if a student has a prepped SAT score too low for selective colleges (say, broadly, under 1300 or something, though I hesitate to suggest a cutoff), I might suspect that they may not have a shot at doing well enough on LSAT for T14 admission even after prep and should adjust their law school aspirations accordingly.

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