Law school admission and elite colleges

Data10
Mon, 28 Jun 2021 18:36:20 +0000

That’s the whole point of my posts in this thread. If you go by matriculations in isolation, matriculation totals are dominated by far more influential factors than prereferences by law schools for particular undergrad colleges, such as my USC example above. At UCLA Law School, UCLA and USC applicants appear to be overrepresented to a similar degree. It’s not a coincidence that the 2 colleges in LA that are located within ~13 miles from UCLA are the 2 colleges that are most overrepresented (with large sample size). Kids are far more likely to apply to colleges that are in the same city of their undergrad college than colleges that are located far away.

To separate location effect, one can compare UCLA undergrad to the nearby and similar stat USC undergrad as a reference, but you cannot control for distance effects by comparing to another college in the city like this like this most other T14 colleges. For example, I expect Cornell undergrads are far more likely to apply to Cornell Law than other colleges located hundreds of miles away. Which other reference control college is located in Ithaca, has similar law school applicant stats to Cornell undergrads, and has sufficient sample size? Columbia is also in NYS, but having grown up in upstate NY, I can tell you that upstate NY residents as a whole do not have comparable feelings about Cornell and Columbia, or similar feelings about living in upstate NY vs living in NYC. Kids from my HS had more applications to Cornell than all other Ivy+ colleges combined, so kids from my HS were overrepresnted among matriculants to Cornell, but not to other Ivies. That doesn’t mean that Cornell favors applicants from my HS over other HSs. It’s certainly possible that some law schools favor applicants from the home college, but you cannot assume this based on seeing the undergrad college being overrepresented in the matriculations totals.