<p>"Am I reading correctly that you are calling Georgetown a lower-ranked school to avoid?</p>
<p>I’ve been in BigLaw hiring for more than 25 years and I don’t know of any BigLaw firm that doesn’t recruit at Georgetown on pretty much the same level as HYS."</p>
<p>first off, no one said georgetown was a lower ranked school to avoid. i referred to it as a lower t14…which it is, since it’s literally ranked 14th. when compared to a school like yale, stanford, or harvard, it’s not even a competition. as the economy has tanked, i still maintain that the only sure things are HYS. i don’t think many older attorneys/recruiters know how big of a hit big law hiring has taken in recent years. as a current 2L who just finished OCI, i can tell you it seems much tougher than it used to be. employment stats support this assertion.</p>
<p>my opinion is NOT based on the us news rankings; us news is largely irrelevant. my opinion is based on cold hard statistics. the same firms may go to georgetown, but they have higher GPA cutoffs. georgetown only placed 31.08% of its students in big law in 2011 and their clerkship numbers pale in comparison to HYS. in fact, USC, maybe the strongest “regional” school in the nation, outpaced georgetown in big law placement (at 32.85%). </p>
<p>my point is that HYS gets you big law relatively easily, and also opens up many doors not available to other schools. for example, many students at HYS don’t even want big law and prefer clerking/going into academia. if you attend a school like georgetown, big law is FAR from a guarantee and their students aren’t afforded the same alternative options.</p>