Demosthenes, with your emphasis on Internet data, surely you can go to law school websites and see lists of undergraduate institutions of current students. You can surely combine that with your own personal experience at a top-10 law school–which surely you have, right?-- or even just looking at your law school yearbook–which surely you have, right?-- and see that students at top-10 law schools come disproportionately from Ivies and comparable schools (e.g., Amherst, Duke, Chicago, Stanford, etc.); while a current student list can list a huge range of institutions, ranging from No-Name University X to Yale, the no-name universities have just one student or so at the law school, while Princeton will have dozens.
So, the data are clear: students at top law schools come disproportionately from highly-ranked colleges. But does going to a highly-ranked college make it easier to get into law school?
Yes. Personal experience shows that students from highly-ranked colleges often have a “edge” in admissions. The data to back up this claim would be available in admissions offices, but some of it leaks out within the law school.
If you actually went to a top-10 law school–which you did, right?-- you’d know your classmates, where they went to undergrad and, for the ones who loved to talk about themselves, how they did on the LSAT.
From my own personal experience at HLS–which you have, too, right?–I know of several classmates who went to Harvard College who got only a 165 on the LSAT but who got into HLS. One had a very compelling personal story of adversity. Neither was an URM. You have that personal experience and knowledge of your own classmates, don’t you? Don’t you?
Even if a name of a fancy college per se doesn’t open an admissions door, the peer pressure to succeed, and the institutional support, at a fancy college can help better-prepare a student for admission to a top law school, based on my own experience, which I am sure can be backed up by Internet data.
crankyoldman: anyone who claims to know a ton of things about a subject also needs personal experience with the subject to be a compelling proponent about the subject. Who would you trust in a discussion of football: someone who just watches the NFL on TV or an experienced NFL athlete? That’s the issue here.