Please get back on topic and take the debate on law school to pm. Further posts will be deleted.
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Is Virginia your in-state school? How easy or difficult would it be to transfer from Yale if finances changed or it wasn’t a good fit? UVA without Jefferson is still impressive.
These stats listed probably don’t show the whole picture. I’m betting the overall law/grad school admit rates for UVA Jefferson is better than UVA only. Or at least better to top tier law/grad schools.
Winners of tip-top scholarships are treated differently. The schools have a vested interest in seeing their award winners succeed. Try to research Jefferson scholars specifically for career success.
Again playing with stats. Maybe Yale law does enroll more HYPS undergrads. However, unless you know how many HYPS grads applied vs the field, it’s hard to tell if there’s an advantage or no advantage at all.
Congratulations. Two great choices. Good luck.
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This might give the OP some helpful perspective.
Starting on page 40.
So one follow up point I would like to suggest the OP consider is that there is still quite a bit of regionalism evident in at least where people choose to go after college. As usual this is not necessarily the same thing as where they COULD go, just where they DO go, but the point is you have to be careful with feeder studies in the sense if people make a certain choice for college they may make a similar choice again for law school, first jobs, and so on.
So that law school feeder list, for example, points out the top two top law school destinations for Harvard College students are Harvard and Yale. Which in fact are the same for Yale (Harvard Law is a lot bigger than Yale Law). Whereas the top two for Stanford are Berkeley and Stanford. This is almost surely not because top Stanford people cannot get into Harvard and Yale, it is likely because they are choosing a top California law school after a top California college.
OK, then UVA’s top two law schools are UVA itself and Georgetown. I think some people would have been tempted to see that as a forced choice, and maybe a bit, but that Stanford information should give you pause before thinking too much of that because again those are logical choices for people who already chose UVA for college.
And I agree we should not be overly obsessed with law school on the OP’s part, but turning to the IR list, it is not at all a surprise how many are in DC, Maryland, or Virginia. Georgetown, GW, and American are all way higher on that list than their “normal” US News ranking, as is William & Mary. The IB feeders study does not make this clear, but my understanding is you can see a similar effect where Northeast colleges are more likely to feed financial firms in Boston or New York, West Coast colleges financial firms on the West Coast, and so on.
And to be sure, one of the nice things about a Yale-type college is while their graduates may be more likely to be Northeast for next steps, they still have robust networks all over. That is no less true of a Stanford and a West Coast. But I think it is fair to say that when you are talking about the top publics like UVA, regionalism starts becoming a little more prominent–but the top publics are also still at least somewhat national too, just maybe a notch or two less than the HYPS-type privates.
So the OP should evaluate that, but it happens that if they are interested in the possibility of politics, or the intersection of law and politics, UVA is probably better for that than its normal rankings alone would suggest because it is also a broader DC-orbit school. I am less sure about where it fits in the financial world–I know it is considered a target school, but beyond that I don’t really know where.
But this is a lot more nuanced than just ranking schools generically, and that is fine. Like the margin of error issue, there may be some tradeoffs here that have to be weighed against the cost differences, and I don’t think trying to do that generically is a great idea in light of the amount of the cost difference.
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Well, I do think it fair to say that Yale law school, though excellent, definitely has a reputation of being not practical compared to its peers. It’s a law school for people who don’t intend on practicing law more than any other of the elite law schools.
I also think people on here tend to over inflate the value of the T3 schools and usually it’s the people who didn’t attend one who buy most in the value of the degree. If you read through the Harvard red book, for example, you find many grads living quite ordinary professional lives. Op’s career trajectory unlikely to be much different based on which of these two schools they chose. And while the man on the street might not know what the Jefferson is, elite law schools and even Supreme Court Justices definitely do.
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Yeah, for the vast majority it is not about achieving some extraordinarily famous position, it is about having the professional career of their choosing, where really what happens at career peak is much more about the tradeoffs they choose and how they perform than where they went to college.
And that’s fine, these fancy colleges work great for that, with a higher margin for error, widespread networks both in terms of fields and location, and so on. But again those are virtues that don’t always mean much to individuals who don’t need that margin for error, who want next steps their college is chosen to be really good for, and so on. So you have to be careful when paying a lot more versus really excellent alternatives like UVA.
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I think even this overstates it. There are plenty of Harvard/Yale/Princeton alumni who have unimpressive careers they could have had from any decent college. Not necessarily by choice.
On the other hand, I think the value of the Jefferson is being undersold. The purpose of the Jefferson is to lure students like op from the Ivies to UVA. It’s not just the free ride, it’s special summer and research opportunities as well.
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Absolutely. The branding of these top named scholarships alone is valuable, precisely because it immediately answers the implicit question, “Why UVA?” (or whatever the college). If you are a Jefferson, people will typically assume you of course got into Yales and such, but you wisely chose the Jefferson.
And then as usual the other program features depend on what you actually make of them, but certainly once you understand the way you achieve parity of prospects at fancy publics like UVA versus fancy privates is just by being an outstanding student, then you can think about how to use these programs to be an outstanding student.
So yeah, very much by intention, these named scholarship programs are designed to make your prospects as good or better versus choosing just a regular admittance at a fancy private. And I don’t think it is a scam, it works, at least if you do what it takes to make it work.
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THIS.
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@sageshrub you are now an accepted student. You need to revisit both UVA and Yale. There is a difference in these two schools in terms of location, campus vibe, size, etc.
Is there a special accepted student visit for the Jefferson Scholars? If so, GO. Find out what other scholars have done which benefits them.
Charlottesville is very different than New Haven. Just the locations make these schools very different. What do you want to experience for four years? These locations are both terrific…but they are very different.
I agree with others. You have two wonderful choices. Please let us know where you decide to go…and then report back a year later to let us know how it’s going!
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It’s a false hypothetical. First of all, having an amazing girlfriend shouldn’t cause a GPA to drop. They can study together and inspire each other. And second, there’s rampant grade inflation at Yale. From the Yale Daily News: “Yale College’s mean GPA was 3.70 for the 2022-23 academic year, and 78.97 percent of grades given to students were A’s or A-’s. The data, which show a sharp hike in grades coinciding with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, come from a document presented at a November faculty meeting.”
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It’s not just grad schools. It’s fellowships and other “merit-based” awards. Like the Rhodes and Marshall fellowship. Of the 2024 winners of these awards, 14 are from Harvard, 7 are from Yale, and 1 is from UVA. In 2023, 11 were from Harvard, 8 were from Yale and 0 were from UVA. For the Putnam competition, it’s always MIT, Princeton, Harvard. UVA does not rank.
These are the kinds of data that leads many people to rate HYP schools highest. Either you believe that these fellowships are merit-based, in which case the top students by a huge margin attend these schools, or you believe that the “elite fix is in”, in which case there is value in being on the right side of that fix.
Yes, there are many mediocre students (many of the athletic recruits and some legacies) at these schools, though Yale’s legacy preference is relatively low. OP doesn’t seem like one of those mediocre students, and it would seem that Yale gives OP the better chance to be noticed and fly high with other high fliers.
I’m not sure anything you said changes the point that a 3.2 from Yale is more marketable than a 3.2 from UVA. When clients ask, “where’d you go to school”, they don’t ask GPA and most realistically don’t know about the Jefferson Scholarship. They just hear UVA. Not my fault or theirs. Just reality.
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I have a very hard time believing that Yale will make this student fly higher than UVA as a Jefferson Scholar. Both schools will provide the tools and opportunities he needs to succeed.
This will come down to personal choice and preference. There is no wrong decision, imo.
The only thing I would really think about is law school funding…should this student go that route.
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Yet in practice, the Rhodes committee and Marshall committee seem to disagree with you, at least historically.
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If this student attends UVA and takes advantage of everything that is offered, I have no doubt that he will succeed.
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At this point, I don’t think anyone is bringing up any new points.
Both. Choices. Are. Excellent.
Now it is up to the OP to weigh their various factors (factors we are not privy to) and make the decision.
I didn’t get enough sleep last night, so I am cranky. But I really wish the “money trumps everything” and “elitism trumps everything” posts would stop. Both can be true, and both can not be true.
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Fully in agreement with the last post that no one is bringing up any new points and now it’s up the OP and their parents to figure out what works for them.
Congrats to the OP and they are welcome to circle back and have us reopen the thread with an update.
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