Curry wrote:You have ties to Socal. Go to Cornell.
You're advising a guy to leave his target market to go to a slightly better school? Are you all crazy?
Cornell has better prospects nationally, but ALL the Southern California firms are going to interview at USC. Not so for Cornell. Not to mention that, yes, he can network while at USC. It's not like the T-14 is some kind of golden ticket everywhere. If he ends up being bottom 25% at Cornell he's WAY WAY WAY more screwed in SoCal than being bottom 25% at USC.
Cornell is national in the sense that yes, you can place everywhere. But its target market and strongest one is in NY. That's what the OCI is going to more geared towards. You don't go to a school that targets New York when you want to go to USC.
And this "diversity" stuff is silly. Law firms hire where they have established pipelines - where they've had success before and where a lot of them probably graduated from. For southern California, I'd only take HYS, Berk and maybe UCLA over USC. USC has a death grip on Southern California generally.
You go walk into a Southern California law firm where a good portion of the attorneys went to USC/UCLA and you tell tell them Cornell outranks those two and to give you a job on that basis. Let me know how that goes.