gulceatransfer wrote:Please explain how 2 and 3 are dumb. I do not understand your last post. Are you assuming entry at a T-2 guarantees significant scholarship $ at a TTT in the same market?
soullesswonder wrote:gulceatransfer wrote:Simple.
1) Most can't get into a T-1, but can get into T-2.
2) Many that can get in at a T-1 don't live (or want to live) where they might be accepted.
3) Many don't live (or want to live) where a TTT may be offering scholarship.
4) People seeking to practice law typically want to get the best possible education in order to do so.
To say that paying sticker is an inherently bad idea for a T-2 over the course of 30-40 year career (even assuming a class ranking outside top-10%), is much too broad of a brush to paint the picture. The reality is that the majority of graduates at T-2 will go on to have successful careers, even if they might make less coming out of the gate than someone attending a T-1 and may have more debt that if they attended a TTT or lower.
2 and 3 are just dumb (you're going for an education and there are enough law schools in this country that you should have no problem finding a T1 or TTT close by to anyone important in your life. 4 is also dumb since even the profs at TTT schools have terrific credentials. Aside from some "practical" aspects of the curriculum such as clinics and LRW, there is very little difference in the quality of the education - and in a narrow sense some lower-ranked schools might be "better" b/c their emphasis on black letter law is more useful to a young associate than some seminar on "Law and the gender dynamics of
Twilight"
My point is that "I don't want to live there" isn't a valid excuse when there are so many law schools located all around the country. So maybe a T1 that admits you is too far away from family/friends or is in a urban location that doesn't agree with you. Fine...there is likely another T1 that will admit you that can address those concerns. Same goes for a TTT, and while I wouldn't give a guarantee odds are that if you can get in at a T2 you can indeed get $$ from a T3 in the same market.
afterglow99 wrote:
soullesswonder wrote:afterglow99 wrote:
If you've outworked and outperformed your peers academically up to law school, there's no reason to think that it is going to change.
By this logic, J.J. Redick, Adam Morrison, Emeka Okafor, and Hasheem Thabeet should all be NBA all-stars. Oddly enough, when you put a bunch of winners together in a class and make them compete,
some of them are going to lose. Unless you've got something like 10-15 LSAT points and .3 UGPA on the median, you aren't really that much better (and if you are, WTH are you doing in that particular school?). Law school is not like undergrad or grad school or even other professional schools - it's an entirely different game and judging the ability of any one candidate to transition is a crapshoot. The pro sports analogy really does apply here - all things considered, physical freaks have a bigger upside and you kind of know who's going to be a first-round or middle-round pick, but even the best scouts have a long string of prospects who they misjudged.
Having .3 UG GPA on the median is exactly what I'm talking about. If you've been pulling this since HS (assuming you went to a very competitive HS and college) I still don't see why it's unreasonable to think you can continue to outperform many of your peers. Im just trying to say there are situations, albeit only some, where this expectation isn't that crazy.
And cmon, the basketball analogy is really flawed. You're speaking of THE most competitive basketball league in the world. We're talking about T2 law schools that really aren't very hard at all to get into to. I'm not speaking of assuming you could outperform your peers at HYS, because there you really are looking at a bunch of "winners." You're assuming simply getting into ANY law school automatically means you're at the top in terms of factors that contribute to good grades and good lawyering.
(I'm not trying to diss T2s - I go to one and have no complaints.)
No, the basketball analogy is just fine - there's still a substantial difference in skill level among individual teams, even in the NBA. But even if you throw out the NBA, there are plenty of former BMOCs struggling to stay in the D-league. Bottom Line: success at one level does not automatically translate to success at the next.
More importantly, you haven't even addressed my point that law school is a much bigger transition than the one from HS to UG, and I should clarify that even if your LSAT and GPA blow away your competition, I would say that grading is too arbitrary to believe that you can be confident of being much better than top third or top quarter. For T2s, that's not good enough for BigLaw, so in order to get those jobs you need to be both good enough to put yourself in contention AND lucky enough to have professors that like your exam styles
With regards to the "winners" comment - it's all relative. Yeah, your T2 colleagues may not be the absolute best, but if you're paying sticker there you didn't go out and set the world on fire, either. And EVERYONE thinks that they're better than their raw stats, so your confidence may be as misplaced as the next guy's.