Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6 Forum

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KMaine

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by KMaine » Fri Jan 06, 2012 12:09 pm

MOOBCINOS wrote:It's not dumb. Just look at the numbers. Yes, Cornell and Columbia are both great schools. The issue is just thay Columbia will open a few more doors for you than Cornell.

The debt issue comes into play only if you want to work for Govt. or something else with a lower salary compared, in which case I would recommend Cornell.

I'm simply pointing out the fact that, if OP wants to go to BigLaw, biting the 210k bullet to go to Columbia is probably worth it.
So, you would pay 210K for something that may open up a few more doors? It would be silly to say that Columbia does not offer better opportunities: better shot at academia, top clerkships, V10 firms will dip deeper in the class, but the price I would pay for that difference is significantly less. Personally, I would go to Cornell, get my biglaw job, and invest the money (would make more than a nice down payment on your dream house).

Also, I think you have it backwards. If I was going to work in some sort of low paying job, I would be more willing to take on the additional debt because of LRAP and IBR.

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by Nobody » Fri Jan 06, 2012 12:13 pm

Number of partners is interesting because it shows that the long-run cost of going to Cornell is more expensive than it might originally seem. Plus I think opening doors does matter pretty significantly here--for most people, law school is not the absolute best investment from a strictly financial perspective, since even the kids going to the best schools could probably work in finance, etc. If going to Columbia significantly improves your chances at interesting work, like being a judge or a partner, that's seriously worth considering.

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KMaine

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by KMaine » Fri Jan 06, 2012 12:27 pm

Nobody wrote:Number of partners is interesting because it shows that the long-run cost of going to Cornell is more expensive than it might originally seem. Plus I think opening doors does matter pretty significantly here--for most people, law school is not the absolute best investment from a strictly financial perspective, since even the kids going to the best schools could probably work in finance, etc. If going to Columbia significantly improves your chances at interesting work, like being a judge or a partner, that's seriously worth considering.
I agree that it is "interesting," but I am not convinced that Columbia is the "x" factor in this. The information we have at least in this thread is pretty scant. One would have to consider relative class sizes, whether a given firm recruits at Cornell (admittedly, something that one may want to consider when comparing the two schools), and some element of self selection (maybe people who would be willing to live in NYC long term, would be more likely to attend a school like Columbia or Fordham than they would Cornell). Not being one who wants any part of NYC, I may underestimate the importance of the partnership stuff. I am fairly confident that going to Cornell will not adversely impact my chances of gaining partnership in my market. Also, I am not sure that Columbia would at all help ones chances of becoming a judge. Again, I think that Columbia is the better school, but would not pay that much more for it. I don't think this is a really short sighted point of view. Personal choice, I guess.

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by iamrobk » Fri Jan 06, 2012 1:15 pm

Blessedassurance wrote:OP, what if the sky was another color? What if Germany had won the war? What if our moms had had an abortion? What if you get two more questions right on the LSAT? What if the world ends tomorrow? What if...what if...

There's a pretty good reason people generally don't like answering hypothetical questions. It's like the annoying kid at the back of the car asking why cars run on gas or why Satan and Jesus don't get along.

Nothing prevents you from asking this question when you actually have concrete offers.
Jeez man, if you don't like the question you don't have to respond to it. No reason the OP can't try to gather some opinions to help make their decision easier.

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by 09042014 » Fri Jan 06, 2012 4:59 pm

Nobody wrote:Number of partners is interesting because it shows that the long-run cost of going to Cornell is more expensive than it might originally seem. Plus I think opening doors does matter pretty significantly here--for most people, law school is not the absolute best investment from a strictly financial perspective, since even the kids going to the best schools could probably work in finance, etc. If going to Columbia significantly improves your chances at interesting work, like being a judge or a partner, that's seriously worth considering.
Because your guestimation is probably very flawed. Firms don't care where their partners went to school. Once you are in to the door, it ceases to matter to the firm. They only care that you can make them money.

I doubt there is a statistically significant difference in partner outcomes between the schools.

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by Nobody » Fri Jan 06, 2012 5:46 pm

I dunno, part of me thinks it makes sense that firm leadership would have a kind of soft but lingering bias about a Yale associate versus a Cornell associate that might influence down the road decisions. Definitely nothing easily quantifiable, but I don't think that's a reason to dismiss it out of hand when there really do seem to be far fewer Cornell partners.

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by Lincoln » Fri Jan 06, 2012 6:02 pm

Nobody wrote:I dunno, part of me thinks it makes sense that firm leadership would have a kind of soft but lingering bias about a Yale associate versus a Cornell associate that might influence down the road decisions. Definitely nothing easily quantifiable, but I don't think that's a reason to dismiss it out of hand when there really do seem to be far fewer Cornell partners.
Biggest reason there are fewer Cornell partners at big firms is that there are fewer Cornell graduates as a whole. Columbia's class size is twice Cornell's. If you really want to work at Wachtell or Boies and nowhere else then yes, Columbia at sticker is obviously the right choice. But if you are just going for Big Law generally, I think a full ride outweighs the other advantages Columbia provides (academia being the big one, imo).

Also, in this post you're talking about Yale v. Cornell, not Columbia v. Cornell. Look up how many Yale partners there are at any given firm.

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by 09042014 » Fri Jan 06, 2012 11:01 pm

Nobody wrote:I dunno, part of me thinks it makes sense that firm leadership would have a kind of soft but lingering bias about a Yale associate versus a Cornell associate that might influence down the road decisions. Definitely nothing easily quantifiable, but I don't think that's a reason to dismiss it out of hand when there really do seem to be far fewer Cornell partners.
You are just assuming your conclusion at this point.

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by Nobody » Sat Jan 07, 2012 2:57 pm

Lincoln wrote:
Nobody wrote:I dunno, part of me thinks it makes sense that firm leadership would have a kind of soft but lingering bias about a Yale associate versus a Cornell associate that might influence down the road decisions. Definitely nothing easily quantifiable, but I don't think that's a reason to dismiss it out of hand when there really do seem to be far fewer Cornell partners.
Biggest reason there are fewer Cornell partners at big firms is that there are fewer Cornell graduates as a whole. Columbia's class size is twice Cornell's. If you really want to work at Wachtell or Boies and nowhere else then yes, Columbia at sticker is obviously the right choice. But if you are just going for Big Law generally, I think a full ride outweighs the other advantages Columbia provides (academia being the big one, imo).

Also, in this post you're talking about Yale v. Cornell, not Columbia v. Cornell. Look up how many Yale partners there are at any given firm.
The class size bit makes sense, I hadn't thought of that. As for mentioning Yale, It wasn't quite a typo, since I'm really more wondering about divisions within the T14 in general. I'm just curious about it because Cornell has good placement in market paying firms, but relying on that statistic alone might hide the fact that there are divisions within market paying firms that the placement metric doesn't reflect.

Desert Fox: I'm not assuming my conclusion at all. I'm just noticing that there does seem to be a difference in partner numbers. It could be something totally innocuous like class size that explains it, but that's no reason to just dismiss the whole discussion out of hand.

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by Blessedassurance » Sat Jan 07, 2012 3:28 pm

Nobody wrote:The class size bit makes sense, I hadn't thought of that. As for mentioning Yale, It wasn't quite a typo, since I'm really more wondering about divisions within the T14 in general. I'm just curious about it because Cornell has good placement in market paying firms, but relying on that statistic alone might hide the fact that there are divisions within market paying firms that the placement metric doesn't reflect.
Yale is a bad example. The people who go there like to do other things.

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by Nobody » Sat Jan 07, 2012 5:16 pm

That doesn't mean they don't have the options to go the biglaw route.

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by Blessedassurance » Sun Jan 08, 2012 1:39 am

Nobody wrote:That doesn't mean they don't have the options to go the biglaw route.
Pray tell how you propose on measuring that by looking at partners' profiles at "prestigious" firms.

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by Nobody » Sun Jan 08, 2012 7:44 pm

But I'm not saying that Yale has worse options at biglaw. People were saying that Cornell=T6 in terms of long term placement. I'm not totally challenging that, because I'm not pretending to know for sure that that isn't true. But I am wondering if it is true, and so I brought up Yale as a way to say "if you accept that Yale has better prospects than Cornell, than why not that the T6 has better options than Cornell?" I realize I probably didn't do a good job of that.

But my point is basically this: I know TLS is very data driven, and from a certain angle it looks like Cornell places just as well at the T6, because it places equally well into NLJ 250 or whatever. My question is whether that's actually true, since there could be divisions within the NLJ250 that aren't acknowledged in that data. If that's the case, Cornell could be placing into the bottom half of that (however you would measure that, if not money than prestige, which, despite what people say, totally matters even after school) and the T6 could be placing at the top, and I was wondering if there was any conventional wisdom relating to that.

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by 09042014 » Sun Jan 08, 2012 8:05 pm

Nobody wrote:But I'm not saying that Yale has worse options at biglaw. People were saying that Cornell=T6 in terms of long term placement. I'm not totally challenging that, because I'm not pretending to know for sure that that isn't true. But I am wondering if it is true, and so I brought up Yale as a way to say "if you accept that Yale has better prospects than Cornell, than why not that the T6 has better options than Cornell?" I realize I probably didn't do a good job of that.

But my point is basically this: I know TLS is very data driven, and from a certain angle it looks like Cornell places just as well at the T6, because it places equally well into NLJ 250 or whatever. My question is whether that's actually true, since there could be divisions within the NLJ250 that aren't acknowledged in that data. If that's the case, Cornell could be placing into the bottom half of that (however you would measure that, if not money than prestige, which, despite what people say, totally matters even after school) and the T6 could be placing at the top, and I was wondering if there was any conventional wisdom relating to that.
Nobody (not you, damn your screen name) is saying Cornell = T6 placement. We are saying, once you get to a firm, it doesn't matter anymore.

Firms pick partners on their ability to make money. Not on where they went to school.

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Re: Cornell with (Nearly) Full Ride vs T6

Post by Nobody » Sun Jan 08, 2012 9:25 pm

But I'm saying that it still might have down the road consequences if T6 students get into better firms in general.

But I also admit I'm totally clueless here and just wondering. I'll stop.

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