Excluding HYS, how much does it matter which T-14 you pick? Forum

[Nelson]

Gathering the best law students before law school starts isn't the same as gathering all of the best law students. The top 10% at any school is really good at law school. I posit that if you took the top 10% of each T14, combined that into one super school, and had them redo 1L year, students from different schools would be distributed randomly and evenly across the curve.

[Sojourner2]

I'm very interested in the discussion going on about Harvard and Penn here. So please continue that--I would love to hear what people think about it.

As to everyone who has offered advice, thank you. I really appreciate it. The idea of choosing a lower ranked school makes me a little nervous (because it may affect my chances to get a good job and pay off debt, which is the real source of my concern), but you all have convinced me that if I do choose the UVA route, I'm not necessarily signing a death warrant.

To those of you who suggested negotiating more, I definitely plan to do that. Hopefully I get some other aid offers and can play those off each other a little.

[A. Nony Mouse]

jbagel, I don't understand the point about how "if you're good at law school exams, you'll be good at them at Penn or Harvard." Being "good at law school exams" has very little absolute content. On the one hand, I don't think this is disagreeing with me. A kid who gets top 5% at Penn as a 1L and transfers to HLS isn't going to end up below median -- but I'm not claiming the differences are that drastic. Really the only thing I'm claiming is that of the kids who finish, say, between the 8 and 10 percent marks at Penn, a lot of those kids would finish outside the top 10% if they were at HLS, even if just by a smidgen. Not a big difference, but a difference. In more granular terms, there are a lot of kids that get the 14th A in a 1L class at Penn (when the 15th grade is an A-) who would've been pushed into an A- at HLS because the quality of the competition is a little better.

Not jbagel or Nelson, but I just don't think law school performance tracks UGPA/LSAT closely enough to make this kind of assumption. Plus, the differences in UGPA/LSAT are really pretty small - you're parsing very minor differences in factors that correlate to law school performance very imperfectly. Just because they're the best indicators we have of 1L performance doesn't mean that they're great indicators.

[jumpin munkey]

I can accept that. So would you say the idea -- that it's easier, if only slightly, to get x% at P than x% at H -- stands, or no? In other words, is what you're saying that if you took the magnas at Chapman and stuck them at Harvard, most of them would finish outside the top 10%, but as between Penn and HLS, the differences are too small to be amount to more than noise? If so, I could believe that, so maybe I'm wrong.

[A. Nony Mouse]

I'd say the latter. I just think when you're talking about people with Penn/Harvard scores, the difference in law school performance comes down to factors other than raw ability, because the raw ability is so close as to be negligible, and that it's too hard to predict success (we all know stories of people admitted with very weak numbers who end up top 10% of their class). But that's also my gut reaction coming from well below either Penn or Harvard (and based in my own experience teaching at a variety of different universities. Not law, of course).

[froglee]

I won't pick georgetown or UoV because being in the middle will still make your job prospect pretty dangerous

[RodneyRuxin]

OP: It's really HYSChi

So it looks like the problem is solved for you.

[banjo]

This has lead me to the conclusion that a lot of us (myself included) may just be confusing correlation and causation. Chicago (for example) places better in Big Law than UVA, so we tell people interested in Big Law to go there. That is, we act as though graduating from Chicago improves your prospects, when really it may be that Chicago is correlated with better prospects because, on average, slightly more intelligent/capable/hard-working students go to Chicago over UVA, and this explains the placement differences. If so, then it would suggest that if you are equally hard-working, then regardless of where you go you will have equal career prospects. (As noted in the subject line, this hypothesis excludes HYS and is limited to T-14.)

I think there is a nugget of truth here. For example, YLS students clerk in large numbers, so YLS students might target clerkships more seriously. If the NYU student body were as clerkship-focused as YLS, the school might have slightly better (though still not YLS-like) clerkship placement.

I also think incoming softs play a role. NU students, on average, might have slightly better softs than Georgetown students-maybe in the form of cooler work experience / internships. Having something cool to talk about can make the difference in getting a callback and ultimately an offer.

Finally, there's a bit of geographical self-selection. Penn students might target NYC more heavily than Michigan students, leading to better OCI results.

Where you go wrong is attributing the placement differences to intelligence or capability. I think it is very unlikely that students at one T14 work harder than students at another T14. The only sound conclusion is that, at some schools, the non-academic qualities of the student body overstate or understate the school's placement power.

[Sojourner2]

This has lead me to the conclusion that a lot of us (myself included) may just be confusing correlation and causation. Chicago (for example) places better in Big Law than UVA, so we tell people interested in Big Law to go there. That is, we act as though graduating from Chicago improves your prospects, when really it may be that Chicago is correlated with better prospects because, on average, slightly more intelligent/capable/hard-working students go to Chicago over UVA, and this explains the placement differences. If so, then it would suggest that if you are equally hard-working, then regardless of where you go you will have equal career prospects. (As noted in the subject line, this hypothesis excludes HYS and is limited to T-14.)

I think there is a nugget of truth here. For example, YLS students clerk in large numbers, so YLS students might target clerkships more seriously. If the NYU student body were as clerkship-focused as YLS, the school might have slightly better (though still not YLS-like) clerkship placement.

I also think incoming softs play a role. NU students, on average, might have slightly better softs than Georgetown students-maybe in the form of cooler work experience / internships. Having something cool to talk about can make the difference in getting a callback and ultimately an offer.

Finally, there's a bit of geographical self-selection. Penn students might target NYC more heavily than Michigan students, leading to better OCI results.

Where you go wrong is attributing the placement differences to intelligence or capability. I think it is very unlikely that students at one T14 work harder than students at another T14. The only sound conclusion is that, at some schools, the non-academic qualities of the student body overstate or understate the school's placement power.

I think you make a good point about softs.

The first person who responded to my question pointed out the very small difference between Chicago's GPA and LSAT vs. UVA, thus speculating that the difference in quality of student probably does not explain why some firms are willing to reach lower into the graduating class at a place like Chicago as opposed to UVA or Georgetown, etc.. But I wonder if, in fact, its that students who go to a place like Chicago over UVA might have similar numbers but slightly more compelling experiences or backgrounds that make the difference in getting into Chicago, and ultimately play into why firms are willing to hire the 100th ranked student at Chicago but not UVA.

(This may assume too much rationality on the part of hiring firms. It may instead be that, over the years, schools have acquired certain reputations and firms hire on the basis of those reputations, whether those reputations as far as the quality of the student body is concerned are warranted or not. By that I mean: there are lots of things that feed into rankings that don't have anything to do with the quality of the student body, but because they do affect rankings and people tend to assume that higher ranked schools = better students, firms hire from deeper in the class at a place like Chicago because they incorrectly assume that those students are actually of higher quality. Or--not to confuse things--but a third option is that the student body is slightly better at a place like Chicago but not on the basis of anything that feeds into the rankings (i.e. softs), and the firms that hire on the basis of rankings actually do end up with the better student, even though their reasoning for hiring the way they did was actually faulty.)