Hamilton (Columbia) vs. Harvard Forum

[Bearlyalive]

1. Very few people care about named scholarships like the Hamilton and those who do don't usually care much. For hiring purposes, it's pretty close to a non-issue, and I wouldn't let it factor into your decision.

Would you mind elaborating a little more on this? I hear different opinions on this all the time: some say a Hamilton on a resume is as valuable as a HYS, others say it's nbd.

Not abl and just a 0L, but from trying to research this as much as possible, here's a few things I've heard:

1. For biglaw and most other legal careers, your grades (especially 1L) are the most determinative factor in getting your first legal job. The advantage of going to a more preftigious school (t14 > rest, and then within some of the loose tiers within the t14) is that law firms will go deeper into a class to make their offers. So, you may be able to get a job at just above median going to Columbia that you may have had to be top 20% at Georgetown to land. Given how the law school curve works, this can be a significant consideration in choosing a school. However, I would definitely guess that for HLS versus CLS, especially for Biglaw, and even more so for Biglaw in NYC, the difference in how legal employers treat similarly ranked students is probably negligible.

2. For the above, very little of the determination is based on the actual quality of education offered by the schools. An attorney choosing between an HLS and a CLS grad with identical class standing (all else equal, which is a rare circumstance) is probably not going to choose the HLS grad over the CLS because he/she really believes the legal education is that much better at HLS (after all, they went through law school too). Instead, they will probably choose the HLS grad simply by the fact that they will think that the CLS grad was not good enough to get accepted into HLS, and they would prefer to choose the candidate with the most consistent record of success. (As an aside, this is based on a post I saw the Legal Employment board, which pretty much stated the exact sentiment: legal hirers will, unless shown otherwise, assume that you went to a lower ranked school because you were not good enough to be accepted into the higher ranked school).

3. For the above, a Hamilton or other named scholar definitely has the potential to mitigate, negate, or even outweigh the above sentiment. If a legal employer sees that you have one of those scholarships on your resume and actually knows what the scholarship is, they will know that you likely had the option to attend YHS (or whatever else) and chose not to; they will know you were good enough, at minimum, to be accepted. However, not all legal employers know what these scholarships are, and some just don't care. Even putting "Hamilton Fellow - Full Tuition Scholarship" on your resume might not sway them. Your treatment will vary from employer to employer.

Basically, this makes the extra "prestige" of a named scholarship a wash. Your grades are FAR more important than almost anything else, and at best the scholarship puts you on an even playing field with students at the other schools you turned down.

Actual lawyers or legal hirers, feel free to correct if wrong.

ETA: Agree with some of the posters on the last page regarding the difference between HLS and CLS for job placement other than Biglaw. From what I've read, HLS seems to convey a noticeable advantage in securing clerkships and some of the more difficult to get legal jobs like the DOJ or academia. I do not want to above to be construed as the opportunities at CLS being the same as those at HLS. You can get any job from either school, but for these jobs, you have a non-negligible better shot from HLS. Worth 180k... probably not.

[WheninLaw]

1. Very few people care about named scholarships like the Hamilton and those who do don't usually care much. For hiring purposes, it's pretty close to a non-issue, and I wouldn't let it factor into your decision.

Would you mind elaborating a little more on this? I hear different opinions on this all the time: some say a Hamilton on a resume is as valuable as a HYS, others say it's nbd.

Abl's opinions are often insane (see his above post), but he's right about this. Named scholarships like the Ruby or Hamilton don't factor too much into legal hiring. Maybe it impresses an alum or catches a judge's eye, but in the end, school/grades matter much more.

At the same time, the difference between Harvard and Columbia is also fairly negligible as most hiring goes. Seriously.

I think that's true for big law, but less true for clerkships, certain boutiques, and federal government hiring. As I mentioned earlier, I don't think the benefit of HLS over CLS is worth $180K or $100K, but I do think it's worth a bit more than some ITT are suggesting.

I should have clarified that I meant for big law hiring, which I think most people feed into despite their initial aspirations. I agree that H has a very real advantage in certain things.

[jbagelboy]

1. Very few people care about named scholarships like the Hamilton and those who do don't usually care much. For hiring purposes, it's pretty close to a non-issue, and I wouldn't let it factor into your decision.

2. Think hard about whether you want public interest or politics. Either could be a valid reason to choose H in this situation.

For public interest, if you end up working at a loan repayment-eligible public interest position for ten years, well, you're really talking about Harvard for 0 or Columbia for 0. Harvard will give you a leg up for certain highly desirable public interest positions. If you were pretty sure this is what you wanted to do, I'd probably say H is the right call, although it's a close call. The question is whether the uncertainty of you sticking with public interest or not getting a job times the debt counterbalances the small leg up in hiring H gives you.

For politics, I do get the sense that the Harvard name matters some (even vs YS). And I know the previous poster was joking, but I do think if you're going to be totally cynical and calculating about these things, I also think that being able to show that you're not just totally privileged is helpful for politics (which you will not be able to show if you graduate from undergrad and law school with no debt and >$100k in family money). If you were totally sure about politics, this might be the right (if riskier) path to take.

***

My sense is that you're just vaguely curious about PI or politics. So are most law students. Almost none of them do either, not because PI or politics are impossible or unattractive, but because the biglaw hiring pipeline is hard to avoid and sucks up just about all of the students who are not actively swimming upstream in another direction. If you're not more than vaguely curious about these things, you should probably go to Columbia. It's not worth taking on debt (and spending your savings) for a slight improvement of chances for options you're only somewhat considering that, as a practical matter, you're unlikely to pursue. If after some introspection you decide you actually passionately do want to pursue one of these options 100% from day one, and are going to be one of the students at H or C swimming upstream, this becomes a closer question.

<--I'm a practicing attorney.

jesus christ.

I especially love the bit about how going to harvard law school will make you seem "less privileged" so as to gain brownie points in some theoretical future political career. Just, lol.

[abl]

1. Very few people care about named scholarships like the Hamilton and those who do don't usually care much. For hiring purposes, it's pretty close to a non-issue, and I wouldn't let it factor into your decision.

2. Think hard about whether you want public interest or politics. Either could be a valid reason to choose H in this situation.

For public interest, if you end up working at a loan repayment-eligible public interest position for ten years, well, you're really talking about Harvard for 0 or Columbia for 0. Harvard will give you a leg up for certain highly desirable public interest positions. If you were pretty sure this is what you wanted to do, I'd probably say H is the right call, although it's a close call. The question is whether the uncertainty of you sticking with public interest or not getting a job times the debt counterbalances the small leg up in hiring H gives you.

For politics, I do get the sense that the Harvard name matters some (even vs YS). And I know the previous poster was joking, but I do think if you're going to be totally cynical and calculating about these things, I also think that being able to show that you're not just totally privileged is helpful for politics (which you will not be able to show if you graduate from undergrad and law school with no debt and >$100k in family money). If you were totally sure about politics, this might be the right (if riskier) path to take.

***

My sense is that you're just vaguely curious about PI or politics. So are most law students. Almost none of them do either, not because PI or politics are impossible or unattractive, but because the biglaw hiring pipeline is hard to avoid and sucks up just about all of the students who are not actively swimming upstream in another direction. If you're not more than vaguely curious about these things, you should probably go to Columbia. It's not worth taking on debt (and spending your savings) for a slight improvement of chances for options you're only somewhat considering that, as a practical matter, you're unlikely to pursue. If after some introspection you decide you actually passionately do want to pursue one of these options 100% from day one, and are going to be one of the students at H or C swimming upstream, this becomes a closer question.

<--I'm a practicing attorney.

jesus christ.

I especially love the bit about how going to harvard law school will make you seem "less privileged" so as to gain brownie points in some theoretical future political career. Just, lol.

That's obviously not what I said.

Also, what about my post do you find objectionable? Do you even disagree with anything that I said, or are you just being a jerk for the sake of being a jerk?

[rpupkin]

3. For the above, a Hamilton or other named scholar definitely has the potential to mitigate, negate, or even outweigh the above sentiment.

No it doesn't. A named scholarship does not mitigate or negate poor law school grades. As for this:

If a legal employer sees that you have one of those scholarships on your resume and actually knows what the scholarship is, they will know that you likely had the option to attend YHS (or whatever else) and chose not to

No one cares that you had the option to attend HYS and chose not to. You're projecting 0L values onto the real world.

[Nebby]

I hate all the 0Ls ITT

[WinterComing]

3. For the above, a Hamilton or other named scholar definitely has the potential to mitigate, negate, or even outweigh the above sentiment.

No it doesn't. A named scholarship does not mitigate or negate poor law school grades. As for this:

If a legal employer sees that you have one of those scholarships on your resume and actually knows what the scholarship is, they will know that you likely had the option to attend YHS (or whatever else) and chose not to

No one cares that you had the option to attend HYS and chose not to. You're projecting 0L values onto the real world.

Rpupkin's line of reasoning here makes perfect sense to me, but I also know that something like greater than 50 percent of Ruby recipients get clerkships (have heard this repeated by enough Chicago students and faculty that it must be true). How do you account for that, if the scholarship name carries no weight?

Two possible theories: People deemed worthy of the scholarship in the first place tend to get good grades, so it's a correlation but not causation situation. Or maybe to perpetuate the stat as part of trying to recruit future Rubies, Chicago profs bend over backward to get current Rubies into clerkships.

[L’Étranger]

0L values onto the real world.

This is pretty meta. Is 0L a state of being?

[lawlorbust]

3. For the above, a Hamilton or other named scholar definitely has the potential to mitigate, negate, or even outweigh the above sentiment.

No it doesn't. A named scholarship does not mitigate or negate poor law school grades. As for this:

If a legal employer sees that you have one of those scholarships on your resume and actually knows what the scholarship is, they will know that you likely had the option to attend YHS (or whatever else) and chose not to

No one cares that you had the option to attend HYS and chose not to. You're projecting 0L values onto the real world.

Rpupkin's line of reasoning here makes perfect sense to me, but I also know that something like greater than 50 percent of Ruby recipients get clerkships (have heard this repeated by enough Chicago students and faculty that it must be true). How do you account for that, if the scholarship name carries no weight?

Two possible theories: People deemed worthy of the scholarship in the first place tend to get good grades, so it's a correlation but not causation situation. Or maybe to perpetuate the stat as part of trying to recruit future Rubies, Chicago profs bend over backward to get current Rubies into clerkships.

It probably just depends on the program. For example, some of NYU's full-tuition programs explicitly offer closer faculty contact and mentoring. But if there's no effort to institutional support built up to accompany the $$$, then I can't see why faculty members would care with boosting scholarship recipients just because they were scholarship recipients. Obviously, whether such institutional support exists is something that someone with a Ruby/Hamilton should reach out to the school to discuss.

[Bearlyalive]

3. For the above, a Hamilton or other named scholar definitely has the potential to mitigate, negate, or even outweigh the above sentiment.

No it doesn't. A named scholarship does not mitigate or negate poor law school grades. As for this:

If a legal employer sees that you have one of those scholarships on your resume and actually knows what the scholarship is, they will know that you likely had the option to attend YHS (or whatever else) and chose not to

No one cares that you had the option to attend HYS and chose not to. You're projecting 0L values onto the real world.

You misinterpreted what I was saying for the first point. I agree that a named scholarship does NOT have the potential to outweigh poor grades. I thought I was quite clear that grades are the determinative factor. However, I do think that a named scholarship can be weighed in the "preftige" factor, however that might work. A candidate who is a top 10% Hamilton Fellow at CLS is probably likely to be viewed the same as (or, but this is less likely, better than) a candidate who is top 10% at HYS, assuming the person in charge of hiring knows what the Hamilton is. I know that the preftige factor is not readily quantifiable, but it obviously exists: employers pull from deeper at HYS than they do at CCN, and deeper from CCN than they do at PMBU and the rest of the t14. The bias is readily discernible in employment statistics, and by just asking people working in Biglaw. Why employers do this is separate from the fact that they do it, but you cannot deny that attending a higher ranked school has an impact on employment prospects, grades being equal (which is what should be used as the standard, because this forum stresses assuming median performance).

To the second point, I don't care to argue for it because I honestly don't know its validity, but I will just say that it wasn't something that just popped into my head. I read it, and many others similar to it, in the Legal Employment forum. It's not a 0L value. It came from a discussion on how firm lawyers who hire at OCI evaluate candidates, and one point made was that those lawyers assume, all else equal, that a candidate who goes to CLS is not as good as an otherwise identical candidate from HLS.

[A. Nony Mouse]

3. For the above, a Hamilton or other named scholar definitely has the potential to mitigate, negate, or even outweigh the above sentiment.

No it doesn't. A named scholarship does not mitigate or negate poor law school grades. As for this:

If a legal employer sees that you have one of those scholarships on your resume and actually knows what the scholarship is, they will know that you likely had the option to attend YHS (or whatever else) and chose not to

No one cares that you had the option to attend HYS and chose not to. You're projecting 0L values onto the real world.

Rpupkin's line of reasoning here makes perfect sense to me, but I also know that something like greater than 50 percent of Ruby recipients get clerkships (have heard this repeated by enough Chicago students and faculty that it must be true). How do you account for that, if the scholarship name carries no weight?

Two possible theories: People deemed worthy of the scholarship in the first place tend to get good grades, so it's a correlation but not causation situation. Or maybe to perpetuate the stat as part of trying to recruit future Rubies, Chicago profs bend over backward to get current Rubies into clerkships.

Since the Ruby is used to recruit the very top students, it seems pretty likely that grades just correlate. No one can go to law school expecting to be at the top, but if you're a candidate who got a full ride, you have stats putting you at the top of applicants, which makes it unsurprising if you then do well.

[Nekrowizard]

3. For the above, a Hamilton or other named scholar definitely has the potential to mitigate, negate, or even outweigh the above sentiment.

No it doesn't. A named scholarship does not mitigate or negate poor law school grades. As for this:

If a legal employer sees that you have one of those scholarships on your resume and actually knows what the scholarship is, they will know that you likely had the option to attend YHS (or whatever else) and chose not to

No one cares that you had the option to attend HYS and chose not to. You're projecting 0L values onto the real world.

Rpupkin's line of reasoning here makes perfect sense to me, but I also know that something like greater than 50 percent of Ruby recipients get clerkships (have heard this repeated by enough Chicago students and faculty that it must be true). How do you account for that, if the scholarship name carries no weight?

Two possible theories: People deemed worthy of the scholarship in the first place tend to get good grades, so it's a correlation but not causation situation. Or maybe to perpetuate the stat as part of trying to recruit future Rubies, Chicago profs bend over backward to get current Rubies into clerkships.

I Imagine that the first explanation is much more likely.

[Bearlyalive]

3. For the above, a Hamilton or other named scholar definitely has the potential to mitigate, negate, or even outweigh the above sentiment.

No it doesn't. A named scholarship does not mitigate or negate poor law school grades. As for this:

If a legal employer sees that you have one of those scholarships on your resume and actually knows what the scholarship is, they will know that you likely had the option to attend YHS (or whatever else) and chose not to

No one cares that you had the option to attend HYS and chose not to. You're projecting 0L values onto the real world.

Rpupkin's line of reasoning here makes perfect sense to me, but I also know that something like greater than 50 percent of Ruby recipients get clerkships (have heard this repeated by enough Chicago students and faculty that it must be true). How do you account for that, if the scholarship name carries no weight?

Two possible theories: People deemed worthy of the scholarship in the first place tend to get good grades, so it's a correlation but not causation situation. Or maybe to perpetuate the stat as part of trying to recruit future Rubies, Chicago profs bend over backward to get current Rubies into clerkships.

Since securing a clerkship is largely related to establishing close relationships with professors who will go up to bat for you, it seems plausible on its face that Hamilton/Ruby students would have a leg up due to their having faculty mentors. I think, however, that such an advantage is not as strong as it first appears. According to both the CLS and UoC students pages, professors at both schools are easily accessible to students who show promise and who make the effort to reach out. I think that "promise" is dictated more by grades/class performance than by a scholarship. Maybe your mentor will introduce you to some faculty, and maybe you can build on that initial advantage, but I think that most of the professors that you will meet will form their opinion of you completely independently of your scholarship (if nothing else than because they won't even know that you're a Hamilton/Rubenstein/Dillard Scholar... I mean, it's not like you're going to go into the office hours of your 1L professors and introduce yourself saying "Hi, I'm Bearlyalive, and I'm a Hamilton scholar!").

I'm inclined to say that while the benefit probably does exist, the discrepancy between Chicago's clerkship numbers and those of Rubenstein scholars in particular is more likely due to correlation than causation. You can't assume that you, as an individual, will do better as a Rubenstein scholar, but I'd be amazed if that body of students as a whole wasn't more likely to do well than the average student at Chicago to some measurable degree.

[jnwa]

3. For the above, a Hamilton or other named scholar definitely has the potential to mitigate, negate, or even outweigh the above sentiment.

No it doesn't. A named scholarship does not mitigate or negate poor law school grades. As for this:

If a legal employer sees that you have one of those scholarships on your resume and actually knows what the scholarship is, they will know that you likely had the option to attend YHS (or whatever else) and chose not to

No one cares that you had the option to attend HYS and chose not to. You're projecting 0L values onto the real world.

Rpupkin's line of reasoning here makes perfect sense to me, but I also know that something like greater than 50 percent of Ruby recipients get clerkships (have heard this repeated by enough Chicago students and faculty that it must be true). How do you account for that, if the scholarship name carries no weight?

Two possible theories: People deemed worthy of the scholarship in the first place tend to get good grades, so it's a correlation but not causation situation. Or maybe to perpetuate the stat as part of trying to recruit future Rubies, Chicago profs bend over backward to get current Rubies into clerkships.

I Imagine that the first explanation is much more likely.

Doesnt that go against the oft repeated TLS mantra of "incoming credentials dont correlate well with law school performance"?

[Nekrowizard]

Doesnt that go against the oft repeated TLS mantra of "incoming credentials dont correlate well with law school performance"?

I'm personally not a huge believer in that mantra. Yeah, a guy with a 173/3.8 is probably indistinguishable from 174/3.9. But I bet if you compared 170/3.7 guy with 180/4.0 guy, the latter will perform better.

[jnwa]

Doesnt that go against the oft repeated TLS mantra of "incoming credentials dont correlate well with law school performance"?

I'm personally not a huge believer in that mantra. Yeah, a guy with a 173/3.8 is probably indistinguishable from 174/3.9. But I bet if you compared 170/3.7 guy with 180/4.0 guy, the latter will perform better.

Looked at 3 random Rubys on lawschools numbers. 3.9 172 4.0 172 and 3.9 180. Obviously the last one is crazy but the first 2 basically have regular Chicago numbers when considering the fact that LSAT scores are +-3. Im sure Ruby's do better than the rest of the class on average. Do they do better enough for a 50% clerkship rate at a school with 16% overall, im not so sure.

[fliptrip]

Doesnt that go against the oft repeated TLS mantra of "incoming credentials dont correlate well with law school performance"?

I'm personally not a huge believer in that mantra. Yeah, a guy with a 173/3.8 is probably indistinguishable from 174/3.9. But I bet if you compared 170/3.7 guy with 180/4.0 guy, the latter will perform better.

The correlation is weaker within narrow ranges...so yes, your 4.0/180 who is your typical Hamilton should by all means be showing up in the upper quarter of any class they are a part of at CLS. But, within the interquartile range of CLS, I would expect a lot of randomness.

[Tls2016]

3. For the above, a Hamilton or other named scholar definitely has the potential to mitigate, negate, or even outweigh the above sentiment.

No it doesn't. A named scholarship does not mitigate or negate poor law school grades. As for this:

If a legal employer sees that you have one of those scholarships on your resume and actually knows what the scholarship is, they will know that you likely had the option to attend YHS (or whatever else) and chose not to

No one cares that you had the option to attend HYS and chose not to. You're projecting 0L values onto the real world.

You misinterpreted what I was saying for the first point. I agree that a named scholarship does NOT have the potential to outweigh poor grades. I thought I was quite clear that grades are the determinative factor. However, I do think that a named scholarship can be weighed in the "preftige" factor, however that might work. A candidate who is a top 10% Hamilton Fellow at CLS is probably likely to be viewed the same as (or, but this is less likely, better than) a candidate who is top 10% at HYS, assuming the person in charge of hiring knows what the Hamilton is. I know that the preftige factor is not readily quantifiable, but it obviously exists: employers pull from deeper at HYS than they do at CCN, and deeper from CCN than they do at PMBU and the rest of the t14. The bias is readily discernible in employment statistics, and by just asking people working in Biglaw. Why employers do this is separate from the fact that they do it, but you cannot deny that attending a higher ranked school has an impact on employment prospects, grades being equal (which is what should be used as the standard, because this forum stresses assuming median performance).

To the second point, I don't care to argue for it because I honestly don't know its validity, but I will just say that it wasn't something that just popped into my head. I read it, and many others similar to it, in the Legal Employment forum. It's not a 0L value. It came from a discussion on how firm lawyers who hire at OCI evaluate candidates, and one point made was that those lawyers assume, all else equal, that a candidate who goes to CLS is not as good as an otherwise identical candidate from HLS.

No. OCI interviewers in NYC are much smarter and better informed than an idiot who would assume a CLS student is not as good as a Harvard.
At such a huge difference in price, Columbia is the obvious choice.
The only time when Harvard was better for a student choosing between a Hanilton and Harvard was when it turned out to be cheaper than Columbia.

[WinterComing]

Doesnt that go against the oft repeated TLS mantra of "incoming credentials dont correlate well with law school performance"?

I'm personally not a huge believer in that mantra. Yeah, a guy with a 173/3.8 is probably indistinguishable from 174/3.9. But I bet if you compared 170/3.7 guy with 180/4.0 guy, the latter will perform better.

The correlation is weaker within narrow ranges...so yes, your 4.0/180 who is your typical Hamilton should by all means be showing up in the upper quarter of any class they are a part of at CLS. But, within the interquartile range of CLS, I would expect a lot of randomness.

So then how would you explain the Ruby thing, Flip?

[Nekrowizard]

Doesnt that go against the oft repeated TLS mantra of "incoming credentials dont correlate well with law school performance"?

I'm personally not a huge believer in that mantra. Yeah, a guy with a 173/3.8 is probably indistinguishable from 174/3.9. But I bet if you compared 170/3.7 guy with 180/4.0 guy, the latter will perform better.

Looked at 3 random Rubys on lawschools numbers. 3.9 172 4.0 172 and 3.9 180. Obviously the last one is crazy but the first 2 basically have regular Chicago numbers when considering the fact that LSAT scores are +-3. Im sure Ruby's do better than the rest of the class on average. Do they do better enough for a 50% clerkship rate at a school with 16% overall, im not so sure.

I would've expected the typical recipient to have better numbers than that, tbh. How many of the things do they give out?

[jnwa]

Doesnt that go against the oft repeated TLS mantra of "incoming credentials dont correlate well with law school performance"?

I'm personally not a huge believer in that mantra. Yeah, a guy with a 173/3.8 is probably indistinguishable from 174/3.9. But I bet if you compared 170/3.7 guy with 180/4.0 guy, the latter will perform better.

The correlation is weaker within narrow ranges...so yes, your 4.0/180 who is your typical Hamilton should by all means be showing up in the upper quarter of any class they are a part of at CLS. But, within the interquartile range of CLS, I would expect a lot of randomness.

So then how would you explain the Ruby thing, Flip?

Ruby get to be bffs with profs. Also the school has a vested interest in ensuring Ruby's do cool stuff and are more likely to help Ruby's even if its just because the admin and faculty know them better(heard of this happening with Darrow). Lastly maybe it really does look cool on your resume and have a boost that way as well.(idk if this is true).

[A. Nony Mouse]

Doesnt that go against the oft repeated TLS mantra of "incoming credentials dont correlate well with law school performance"?

I don't think that's quite the mantra. "You can't predict your law school performance" isn't the same as "there is no correlation between credentials and performance." There probably is some correlation, but any given applicant can't know whether it will apply to them or not.

To the extent Rubies represent the tip-top applicants, and to the extent a clerkship demonstrates top grades, there's still a big chunk of Rubies not doing clerkships. There are probably plenty who don't want to clerk, but then, getting a clerkship out of Chicago - depending on the clerkship - may not indicate tip-top grades, either (not all clerkships are feeders).

And there's also probably a correlation in that students who are competitive for/take Rubies may be the kinds of students inclined to collect as many brass rings as possible, including clerkships. The LSN numbers may not tell the whole story - they may have other kinds of glowing softs to sell.

[fliptrip]

First, I confess that I don't have the best sense of how clerkship hiring works other than to know its very relationship-based. Most obviously, you're going to have a sizable number of Rubies with great grades, so that helps. Beyond that, I have to disagree with the idea that professors don't know if you're a named scholar. I just have a measly Dillard Scholarship, but the Dillard group is convened regularly and does have special opportunities to interact with faculty that other students don't have. Also, professors sit on the committees that award these scholarships, so it seems more likely that you'll be known well coming in by at least a few professors. Seems to be an ideal situation to facilitate more success in the clerkship process.

Let's also not forget self-selection. I'd imagine that your typical Ruby student is more interested in clerking than non-Ruby types.

[Bearlyalive]

No. OCI interviewers in NYC are much smarter and better informed than an idiot who would assume a CLS student is not as good as a Harvard.
At such a huge difference in price, Columbia is the obvious choice.
The only time when Harvard was better for a student choosing between a Hanilton and Harvard was when it turned out to be cheaper than Columbia.

Don't disagree that the Hamilton better in 90%+ of cases, but I think that the remaining ~10% is a bit broader than just a strict financial calculus.

As for the OCI interviewers, /shrug, you're probably right. That said, I don't have total faith in anyone, let alone recruiters, and certainly not HR. It may well be in the minority, and maybe even negligible in NY where CLS has such a strong presence, but I'm hard-pressed to believe that there are not a non-significant number of employers and recruiters who are biased towards HLS over CLS students. Worth 180k? Nope, but I already said that. Doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

[rpupkin]

You misinterpreted what I was saying for the first point. I agree that a named scholarship does NOT have the potential to outweigh poor grades. I thought I was quite clear that grades are the determinative factor. However, I do think that a named scholarship can be weighed in the "preftige" factor, however that might work. A candidate who is a top 10% Hamilton Fellow at CLS is probably likely to be viewed the same as (or, but this is less likely, better than) a candidate who is top 10% at HYS, assuming the person in charge of hiring knows what the Hamilton is.

I'm sorry, but, based on my experience with clerkship and firm hiring, this is just completely wrong. What do you base this statement on?