WashU($$.5) vs UIUC($$$$) Forum

[jidqwdnjqw]

full ride to uiuc, 125k scholly to washu
UIUC COA: 50-60k
WashU COA: 120-130k

goal:big law

I need help, seat deposit coming up

[The Lsat Airbender]

If you're gunning for biglaw, then WashU is too expensive and UIUC isn't good enough.

If you're okay with non-biglaw outcomes and want to live in Illinois then UIUC is a perfectly good outcome. WashU has a lot more biglaw upside but that debt load will be painful if you strike out, which you'd have roughly a coin flip's chance of doing.

[Sackboy]

If you're gunning for biglaw, then WashU is too expensive and UIUC isn't good enough.

If you're okay with non-biglaw outcomes and want to live in Illinois then UIUC is a perfectly good outcome. WashU has a lot more biglaw upside but that debt load will be painful if you strike out, which you'd have roughly a coin flip's chance of doing.

+1.

120k-130k would be a fine (even great) outcome if you were attending a lower T13. For WashU, it's not a good outcome. If you are really biglaw or bust, you should retake and reapply, because these current options are not great for your goals.

I have a good friend who made a similar gamble by attending a school with a 20-25% BL+FC placement rate on a full-tuition scholarship instead of attending a T13. He ended up on the low end of top 1/3 and struck out of biglaw. He ended up at a regional firm making $85k, and I won't say he's unhappy, but he's pretty disappointed.

[BobLoblaw18]

Stats?

[trebekismyhero]

UIUC over WashU at those COA numbers, but if you're big law or bust you should go to a t13. UIUC and WashU can get you big law, but you'll need to be top 1/4, especially in this economic environment.

[239840]

I have a good friend who made a similar gamble by attending a school with a 20-25% BL+FC placement rate on a full-tuition scholarship instead of attending a T13. He ended up on the low end of top 1/3 and struck out of biglaw. He ended up at a regional firm making $85k, and I won't say he's unhappy, but he's pretty disappointed.

Why is he disappointed? Was he one of those people who go to a UIUC-type school thinking they'll be able to "beat law schools admissions at its own game" by taking on minimal debt at a T30 and then hustling for Big Law? The job he got otherwise doesn't sound that bad. But if he went into law school thinking he'd be in the top 20% and come out making $180k with minimal debt, then that makes sense.

Also, what if someone's only T13 offer is at sticker? Is that still better for someone with Big Law aspirations? I could very well end up having to make that decision, and while I do want Big Law, I'm not sure if the potential higher salary would offset the debt. Perhaps it would over the longer-term trajectory of a career.

[QContinuum]

Also, what if someone's only T13 offer is at sticker? Is that still better for someone with Big Law aspirations? I could very well end up having to make that decision, and while I do want Big Law, I'm not sure if the potential higher salary would offset the debt. Perhaps it would over the longer-term trajectory of a career.

I can't speak to Sack's friend, of course, but I'll address the above. It's not just the BigLaw salary. It's the geographic portability and career-long flexibility a T13 J.D. offers* (*caveat, Cornell's less geographically portable than the other T13s).

Geographic portability means you can take your T13 J.D. to any midsize or larger legal market in the country - it's recognized and respected nationwide. In contrast, absent other factors (terrific GPA, strong hometown ties), a T20 J.D. is primarily limited to the school's greater geographic region, maybe plus NYC (e.g., a USC J.D. is going to be portable throughout CA and maybe the West Coast, but would get limited traction in Atlanta or Boston; a WUSTL J.D. is primarily recognized in the Midwest; and so forth).

Career flexibility includes, for corporate-oriented folks, the in-house exit options only available from BigLaw. And, for litigation-oriented folks, the Fed Gov/AUSA/high-level PI exit options only available from BigLaw.

[Sackboy]

Why is he disappointed? Was he one of those people who go to a UIUC-type school thinking they'll be able to "beat law schools admissions at its own game" by taking on minimal debt at a T30 and then hustling for Big Law? The job he got otherwise doesn't sound that bad. But if he went into law school thinking he'd be in the top 20% and come out making $180k with minimal debt, then that makes sense.

Also, what if someone's only T13 offer is at sticker? Is that still better for someone with Big Law aspirations? I could very well end up having to make that decision, and while I do want Big Law, I'm not sure if the potential higher salary would offset the debt. Perhaps it would over the longer-term trajectory of a career.

Re: my friend, it was exactly that. He's a smart guy, and his undergraduate GPA started off a bit rocky due to some family issues, so he had the idea of "well, I'm really smarter than my GPA, so I'll take a T30 full-ride and just hit top 20%" that you see a lot on this board. Considering your uGPA correlates like 0.4 with your law school performance, it's really bad logic. You could end up anywhere in your class, as my friend found out. The gig is otherwise good, and he's not in terrible financial shape or extremely upset, just disappointed that he's pretty much stuck in his flyover state and will probably make between $80k-$150k his entire career.

As for taking a T13 at sticker, it's definitely the way to go if you want near-guaranteed biglaw, but I'd never recommend anyone do it. There used to be a poster on this board (and I think he still pops by from time to time) called UVA2B who, iirc, said that $150k was his highest tolerance for debt coming out of a T13 law school, and I think that's generally a good mark to hit. If you're living lean and really ass-blasting your loans, you can pay that off in 2 years and bail from biglaw. When you start talking about sticker these days, that's $300k+. That'd take 4-5 years of living incredibly lean while working a grueling job. I wouldn't wish that upon anyone.

T13 at sticker and T30 full-ride should, rarely, be the only real choices. Many applicants can retake and reapply. It's not fun. It's quite frankly mentally taxing, especially if you feel a strong social urge to "go now," but it's the right call. A 166 3.7 can get you a full-ride at many T30s and probably sticker at any T13 that admits you. A 170 3.7 is getting you at least some $$ at lower T13s.

[The Lsat Airbender]

It's pretty easy to do the math on this. Suppose the margin between biglaw and not-biglaw is, say $500,000 (that's a round number to make the math easy but I think that's a reasonable ballpark on purely financial terms). We also need to make the simplifying assumption that all outcomes boil down to biglaw or not-biglaw, but in terms of salary that's not too unreasonable.

At Cornell you're about 25 percentage points more likely to get biglaw compared to at WashU (~75% minus ~50%). So Cornell is worth an additional $125k of "biglaw equity."

Obviously, the evaluation isn't nearly that simple. Biglaw sucks for a million non-salary reasons and it also great (mainly because of the opps it creates) for a bunch of reasons. It's an intensely personal decision because some people don't value biglaw at all, whereas other people are mainly only motivated by how wealthy they'll be at retirement.

Then you need to also take into account the soft power of a prestigious degree that Q mentions above. 0Ls usually overvalue this factor because they're still trying to impress mommy and daddy, or their Tinder matches or whatever, but there is definitely some real value in having a "nationally-portable" J.D. And only the T14 really offer that. It all depends on what you want to do, how much optionality you need to preserve, etc.

Yet another factor is that higher-ranked schools tend to be stronger financially and therefore to have more generous LRAP programs. This is harder to evaluate because LRAP isn't quite a free lunch but it caps the downside of attending any given school at sticker.

TL;DR: T13 at sticker is a reasonable deal in a vaccuum, sometimes worth passing up a T1 full ride, and it depends on how much you, personally, value the difference in outcomes, especially wrt biglaw. For many individuals, it's a bad decision, but its not intrinsically stupid or anything.

[239840]

Just for the sake of argument, what is the value of being in the bottom 20-30% of your class at a T13? Is Big Law still a reasonable expectation, even if you may have to jockey your way to a position? Would someone in the bottom 20-30% of their class at a T13 be any likelier to succeed at a UIUC?

[The Lsat Airbender]

If you're bottom quartile (i.e., noticeably below-median) at a T13 then 1) biglaw is still possible but you're definitely in the danger zone and I think "reasonable expectation" is too optimistic unless you're at a T6 and good at interviewing/networking and 2) you probably would not have been noticeably above-median at any given T1 school, although that depends somewhat on why your grades were poor at the T13.

[239840]

If you're bottom quartile (i.e., noticeably below-median) at a T13 then 1) biglaw is still possible but you're definitely in the danger zone and I think "reasonable expectation" is too optimistic unless you're at a T6 and good at interviewing/networking and 2) you probably would not have been noticeably above-median at any given T1 school, although that depends somewhat on why your grades were poor at the T13.

It just seems to me that some have this theory of law school where they think they can "be a big fish in a small pond" - based on their stats, that is - and get a job from a regional school that would've been statistically more likely from a T13. But the accepted, predominant viewpoint on here is that you should instead go to a school known for placing students into the type of job you want. It seems that the actual way in which one should try to "game" the process, then, is by doing well on the LSAT, since that might - if even the bottom of the class at a T13 can get good outcomes - more or less frontload the most important work you have to do in getting to the outcome you want. If you're capable of achieving an LSAT score that's sufficient for a T13 acceptance, then it makes very little sense to settle for aiming to dominate at a regional school, especially given how unpredictable law school grades are. If you frontload the important work to acing a learnable test, instead of centering it around 1L performance, you are playing it safer than you'd be if you were to bank on dominating somewhere that doesn't place a lot of graduates into the type of job you want. However, if even at a T13 you'd have to be in the top 70% to get Big Law, or a clerkship, etc., and you'd also have noticeably better competition than you'd have at a T1, there's an argument to be made that the above reasoning may not actually work out for some folks ceteris paribus. But if even the bottom 30% of the class at a T13 can obtain elite jobs, then that wouldn't work as a critique of that reasoning.

[Sackboy]

Just for the sake of argument, what is the value of being in the bottom 20-30% of your class at a T13? Is Big Law still a reasonable expectation, even if you may have to jockey your way to a position? Would someone in the bottom 20-30% of their class at a T13 be any likelier to succeed at a UIUC?

The value being in the bottom 20-30% is that you're still competitive for biglaw jobs in NYC at market-paying V50 firms and many regional firms that don't quite pay market/lockstep but would still be financially OK outcomes (e.g. $130,000). Those V50 and top regional firm outcomes are generally the near best-case scenario coming out of a T1.

Look at Duke this year, they placed 80% in BL+FC. Considering that we all know some people go into law school wanting PI, gov't, or some business role straight out, we can assume the percentage of students who wanted big law is less than 100%. Say 10% of students came in knowing they wanted to do PI/Gov't/Business work, that means Duke would be placing 80/90 of its students who wanted biglaw into biglaw. That's an ~89% success rate. Assuming the PI/Gov't/Business people aren't all stuck at the bottom of the class, that means you can really be near dead last and have a real shot at scraping up some type of biglaw, whether that be a very large regional firm or a V50.

The idea that you'd be 60th percentile at Duke but 20th percentile at IL or any similar notion is just silly. I'm sure if you drop down from Duke to Golden Gate Law that will probably be true, because the gap in average students is massive. The average GPA coming into IL is 3.70. The average coming into Duke is 3.78. The average LSAT at both schools is 162 (86th) and 169 (97th), respectively. Quite frankly, those students are pretty much identical. If all the IL students studied again and retook, they could probably look exactly like Duke students (we all know the LSAT is incredibly learnable). Even if they didn't, 86th vs 97th percentile isn't a huge gap. Both students are well above average and have similar GPAs. So, if you're looking to pass IL kids on raw muscle, you really don't have much more than them. Now, if you focus on the reality of law school and the fact that you either kind of suck at law school exams or you don't, it becomes pretty clear why you can't just be OK and Duke and great at IL. If you turned in mediocre exams at Duke, they'd still be mediocre exams at IL, because there is very weak evidence that your ability to succeed in law school is even tied to GPA/LSAT. I think when they combine them they get less than a 0.5 correlation.

So, this is all to say that nobody should be thinking they'll be top X% (unless X=100), that they'll magically be good in a new system they've never experienced, or that them going to a "lesser" school will allowing their superior capabilities to let them do really well (unless they are making a massive drop from Duke students to 3.15 GPA students with 150 LSATs - actual median numbers at Golden Gate).

[QContinuum]

So, this is all to say that nobody should be thinking they'll be top X% (unless X=100), that they'll magically be good in a new system they've never experienced, or that them going to a "lesser" school will allowing their superior capabilities to let them do really well (unless they are making a massive drop from Duke students to 3.15 GPA students with 150 LSATs - actual median numbers at Golden Gate).

And just to add a final flourish to Sackboy's terrific analysis above, which I heartily second:

While someone with a Duke admission could likely count on being a top student at a school like Golden Gate - let's say top 20%, or even top 10% - the issue with that is that they still can't count on being the #1 or #2 student in their entire class year at Golden Gate, which is what it'd take to achieve an outcome (i.e., BigLaw) even remotely comparable to Duke's*. Even then there'd be the (lack of) mobility, and (rightly or wrongly) a career-long struggle to overcome hasty judgments from other lawyers, many/most of whom at the highest echelons of practice are pretty prestige-obsessed.

*Even if this person was smart/determined/hardworking/etc. enough to deserve the top spot at Golden Gate, there'd be literally zero margin for error. A bad cold or headache the day of the torts final? Oops. A single professor whose teaching style just didn't work? Oops.

So, summing up: The problem with attending a lower-ranked school in hopes of making it into the top X% is that the quality of students declines relatively slowly as you move down the ranks, and by the time you get to schools where the quality of students has dropped enough that you'd be assured to dominate your classmates, you've gotten to schools with such low placement power into BigLaw and federal clerkships that even your assured domination doesn't get you back to BigLaw safety.

[239840]

Interesting. Thanks! All of that makes sense. Is it pretty doable to pivot to a PI focus as a 2L at a T13 if you fail to land Big Law at OCI and are worried about debt?

[QContinuum]

Interesting. Thanks! All of that makes sense. Is it pretty doable to pivot to a PI focus as a 2L at a T13 if you fail to land Big Law at OCI and are worried about debt?

1) Yes. In fact, a good number of PI-focused T13 students spend their 2L summer in BigLaw (for the cash and to keep their BigLaw options open as long as possible) before hitting the pavement in 3L for a PI job. Many/most PI employers don't hire until 3L year anyway. That said, for someone interested in PI, it's strongly preferable to have some record of PI involvement before & throughout law school - PI orgs want to hire "true believers". A 2L summer in BigLaw is fine, so long as paired with PI involvement during law school, a PI-oriented 1L summer, and some PI work during the BigLaw summer (all BigLaw summer programs allow summers to get involved in the firm's PI work).

2) At a T13, you really will be able to land BigLaw as long as you want it. Even if you're in the ~5-10% that strike out at OCI, you'd still more or less be able to land a BigLaw gig if you scramble. It's very, very, very few T13 students who A) badly want BigLaw, yet B) were not able to land BigLaw despite trying everything they possibly could.

[The Lsat Airbender]

The average LSAT at both schools is 162 (86th) and 169 (97th), respectively. Quite frankly, those students are pretty much identical. If all the IL students studied again and retook, they could probably look exactly like Duke students (we all know the LSAT is incredibly learnable). Even if they didn't, 86th vs 97th percentile isn't a huge gap.

I agree that it's not a massive difference but the first part of this is a bit of an exaggeration. The LSAT is learnable to some extent but it's also normally-distributed and statistically-valid. Most people cannot simply will themselves to a 169.

7 points is a statistically-significant divide which predicts a difference in 1L grades. But it's not a huge difference on average, and the average disguises confounding factors at the individual level.

[Sackboy]

I agree that it's not a massive difference but the first part of this is a bit of an exaggeration. The LSAT is learnable to some extent but it's also normally-distributed and statistically-valid. Most people cannot simply will themselves to a 169.

7 points is a statistically-significant divide which predicts a difference in 1L grades. But it's not a huge difference on average, and the average disguises confounding factors at the individual level.

If you're already at a 162, the likelihood is that you can probably get to a 169. The raw score differential between those two scores is 10 questions. That's 2.5 more questions right per section. That's hardly unfathomable.

As I noted, a student's LSAT+GPA accounts for roughly only half of the variance in their law school grades. To say that a 7 point gap in LSAT is going to lead to statistically significant grade outcomes ignores the fact that 1/2 of the equation isn't captured by LSAT+GPA and that the gap between a 162 and 169 isn't very large. 7 points is not equivalent at all ranges of the LSAT. The difference between a 173 on the LSAT and a 180 is 7 points, but those students are both in the 99th percentile. Similarly, a 7 point gap here is essentially a decile in terms of percentile ranking. That's not a big differential, and I wouldn't expect it to lead to one student being far better at law school, or even materially better, than the other.

[The Lsat Airbender]

If you're already at a 162, the likelihood is that you can probably get to a 169. The raw score differential between those two scores is 10 questions. That's 2.5 more questions right per section. That's hardly unfathomable.

As I noted, a student's LSAT+GPA accounts for roughly only half of the variance in their law school grades. To say that a 7 point gap in LSAT is going to lead to statistically significant grade outcomes ignores the fact that 1/2 of the equation isn't captured by LSAT+GPA and that the gap between a 162 and 169 isn't very large. 7 points is not equivalent at all ranges of the LSAT. The difference between a 173 on the LSAT and a 180 is 7 points, but those students are both in the 99th percentile. Similarly, a 7 point gap here is essentially a decile in terms of percentile ranking. That's not a big differential, and I wouldn't expect it to lead to one student being far better at law school, or even materially better, than the other.

There's a difference between someone "at a 162" and people whose highest score was 162 and then matriculated to law school. Retakers usually don't improve that much between actual sittings of the LSAT because, broadly speaking, people who sit the LSAT have already worked hard to get near their ceiling. And everyone has a ceiling. Scores wouldn't be normally-distributed if it was just a matter of getting the reps in to get to 170.

It's like how most of us could easily add 15 MPH to our fastball speed with a little bit of strength training and technique, but a minor-league pitcher capping out at 85 can't just bolt on that extra heat so easily and play in the majors.

Your note that counterintuitive things can happen on the right tail of a bell curve doesn't mean much either. Again with the baseball analogy: the difference between 90 and 98 MPH is still massive, even if it's just separating out the top 0.001% of humanity.

Is there a learnable component to the LSAT, so that somebody's evenualy score usually far exceeds their cold diagnostic? Of course. Are there people who underperform on test day, who still have lots of gas left in the tank? Sure. Is the LSAT a mediocre predictor of law-school performance? Everyone agrees it is. But it measures something, and that something meaningfully correlates to getting high marks on 1L exams.

We agree about the conclusion here, because actual grades at a different institution are a much more reliable predictor of 1L grades than the LSAT could ever hope to be. Someone who struggles at Columbia would probably also have struggled at Minnesota.