Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools Forum

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CLHJS

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Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by CLHJS » Tue Oct 05, 2021 4:37 am

Sharing a few interesting statistics I found over the internet, discussions are welcome. Note the top 5 most represented schools are identical across YLS and SLS and has been so for the past 3-4 years. I wonder how much do undergrad institutions matter in law school admissions? If you look at the ABA data for average LSATs and GPAs, a lot of elite schools aren't that far apart.

2019-2020 Yale Law School undergrad representation:

https://bulletin.yale.edu/sites/default ... 9-2020.pdf

Yale (90)
Harvard (54)
Columbia (34)
Princeton (31)
Stanford (22)
Dartmouth (21)
Cornell (19)
UChicago (18)
Brown (17)
Pennsylvania (16)
Georgetown (13)
Berkeley (13)
Duke (10)
Northwestern (8)
USC (8)
Michigan (8)
JHU (7)
UVA (7)
Amherst (6)
Swarthmore (6)
Bowdoin (5)
NYU (5)
Tufts (5)
UCLA (5)
UConn (5)
UNC-Chapel Hill (5)

2019-2020 Stanford Law Undergrad representation:

https://www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-con ... 2019-1.pdf

Yale (56)
Stanford (46)
Harvard (39)
Princeton (24)
Columbia (21)
Berkeley (20)
Penn (19)
Duke (18)
UChicago (17)
UCLA (16)
Cornell (13)
Georgetown (13)
Dartmouth (12)
Oxford (12)
Brown (11)
Cambridge (10)
NYU (9)
Vanderbilt (9)
USC (9)
Notre Dame (8)
UVA (8)
----------
LACs:
Pomona (8)
Middlebury (6)
Williams (5)
Amherst (4)
Swarthmore (4)
Wellesley (4)
Wesleyan (4)

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by cavalier1138 » Tue Oct 12, 2021 8:57 am

Undergrad institution doesn't matter except on the fringes. A 175/3.9 from the University of Texas will have better outcomes than a 169/3.5 from Yale.

This is, as always, a case of correlation being mistaken for causation. Top undergrad institutions turn out students who are more likely to have high LSAT scores and GPAs (if only due to grade inflation). Top law schools accept students with higher LSAT scores and GPAs. Now, if Yale has to pick between you (generic state school) and Beckwith Chaddington III (Yale), and you're both practically identical in every other way, then yes, Beckwith will probably get the spot. But since that scenario isn't very likely, it's pointless to try and quantify that effect.

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by nixy » Tue Oct 12, 2021 9:22 am

And while soft factors are unlikely to make the difference between acceptance and rejection, to the extent they are, that also favors people from elite schools that can provide lots of neat opportunities to their students (and help poor students pay to do them, although it’s often still tougher for poor students to take those opportunities than for rich students).

Of course, all this merely passes the buck on representation down to the college level.

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by ksm6969 » Tue Oct 12, 2021 10:21 am

cavalier1138 wrote:
Tue Oct 12, 2021 8:57 am
Undergrad institution doesn't matter except on the fringes. A 175/3.9 from the University of Texas will have better outcomes than a 169/3.5 from Yale.

This is, as always, a case of correlation being mistaken for causation. Top undergrad institutions turn out students who are more likely to have high LSAT scores and GPAs (if only due to grade inflation). Top law schools accept students with higher LSAT scores and GPAs. Now, if Yale has to pick between you (generic state school) and Beckwith Chaddington III (Yale), and you're both practically identical in every other way, then yes, Beckwith will probably get the spot. But since that scenario isn't very likely, it's pointless to try and quantify that effect.
While I agree this is generally the case, I think the faculty review system in place at Yale (along with its very small size) makes soft factors and especially undergrad more important. Faculty reviewers, many from top UG institutions, are, like anyone else, attracted to people who remind them of themselves . Schools with dedicated admissions officers train their officers to not pay (so much) attention to these things, but yales faculty review makes it much more unpredictable and makes these little things matter much more.

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by The Lsat Airbender » Tue Oct 12, 2021 12:48 pm

ksm6969 wrote:
Tue Oct 12, 2021 10:21 am
While I agree this is generally the case, I think the faculty review system in place at Yale (along with its very small size) makes soft factors and especially undergrad more important. Faculty reviewers, many from top UG institutions, are, like anyone else, attracted to people who remind them of themselves . Schools with dedicated admissions officers train their officers to not pay (so much) attention to these things, but yales faculty review makes it much more unpredictable and makes these little things matter much more.
The numbers in the OP pretty much put this idea to paid; I see a bit of east-coast/west-coast and home-school bias (i.e., self-selection by applicants) but no major difference in the undergrads of YLS vs SLS students. In fact they're strikingly similar.

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by Robot » Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:06 pm

The Lsat Airbender wrote:
Tue Oct 12, 2021 12:48 pm
ksm6969 wrote:
Tue Oct 12, 2021 10:21 am
While I agree this is generally the case, I think the faculty review system in place at Yale (along with its very small size) makes soft factors and especially undergrad more important. Faculty reviewers, many from top UG institutions, are, like anyone else, attracted to people who remind them of themselves . Schools with dedicated admissions officers train their officers to not pay (so much) attention to these things, but yales faculty review makes it much more unpredictable and makes these little things matter much more.
The numbers in the OP pretty much put this idea to paid; I see a bit of east-coast/west-coast and home-school bias (i.e., self-selection by applicants) but no major difference in the undergrads of YLS vs SLS students. In fact they're strikingly similar.
Nah, both schools care about undergrad, especially Yale. If your school has more students from tiny Dartmouth than massive UT Austin, where most of the top students from the second biggest state in the country go, you have a bias issue. Chicago also publishes its numbers and they have far fewer students from the Ivies and more from ”public Ivies” (eg they have as many from Berkeley and UCLA as Stanford does despite being in the Midwest). Also a much smaller proportion of their student body comes from top schools period, with more from small state schools, private schools you've never heard of like Drake and

https://www.law.uchicago.edu/files/2021 ... ssible.pdf

45 UChicago
20 UC Berkeley
18 Northwestern
16 Yale
15 Cornell
15 Duke
15 UCLA
14 Brown
13 Columbia
13 Harvard
12 Georgetown
12 Texas
11 Florida
11 USC
10 BYU
10 Michigan
10 Stanford
10 Wash U
9 Illinois
9 Princeton
8 Alabama
8 Notre Dame
8 Penn
8 Rice
7 Pittsburgh
6 Johns Hopkins
6 Northeastern
6 Vanderbilt
5 Florida State
5 NYU
5 Purdue
5 William & Mary
5 Wisconsin
4 American
4 Amherst
4 Arizona State
4 BU
4 Colorado
4 Dartmouth
4 Emory
4 Howard
4 Indiana
4 Maryland
4 Miami
4 Nebraska
4 North Carolina
4 Oklahoma

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by nixy » Sat Oct 16, 2021 11:41 pm

I think there are a lot of pipeline issues that aren't strictly bias but probably have the same effect.

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by cavalier1138 » Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:03 pm

Robot wrote:
Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:06 pm
If your school has more students from tiny Dartmouth than massive UT Austin, where most of the top students from the second biggest state in the country go, you have a bias issue.
Except Dartmouth takes the top students from the nation, not just Texas. UT Austin is a great school, but it's not even in the same ballpark in terms of admissions standards.

Could Yale's admission statistics be indicative of bias? Sure. But they could also be indicative of an increasingly narrow pipeline for students who test well and get good grades to continue to test well and get good grades. (Yes, I'm aware that test scores and grades can be affected by systemic problems; take it up with "The System").

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by Robot » Thu Oct 21, 2021 4:53 pm

cavalier1138 wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:03 pm
Robot wrote:
Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:06 pm
If your school has more students from tiny Dartmouth than massive UT Austin, where most of the top students from the second biggest state in the country go, you have a bias issue.
Except Dartmouth takes the top students from the nation, not just Texas. UT Austin is a great school, but it's not even in the same ballpark in terms of admissions standards.

Could Yale's admission statistics be indicative of bias? Sure. But they could also be indicative of an increasingly narrow pipeline for students who test well and get good grades to continue to test well and get good grades. (Yes, I'm aware that test scores and grades can be affected by systemic problems; take it up with "The System").
Both schools’ SAT 75ths are in the mid to high 700s but UT is about ten times larger. Most top students don’t apply to or attend highly selective universities, especially ones like Dartmouth that heavily pull from northeastern prep schools. Like Texans who could conceivably go to Harvard often just go to UT because they get in automatically via the ten percent system and it’s an elite university in many respects (e.g. it’s certainly much more of a research/faculty powerhouse than Dartmouth).

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by nixy » Thu Oct 21, 2021 5:02 pm

Robot wrote:
Thu Oct 21, 2021 4:53 pm
cavalier1138 wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 4:03 pm
Robot wrote:
Sat Oct 16, 2021 10:06 pm
If your school has more students from tiny Dartmouth than massive UT Austin, where most of the top students from the second biggest state in the country go, you have a bias issue.
Except Dartmouth takes the top students from the nation, not just Texas. UT Austin is a great school, but it's not even in the same ballpark in terms of admissions standards.

Could Yale's admission statistics be indicative of bias? Sure. But they could also be indicative of an increasingly narrow pipeline for students who test well and get good grades to continue to test well and get good grades. (Yes, I'm aware that test scores and grades can be affected by systemic problems; take it up with "The System").
Both schools’ SAT 75ths are in the mid to high 700s but UT is about ten times larger. Most top students don’t apply to or attend highly selective universities, especially ones like Dartmouth that heavily pull from northeastern prep schools. Like Texans who could conceivably go to Harvard often just go to UT because they get in automatically via the ten percent system and it’s an elite university in many respects (e.g. it’s certainly much more of a research/faculty powerhouse than Dartmouth).
And a lot of those Texans who aren’t interested in going to Harvard probably aren’t interested in elite northeastern law schools.

Also, Dartmouth’s 75th percentile SATs are higher than UT’s and their average SATs are quite a bit higher than UT’s. (Dartmouth’s average scores are higher than UT’s 75th percentile.)

I’m not saying UT students are unqualified in any way, but I think there’s a lot of factors that go into having more Dartmouth students than pure bias in favor of elite undergraduate schools. It may play some role, but it’s tied up with a bunch of factors.

(Also Dartmouth is absolutely a research/faculty powerhouse. It’s just not as many people as UT.)

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by Robot » Thu Oct 21, 2021 6:58 pm

Law school admissions are nothing like undergrad admissions—the vast majority of top law school candidates apply nationally, while most top undergrad candidates do not. That’s because law schools have far larger differences in outcomes than undergrads and law school applicants are generally much better-informed.

Obviously Dartmouth’s averages are higher, but Texas statistically has more top students just because it’s much larger. The top 10% at Texas is the size of the entirety of Dartmouth.

Also, what’s the story of the massive difference between e.g. Harvard and Columbia at YLS and SLS if not prestige whoring? Harvard and Columbia have virtually indistinguishable student bodies. And how would Chicago’s look so much different? Do you think it preferentially admits public school graduates?

Also definitely not the point of this thread but anyone comparing UT to Dartmouth in faculty research on any metric does not understand academia. Top profs are attracted by grad students, not undergrads—in the sciences especially, they absolutely need them for their labs—and Dartmouth has almost no grad students. It also doesn’t help that it’s in the middle of nowhere. The top research faculty are generally at either (1) flagship public schools like Berkeley, Michigan, and UT or (2) uber-rich private schools with far more grad students than undergrads like Harvard and Chicago. (See also: Chicago’s lengthy period as a top-ten research university with a not-particularly-selective undergrad before the last decade or two when the undergrad caught up.)

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by nixy » Thu Oct 21, 2021 9:09 pm

Again, I've said already and I still think there are pipelines that exist that aren't the same as bias, but have a similar effect. History and connections have significant impact. If that's what you mean by bias, maybe we aren't as far apart as it seems. Chicago has a different established pipeline. It's probably established a history of taking students from a broader range of schools because historically, students who went to wealthy, private, name-brand undergrads already valued those characteristics in their schools, and therefore were themselves biased toward the elite private law schools of the northeast. I don't think there's bias in that Yale will take a lesser Harvard student over a stronger Columbia student. Maybe if all else is equal, Yale favors Harvard over Columbia, but I also don't think all is equal very frequently.

I also think self-selection is a thing, and that there are a lot more top UT students who want stay in Texas and are good with going to UT to stay in Texas, than there are Dartmouth students who won't shoot for the highest ranked just because it's highest ranked. Culturally, Dartmouth is a place that pushes grad school and top everything incredibly hard, for all its students. (I'd bet a way higher percentage of Dartmouth grads go directly to grad school than of UT grads.) That's not going to make up all the difference, but it's part of it.

Part of the problem here is that given the ways in which elite undergrads in the US map onto socio-economic strata, it's impossible to really separate the blunt instrument of "bias" from a whole lot of cultural factors that influence who ends up at what school. Is it "bias" that Yale and Stanford have a lot of Harvard grads, or is it that Harvard already takes the cream of the crop undergrads, *and* has the money and connections to provide them lots of opportunities to get shinier and fancier? UT may be a research powerhouse for grad students, but are its undergrads getting the same opportunities for the soft factors that TLS tends to discount, reasonably so, but which are important when you're weighing two applicants who both have a 174/3.89? Is the preference for fancy internships etc. also a bias? Maybe, it sure can disadvantage the kid who has to work during college to support their family, but it's hard to say it's exactly bias if one kid has a glowing LOR from a professor in Zurich with whom they did original research and the other has a letter from a prof who taught them in a class of 150 and can say they did really well. UT students *can* get those opportunities, I'm sure, but I'd argue that the elite undergrads have more of a culture in which everyone gets those opportunities. (And just for the record, I have personal experience with and close friends with personal experience with all these kinds of institutions.)

Really my problem is that I don't think saying "Yale and Stanford Law Schools are biased!" gets us very far with addressing equity in higher/graduate ed.

(I'm also very familiar with academia and think you've overlooking Dartmouth's med school associated with a spectacular hospital, business school, and extremely strong graduate programs in the sciences. They don't have the breadth of grad programs that UT has, sure, but what they have is pretty impressive.)

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by The Lsat Airbender » Fri Oct 22, 2021 12:36 pm

Robot wrote:
Thu Oct 21, 2021 6:58 pm
Obviously Dartmouth’s averages are higher, but Texas statistically has more top students just because it’s much larger. The top 10% at Texas is the size of the entirety of Dartmouth.
This isn't obviously true. IIRC, law-school applicants from Dartmouth had a much higher average LSAT the last time these data were reported, which implies an even more extreme slant in the 173+ range because of how normal distributions work. Meanwhile, GPA inflation is rife at Ivies.

Would not be at all surprised if Dartmouth has more 173+/3.9+ applicants than UT, and you look kinda silly to presuppose that that's the case without actual hard data.
the vast majority of top law school candidates apply nationally, while most top undergrad candidates do not
This is also a dubious claim which I'd like to see some actual evidence for. The word "top" is doing a ton of work in this statement: "top" law-school applicants apply to the T14 by definition sure, but by that definition the "top" undergrad applicants are mainly applying to Ivy-Plus institutions. A decent number of "top" law school applicants stay home to attend UT (or any other strong regional/state flagship) for the same reason that a decent number of "top" undergrad applicants do. The two populations are very different in a bunch of other ways which probably drown out the effect you're trying to adduce here.

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by Robot » Sat Oct 23, 2021 2:08 pm

nixy wrote:
Thu Oct 21, 2021 9:09 pm

(I'm also very familiar with academia and think you've overlooking Dartmouth's med school associated with a spectacular hospital, business school, and extremely strong graduate programs in the sciences. They don't have the breadth of grad programs that UT has, sure, but what they have is pretty impressive.)
I realize US News rankings, especially for grad schools, aren't great, but calling any of Dartmouth's grad programs except for the business school "extremely strong" is a huge exaggeration.

https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-sc ... l-rankings

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by Robot » Sat Oct 23, 2021 2:41 pm

The Lsat Airbender wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 12:36 pm
This is also a dubious claim which I'd like to see some actual evidence for. The word "top" is doing a ton of work in this statement: "top" law-school applicants apply to the T14 by definition sure, but by that definition the "top" undergrad applicants are mainly applying to Ivy-Plus institutions. A decent number of "top" law school applicants stay home to attend UT (or any other strong regional/state flagship) for the same reason that a decent number of "top" undergrad applicants do. The two populations are very different in a bunch of other ways which probably drown out the effect you're trying to adduce here.
One empirical indication of this is that most National Merit Scholars, who make up a large proportion of students with top SAT scores across the country, attend regional public universities. While per capita they are obviously heaviest at the top schools, e.g. Texas A&M has far more than the "lower" Ivies. But this is also just common sense if you've ever spent time outside of the Northeast, which is the only area of the country where private education is the norm for elite high school students because of its lack of strong public universities. Meanwhile, there are very few if any 3.9/17X students at Alabama Law even though there are a whole lot of 4.X/15XX students at Alabama Undergrad.

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by nixy » Sat Oct 23, 2021 3:12 pm

Robot wrote:
Sat Oct 23, 2021 2:08 pm
nixy wrote:
Thu Oct 21, 2021 9:09 pm

(I'm also very familiar with academia and think you've overlooking Dartmouth's med school associated with a spectacular hospital, business school, and extremely strong graduate programs in the sciences. They don't have the breadth of grad programs that UT has, sure, but what they have is pretty impressive.)
I realize US News rankings, especially for grad schools, aren't great, but calling any of Dartmouth's grad programs except for the business school "extremely strong" is a huge exaggeration.

https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-sc ... l-rankings
USNWR grad school rankings consider number of graduate students and total research expenditures. Any small school is going to score poorly on these measures. I don't know anyone in academia who cares about USNWR rankings of PhD programs. Besides, the strength of a grad degree lies much more in your advisor than your school name.

But more to the point, a school's strength in graduate programs doesn't actually have any clear relationship to its placement of undergrads in top law schools.

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by Robot » Sat Oct 23, 2021 3:53 pm

nixy wrote:
Sat Oct 23, 2021 3:12 pm
Robot wrote:
Sat Oct 23, 2021 2:08 pm
nixy wrote:
Thu Oct 21, 2021 9:09 pm

(I'm also very familiar with academia and think you've overlooking Dartmouth's med school associated with a spectacular hospital, business school, and extremely strong graduate programs in the sciences. They don't have the breadth of grad programs that UT has, sure, but what they have is pretty impressive.)
I realize US News rankings, especially for grad schools, aren't great, but calling any of Dartmouth's grad programs except for the business school "extremely strong" is a huge exaggeration.

https://www.usnews.com/best-graduate-sc ... l-rankings
USNWR grad school rankings consider number of graduate students and total research expenditures. Any small school is going to score poorly on these measures. I don't know anyone in academia who cares about USNWR rankings of PhD programs. Besides, the strength of a grad degree lies much more in your advisor than your school name.

But more to the point, a school's strength in graduate programs doesn't actually have any clear relationship to its placement of undergrads in top law schools.
No, they don't, you are making stuff up. US News Ph.D. rankings in the arts and sciences are solely based on surveys of faculty. Otherwise tiny Caltech wouldn't be top-ten in everything. Dartmouth just really isn't a significant player. But yes, this is completely off-topic.

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by The Lsat Airbender » Sun Oct 24, 2021 11:59 am

Robot wrote:
Sat Oct 23, 2021 2:41 pm
The Lsat Airbender wrote:
Fri Oct 22, 2021 12:36 pm
This is also a dubious claim which I'd like to see some actual evidence for. The word "top" is doing a ton of work in this statement: "top" law-school applicants apply to the T14 by definition sure, but by that definition the "top" undergrad applicants are mainly applying to Ivy-Plus institutions. A decent number of "top" law school applicants stay home to attend UT (or any other strong regional/state flagship) for the same reason that a decent number of "top" undergrad applicants do. The two populations are very different in a bunch of other ways which probably drown out the effect you're trying to adduce here.
One empirical indication of this is that most National Merit Scholars, who make up a large proportion of students with top SAT scores across the country, attend regional public universities. While per capita they are obviously heaviest at the top schools, e.g. Texas A&M has far more than the "lower" Ivies. But this is also just common sense if you've ever spent time outside of the Northeast, which is the only area of the country where private education is the norm for elite high school students because of its lack of strong public universities. Meanwhile, there are very few if any 3.9/17X students at Alabama Law even though there are a whole lot of 4.X/15XX students at Alabama Undergrad.
National Merit is based on PSAT scores, lmao, come on bruh. I don't think it's a good proxy for "law-school applicant strength", which is a four-legged table of LSAT, uGPA, URM status and softs. Of those factors

1) LSAT: presumably correlates very weakly with PSAT performance, since both seem to covary somewhat with the SAT

2) uGPA: probably correlates even more weakly with PSAT performance, to the point of not being statistically significant (or else undergrads would care more about the PSAT for their own admissions process)

3) URM status: weak negative correlation with PSAT performance due to the same disparities that afflict standardized tests generally

4) Softs: probably no detectable correlation with PSAT performance

* * *

When we last had the data, in 2017, the mean LSAT score at Dartmouth was 165.67 (making Dartmouth the 6th-strongest undergrad for this criterion, behind only HYPS and UChicago). UT-Austin's mean LSAT score was 155.99, not even in the top 50.

That's an entire standard deviation, a massive disparity. It's equivalent to male Dartmouth students being 2.5 inches taller on average than their UTexas counterparts—if that were the case, would you be surprised to see Dartmouth producing more NBA players? I wouldn't.

I'm too lazy at the moment to model it out, but if you want to be taken seriously you should first do the math on what that mean-LSAT delta means for the relative populations of Dartmouth and UT-Austin students who have a 169+ on the LSAT and are therefore strong T14 candidates. Then we can move on to the fact that Dartmouth has worse grade inflation (i.e., significantly higher uGPAs on average), smaller class sizes (i.e., better academic letters of rec on average), etc.

https://talk.collegeconfidential.com/t/ ... re/2091306

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by nixy » Sun Oct 24, 2021 1:58 pm

Robot wrote:
Sat Oct 23, 2021 3:53 pm
No, they don't, you are making stuff up. US News Ph.D. rankings in the arts and sciences are solely based on surveys of faculty. Otherwise tiny Caltech wouldn't be top-ten in everything. Dartmouth just really isn't a significant player. But yes, this is completely off-topic.
So the first methodology I found was for engineering, https://www.usnews.com/education/best-g ... ethodology, which does include research expenditures and number of doctorates awarded.

But even if we're not going to agree, again, grad program strength really doesn't have anything to do with undergrad law applicant strength.

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by Robot » Mon Oct 25, 2021 9:08 pm

I am saddened that I am not "taken seriously" by you, "bruh." It's genuinely absurd to think that being in the top one percentile of the PSAT, which is by design a clone of the SAT, does not correlate with having a good undergrad GPA and a good LSAT score. The presence of high SAT scorers at Dartmouth is why it has a higher LSAT average. And undergrads do preferentially admit National Merit winners, and generally also give them scholarships (hence the name).

As for Dartmouth vs. Texas, you would need the underlying numbers of applicants and the standard deviations of LSAT scores within each university, not just the means, to calculate it out. Obviously the higher mean at Dartmouth makes it outperform other tiny colleges, but it's still a tiny college.

The LSAT data actually is helpful, though, and seems to confirm that undergrad discrimination occurs. There is almost no difference not only among the Ivies, but among the Ivies and less brand-name Ivy+ schools like Northwestern and Wash U. But SLS and HLS very obviously have huge distinctions not only between the top ~15 undergrads and the rest, but among the top ~15 undergrads. Chicago, on the other hand? Not really, except (obviously) for its own undergrad, which it openly preferentially admits.

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by cavalier1138 » Tue Oct 26, 2021 11:21 am

Robot wrote:
Mon Oct 25, 2021 9:08 pm
The presence of high SAT scorers at Dartmouth is why it has a higher LSAT average.
Do you see how this undermines your argument about undergrad bias?

(Also, can't believe we've seriously been debating whether UT graduates are, on average, competitive with Ivy League graduates for law school admissions.)

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by nixy » Tue Oct 26, 2021 11:33 am

I actually don't think PSAT tracks particularly closely with GPA/LSAT at all. It's a shorter/easier SAT, and the SAT isn't a great predictor either.

I think there's a lot of self-selection and regional bias that plays into these admission outcomes. For one thing, isn't Chicago a GPA whore rather than an LSAT whore? While there's been reference to grade inflation in the Ivy league (which I don't dispute exists), I think a lot of it is like being median at the T14 - it's a great big mushy middle where no one does badly, but it's still hard to get the very top grades. If you're a law school that prefers high GPAs to high LSATs, I can see why you might end up with students from a larger number of schools (by their very nature, the top students at any school are a limited number, and frankly, I think it's a little easier to get top grades at Pitt or Alabama than at Dartmouth or Harvard). And if you look at UVA, the top 5 schools they accept from are all in the south. Do you think UVA is magically not accepting the Harvard undergrads that end up at Stanford and Yale?

I'm not going to claim the law school admissions game (or higher ed generally) is perfectly equitable and fair - it absolutely isn't - but I don't think Yale and Stanford taking a lot of HYPS undergrads is really the issue.

Robot

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Re: Undergraduate Representation at Yale and Stanford Law Schools

Post by Robot » Tue Oct 26, 2021 7:40 pm

cavalier1138 wrote:
Tue Oct 26, 2021 11:21 am
Robot wrote:
Mon Oct 25, 2021 9:08 pm
The presence of high SAT scorers at Dartmouth is why it has a higher LSAT average.
Do you see how this undermines your argument about undergrad bias?

(Also, can't believe we've seriously been debating whether UT graduates are, on average, competitive with Ivy League graduates for law school admissions.)
No, that isn’t the issue of dispute, not that anyone cares at this point

Seriously? What are you waiting for?

Now there's a charge.
Just kidding ... it's still FREE!


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