Bearlyalive wrote:Tls2016 wrote:
My concern was that I read your post as greatly over exaggerating the benefit of just going to Harvard or Yale instead of taking one of the most prestigious scholarships in the country at Columbia.
I was genuinely interested in what employment data led you to that conclusion particularly as you implied dire consequences if below media at Columbia,but no issues from Harvard. I have not seen any employment data suggesting that is the case at all.
My take is that most grads are going to end up in biglaw anyway for the money and for the credentials. So paying more to end up in the same place is foolish.
I don't know that such employment data, as interesting as it would actually be, exists. Schools publish their overall employment data, but there likely is not a source that breaks down job outcomes based on median grades. In that regard, everything is anecdotal. But, as far as anecdotal goes, I have found TLS to be a great source for getting feedback from current students. I don't believe that there is much a chance of you coming out of Columbia
unemployed even at the bottom of the class; they have 98% employment, so that's obviously not the case. However, raw employment data doesn't tell the whole story, and not all legal jobs are created equal. So, and again basing this on conversations rather than data, I believe that someone below median at Harvard will have a better job
outcome, in whatever they choose to pursue, than someone below median at Columbia. It's no secret that the top firms, government agencies, and PI organizations reach deeper into the HYS candidate pool than they do to CCN. I doubt the idea that the average person at the 25th percentile at Columbia will end up at the same job as the average person at the 25th percentile at Harvard; they might do the same kind of work and maybe even make the same money, but I'll bet there will be some difference in outcome (prestige, QoL, connections for partner down the line, ability to lateral or transfer to PI/government, etc.), and it will favor the Harvard student towards the bottom of the class. Personally, based on what I've read, I think it's more significant than just that, but at the end of the day I'm still a 0L trying to sort through this muck like everyone else, and my impression of things, while founded in what I've read, is my own.
I agree that if biglaw is your goal, you would be foolish to go to Yale or Harvard over taking a Hammy or Ruby. But if you look at the breakdown of Yale's employment statistics for new graduates, only 36% are going to law firms. The kind of person who gets in to Yale (80+% of whom will end up going) are simply not as interested in doing Biglaw as the average CLS, or even HLS student. That could be because the school itself guides its students away from that path while they are there, but I think its more likely that they simply aren't as interested in the first place. Harvard is a little bit more law firm heavy (about 58%), but I think that simply due to the size of the school, there are going to be more students there than at Yale who didn't have to turn down a Hammy or Ruby to make the choice to attend. The higher you go, the less biglaw-oriented the students become. Furthermore, these statistics only track the first year of employment, and not five or ten years down the line; I would bet money that more people who go to HYS than CCN end up doing big law for a few years (to pay off debt) and then moving into a lower paying government or PI job.
But this is all missing the original intention of my post. I was not trying to demonstrate the inherent superiority of HYS over CCN, especially with a full ride on the table for the latter. The main question is whether or not there is a rational basis for turning such a fantastic offer down. Maybe you're correct, and the majority of people who choose Harvard over a Hamilton could have done well at CLS, and gotten the same or better outcome in biglaw with 200k more in the bank and (more importantly imo) many fewer years of debt floating over their heads. But there are definitely some people for whom what I wrote applies, whether because they are risk adverse, academically-inclined, or because they want the most prestigious jobs that HYS are simply superior in with regards to placement. At the end of the day, it's comes down to individual context.
