Top Law Schools

Is it just me or does HLS go out of its way to intentionally take students from as many different undergrad schools as possible? I looked on their website and it says they currently have students from 261 different undergraduate schools. I might even apply there just in case no one else from my UG applies and they feel obligated to take me. Ok that probably won't work, but its worth a shot to try anyway.

Storm wrote:Is it just me or does HLS go out of its way to intentionally take students from as many different undergrad schools as possible? I looked on their website and it says they currently have students from 261 different undergraduate schools. I might even apply there just in case no one else from my UG applies and they feel obligated to take me. Ok that probably won't work, but its worth a shot to try anyway.

that probably has a lot to do with the need for high GPAs

Seems like a fair bet. You probably need to compare them with other law schools first in order for your claim to have actual weight.

Storm wrote:Is it just me or does HLS go out of its way to intentionally take students from as many different undergrad schools as possible? I looked on their website and it says they currently have students from 261 different undergraduate schools. I might even apply there just in case no one else from my UG applies and they feel obligated to take me. Ok that probably won't work, but its worth a shot to try anyway.

Keep in mind that this might include all of the 150-something LLM's, who probably have virtually no overlap in terms of undergraduate schooling.

Off the top of my head, I can tell you that there were people in my section from:

-All the Ivies, and about 40-50 percent of the section went to an Ivy League school (Cornell and Harvard are the most well-represented in my section, with maybe 15-20 between them; Penn and Brown had only 1 apiece).
-Elite public universities (Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Virginia, UT Austin)
-Liberal arts colleges (Haverford, Mt. Holyoke, Wesleyan, Dickinson, Lafayette)
-Well-known private schools (Duke, Georgetown, USC, GW, Stanford, UChicago, NYU, Vanderbilt, WUSTL, Brandeis, BYU)
-Other state schools (Alabama, Arkansas, Maryland [College Park & Baltimore County], Howard, Penn State, CUNY Hunter College)

So yeah, plenty of diversity, but still pretty overwhelmingly elite schools.

It's because their incoming class size is on the large side. If you consider that they have around 1650 JD students at any one time, 1650/261 would be around 6 students on average from each of the 261 schools. So consider that elite schools and top publics have really high representation while you might have 1 student representing each of the lesser known schools, it reasonably balances out. Don't count on the "I'm the only one applying from my school" strategy at all, this distribution basically mirrors where high LSAT scores are usually clustered.