3.78 Ivy Undergrad GPA, 173 LSAT Forum

[liammial]

Ivy undergrad has little or no weight in the admissions process.

Not even close to true. Look at Harvard/Columbia/anywhere else's class: a massive percentage of them are Ivy grads.

Yeah, I know how statistics works. But correlation alone cannot account for this absurdly high number. As someone who went to an Ivy I've seen it firsthand, but I can't prove it here.

[liammial]

"Ivy" undergrad specifically might not mean that much but at very top law programs, i.e. Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, coming from a competitive/highly ranked undergrad makes a difference. Overwhelming majority of the class hails from a prestigious university or LAC, regardless of whether its in the Ivy league. This is not just a correlation/causation issue.

Also look at admitted students at CLS or HLS with sub-median numbers. They are nearly all from an Ivy or equivalent. No, it won't strictly compensate for a low LSAT, but it seems to help. And that's not just correlation.

I think OP stands at least an outside chance at HLS, and a great chance at CCN.

How do you know it's not just because those people who are at Ivy or equivalent schools tend to have much better softs?

I tend to agree with jbagelboy that undergrad school definitely matters in *some* way, although it's hard to tease out. If you took, say, NYU Law's entering class and rank-ordered them in terms of UGPA, my strong suspicion would be that the kids who went to Ivy undergrads would have heavy representation in the bottom half. I'm at Penn, for example, and anecdotally, almost every time I've looked up a fellow student who went to a middle-of-the-road undergrad, they invariably were summa or like the salutatorian, which is not at all going to be true for the students here who went to Harvard or Yale for undergrad. Of course, as said above, this doesn't tell the whole story -- kids who go to HYP, etc., for undergrad will just have much better LSATs than the general pool, so I can't just say "school matters" when the 3.5 Harvard kid going up against the 3.95 Boise State kid has a 173 compared to Boise kid's 165.

But my suspicion (and frankly, my own experience, as someone with a dreadfully low UGPA from an Ivy) is that you have a lot more flexibility GPA-wise coming from an Ivy.

You raise an interesting point though about softs. For example, it's a lot easier to work for McKinsey straight out of undergrad if you went to Harvard. But you tend to need a pretty good GPA for that anyway, and there aren't going to be many kids who get hired at McKinsey but can't do well on the LSAT. Maybe going to Harvard makes it easier to go help whales in Darfur when you're 24 and write a sweet PS about it.

I'm from Penn too and I've actually noticed the opposite. From what I've gathered, Penn applicants actually have more LSAT flexibility. I have always assumed this is because a law school can place more value on a GPA from a good school, and therefore the LSAT is less useful as a predictive metric.

[jumpin munkey]

"Ivy" undergrad specifically might not mean that much but at very top law programs, i.e. Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, coming from a competitive/highly ranked undergrad makes a difference. Overwhelming majority of the class hails from a prestigious university or LAC, regardless of whether its in the Ivy league. This is not just a correlation/causation issue.

Also look at admitted students at CLS or HLS with sub-median numbers. They are nearly all from an Ivy or equivalent. No, it won't strictly compensate for a low LSAT, but it seems to help. And that's not just correlation.

I think OP stands at least an outside chance at HLS, and a great chance at CCN.

How do you know it's not just because those people who are at Ivy or equivalent schools tend to have much better softs?

I tend to agree with jbagelboy that undergrad school definitely matters in *some* way, although it's hard to tease out. If you took, say, NYU Law's entering class and rank-ordered them in terms of UGPA, my strong suspicion would be that the kids who went to Ivy undergrads would have heavy representation in the bottom half. I'm at Penn, for example, and anecdotally, almost every time I've looked up a fellow student who went to a middle-of-the-road undergrad, they invariably were summa or like the salutatorian, which is not at all going to be true for the students here who went to Harvard or Yale for undergrad. Of course, as said above, this doesn't tell the whole story -- kids who go to HYP, etc., for undergrad will just have much better LSATs than the general pool, so I can't just say "school matters" when the 3.5 Harvard kid going up against the 3.95 Boise State kid has a 173 compared to Boise kid's 165.

But my suspicion (and frankly, my own experience, as someone with a dreadfully low UGPA from an Ivy) is that you have a lot more flexibility GPA-wise coming from an Ivy.

You raise an interesting point though about softs. For example, it's a lot easier to work for McKinsey straight out of undergrad if you went to Harvard. But you tend to need a pretty good GPA for that anyway, and there aren't going to be many kids who get hired at McKinsey but can't do well on the LSAT. Maybe going to Harvard makes it easier to go help whales in Darfur when you're 24 and write a sweet PS about it.

I'm from Penn too and I've actually noticed the opposite. From what I've gathered, Penn applicants actually have more LSAT flexibility. I have always assumed this is because a law school can place more value on a GPA from a good school, and therefore the LSAT is less useful as a predictive metric.

For Penn undergrads specifically, I don't disagree, but I think that's just because Penn undergrads make up a plurality of Penn Law's incoming class every year (similar to a lot of other schools). You can't demand the same LSAT and GPA if you want 8-10% of the class to be Penn undergrads.