Top Law Schools

What are my chances at the top 14?

Thank you I really appreciate it!!

In at CCN and down unless YP.

What does "unless YP" mean ? Yield protection ? Yale/Princeton ?

Regardless, apply to all law schools in the Top-14 which are of interest to you.

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That was helpful.

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

Yield Protection

CanadianWolf wrote:That was helpful.

I refuse to believe that you have nearly 9000 posts on this website and don't know what YP means

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Yeah, but it's the same post repeated 9,000 times.

Princeton undergrad as in the title of the thread. But, for clarification purposes, I do realize that both Dartmouth's & Princeton's law schools are well kept secrets.

CanadianWolf wrote: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.

liammial wrote:

CanadianWolf wrote: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.

Correlation != causation

With high LSAT/GPA stats.

I agree with the other posters. Depending on your softs and where you went to school (in this case there is a difference between Cornell and Princeton; sorry if that makes me seem like an elitist), HYS could be in play. Yale is probably least likely, but people have DEFINITELY gotten into H and S with stats and a pedigree similar to yours.

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Thank you guys! I'm very new to this website and the whole application process so this is very helpful.

teampeeta wrote:I agree with the other posters. Depending on your softs and where you went to school (in this case there is a difference between Cornell and Princeton; sorry if that makes me seem like an elitist), HYS could be in play. Yale is probably least likely, but people have DEFINITELY gotten into H and S with stats and a pedigree similar to yours.

FWIW >5 Cornell kids in one of the smallest of its undergrad colleges (<200/class) got in to SLS last year and more in at HLS. It doesn't make you sound elitist, just apt to make claims based on hunches. Go Big Red.

bertrussell wrote:

teampeeta wrote:I agree with the other posters. Depending on your softs and where you went to school (in this case there is a difference between Cornell and Princeton; sorry if that makes me seem like an elitist), HYS could be in play. Yale is probably least likely, but people have DEFINITELY gotten into H and S with stats and a pedigree similar to yours.

FWIW >5 Cornell kids in one of the smallest of its undergrad colleges (<200/class) got in to SLS last year and more in at HLS. It doesn't make you sound elitist, just apt to make claims based on hunches. Go Big Red.

yes can we please stick to "lower-Ivy" snarking on Brown

bertrussell wrote:

teampeeta wrote:I agree with the other posters. Depending on your softs and where you went to school (in this case there is a difference between Cornell and Princeton; sorry if that makes me seem like an elitist), HYS could be in play. Yale is probably least likely, but people have DEFINITELY gotten into H and S with stats and a pedigree similar to yours.

FWIW >5 Cornell kids in one of the smallest of its undergrad colleges (<200/class) got in to SLS last year and more in at HLS. It doesn't make you sound elitist, just apt to make claims based on hunches. Go Big Red.

I don't have anything against Cornell- I'm sure plenty of people from Cornell (and Brown and Dartmouth while we're on the subject) do very well in law school admissions. I do think the prestigious UG boost is more significant for HYP (and also Stanford and MIT even though they technically aren't Ivies) grads. Since OP's GPA is ~25th for HYS and their LSAT is ~median, that distinction may be significant. I know a few people who were 3.8/170-171 who got H and S. They all went to HYP fwiw.

Humblebrag

"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.

liammial wrote:

CanadianWolf wrote: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.

jbagelboy wrote:"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?

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

This is exactly what we'd say if OP was not coming from an Ivy

james.bungles wrote:

jbagelboy wrote:"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.