800 dude wrote:
swamprunner wrote:
Are you serious? Review the ABA required disclosures re Harvard Law. It is much more difficult to get into than undergrad. Same with all other Ivy/Top14 law schools.
This is basically true, but the thing to keep in mind is that for undergrad, applicants are drawn from a lot of different pools. Harvard has more varsity sports than any school in the country. Then there are the the diversity admits (which isn't just racial minorities; if you're the top kid from Wyoming, you've got a much better shot than if you had the same GPA/SAT from California). Then there are donors and legacies. If you are a white, middle class kid who is applying purely on academic grounds with no "plus factors," then it is brutally difficult to get into the undergrad. But that's actually a pretty small group of kids. The majority of the undergrad had some "help" getting in. There's a lot of luck involved, too, because it's so difficult for admissions committees to distinguish between outstanding high school students.
In the law school, they do have affirmative action (though to a lesser degree), and they don't have all of these other plus factors. They're not as focused on getting a well rounded class. They want the best students, and they need to maintain high median 50s for their GPAs and LSATs for rankings purposes. So you have to have good grades and truly excellent LSATs. The MEDIAN LSAT score at HLS is 173, which is 99th percentile!
The bottom line is that most Harvard undergrads couldn't get into the law school. But most Harvard Law School students couldn't (or didn't) get into the college.