Who needs Harvard?

by Rishi Wed Jan 09, 2013 11:45 pm

The Gotta-Get-Ins can no longer claim to be the more or less exclusive gatekeepers to graduate school. Once, it was assumed that an elite-college undergraduate degree was required for admission to a top law or medical program. No more: 61 percent of new students at Harvard Law School last year had received their bachelor's degrees outside the Ivy League. "Every year I have someone who went to Harvard College but can't get into Harvard Law, plus someone who went to the University of Maryland and does get into Harvard Law," Shirley Levin says. For Looking Beyond the Ivy League, Pope analyzed eight consecutive sets of scores on the medical-school aptitude test. Caltech produced the highest-scoring students, but Carleton outdid Harvard, Muhlenberg topped Dartmouth, and Ohio Wesleyan finished ahead of Berkeley.

The elites still lead in producing undergraduates who go on for doctorates (Caltech had the highest percentage during the 1990s), but Earlham, Grinnell, Kalamazoo, Kenyon, Knox, Lawrence, Macalester, Oberlin, and Wooster do better on this scale than many higher-status schools. In the 1990s little Earlham, with just 1,200 students, produced a higher percentage of graduates who have since received doctorates than did Brown, Dartmouth, Duke, Northwestern, Penn, or Vassar.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/10/who-needs-harvard/303521/

by Petrichor Thu Jan 10, 2013 12:14 am

Ivy grads : 14000
Total grads: 1.75 million
Ratio: 0.8%

HLS enrollment: 560
Ivy share: 39%

Discuss...

by Marathadi-Saamiyaar Thu Jan 10, 2013 1:23 am

Yale Law School ranked higher.

by Jeremiah Mburuburu Thu Jan 10, 2013 2:55 am

Marathadi-Saamiyaar wrote:Yale Law School ranked higher.

what else is new?

"Yale Law has been ranked the number one law school in the country by U.S. News and World Report in every year in which the magazine has published law school rankings." -- wikipedia.

by Kris Thu Jan 10, 2013 4:13 am

atcg wrote:Ivy grads : 14000
Total grads: 1.75 million
Ratio: 0.8%

HLS enrollment: 560
Ivy share: 39%

Discuss...

>>> As an aside, I wonder how the 'costs- benefits' play out to the overall society with so many of the brightest minds going into law. As a profession, the value added would seem to be a lot lower than the STEM fields. In fact, a disproportionately high number of lawyers could even be a drag and counter-productive.

by Petrichor Thu Jan 10, 2013 9:58 am

Why so many lawyers? Perhaps 'benign growth theory' has the answers:

>greater internationalization and other forms of interaction;
>greater diversity in the population;
>changes in wealth levels; and
>greater involvement of the workforce in formal organizations.

http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3010&context=flr

by Petrichor Thu Jan 10, 2013 10:14 am

Kris wrote:
>>> As an aside, I wonder how the 'costs- benefits' play out to the overall society with so many of the brightest minds going into law. As a profession, the value added would seem to be a lot lower than the STEM fields. In fact, a disproportionately high number of lawyers could even be a drag and counter-productive.

Lawyers are the best example of rent-seekers in a classic definition. They don't generate wealth but fight over wealth already created. However, it is not the original cause - there is more wealth created today and more people fighting over it than ever before. The number of lawyers is an ugly measure of society's fractious nature.

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