Internet Chatter

The purpose of this blog is to provide some hard data to give other law school applicants in my situation an idea of how to evaluate the importance or insignificance of their advanced degree during the application process. People comment on this situation in various internet forums, and the comments are usually in this vein.

"The bad news is that your Ph.D. won't boost your LS admissions odds all that much. It will help some, but not much. Reason? Your LSDAS gpa is fixed at the time you get your first BA/BS. That's the one used in LS rankings. Nothing you do in grad school will boost that #, so it's MUCH more important in LS admissions that your Ph.D. Seems silly? Agreed, but it's true. I remember an assistant philosophy prof at Fordham who applied to LS and was really upset with the results, which were exactly as predicted based solely on his UG gpa (which wasn't great) and LSAT. He said Ph.D. helped him very little." (Link to source)

This isn't an isolated example. Here's another post that says basically the same thing.


"There are a bunch of ex-PhDs on here, and you may want to search out amyLAchemist's PS sample for an example from someone who just got a PhD in Chemistry; I think it's on the main PS thread. I guess my advice is that it's important, but it's not quite as important as you might think. For example, the blue hair PS on another thread here... the OP got a lot of flack for it but if it was for real, it didn't affect the cycle - it worked out just like the numbers would have predicted anyway. The same goes for LoRs and a lot of other stuff. There are exceptions - if you're going for HYS or Berkeley, for example, maybe some other schools, but it really depends on your targets. It matters, but by orders of magnitude less than numbers + your PhD." (Link to source)

Both of these posts say that PhD's and other "soft" factors don't really have much of an impact on law school admissions. People get accepted where their numbers predict that they will be accepted. Besides that fact that there is usually a large area of uncertainty in exactly where the accept/deny line would be for a particular applicant at a number of schools, I noticed that both of these posters "knew" somebody who didn't get a boost from some soft factor that the applicant thought might be important. I don't want to base my law school application plans on hearsay.

The email from an admissions office that I have posted a portion of here suggests that graduate degrees and work experience can help sway the admission decision one way or another. I am going to try to determine just how much these soft factors can sway an admissions committee. I recognize that not every PhD is in my position, but any kind of reliable information is better than insubstantial rumors.