What kind of difference between schools are we talking about? Quality of education? If so, yes, I would guess that there truly is no difference between Wylie's school, the University of Virginia, and (say) Yale overall. Career opportunities the school's name opens up for its students? Yale might have an edge there, but usually not a decisive one.

I don't think it's just law students' competitive nature, and I don't think we can blame it all on BigLaw, either. At a public interest job interview I had a few weeks ago, the lady interviewing me frankly admitted that because of the economy, she had a flood of applicants who would normally go to firm jobs, and so they were chucking out all applications that weren't from top schools. ("We're only looking at kids from schools like Columbia now," were her exact words.) We live in a credentialist society where a school's name does matter, and it matters for law especially because (unlike medical schools) there's a widely-held perception that some law schools are easy to get into and succeed in. It also matters because many of us simply do not have much law-related work experience, especially when we're applying for our first summer jobs. So employers go by the school name because it's the only hint they have of what we can do. When we're out of school for a few years, I suspect our collective attachment to the hierarchy will diminish considerably. We'll have other things to pride ourselves on. What struck me as weird about Wylie's reaction to bragging about one's law school is that, well, shouldn't he be over that by now? And shouldn't the Yale guy also be over it? The fact that neither of them were suggested to me that Wylie was an especially insecure person and that the Yale guy hadn't done anything much since graduating from Yale.

As for how Columbia "sold" me on itself: it was pretty simple, Columbia was very close to home for me, I heard good things about it from a lawyer I worked for, and it is prestigious. Since I think the prestige of one's law school opens a lot of doors, and do not seriously believe that there are massive differences between the quality of teaching and student life between various "top" schools, prestige played a big role in my decisions on where to apply and consider attending. Was this a con? I don't think so, but maybe. I've no way of finding out, really.

-- AnjaliBhat - 03 Apr 2009