Setting off on the Chase

Molly Geraghly '64 says she wouldn't trade her job for the world. Each year, she becomes intimately acquainted with more than 6000 aspiring attorneys--even if she never meets them face to face.

Geraghty pores through piles of autobiographical essays, letters, and statistics on her unseen correspondents, ultimately making decisions that will change their lives.

Working with a committee of professors and administrators, the Law School's director of admissions leads a far-ranging quest for talent and diversity. The search couldn't be more straightforward, confined to four basic criteria, yet the qualities in demand are somehow indefinable. Geraghty's looking for the right stuff; she'll know it when she sees it.

This year, 780 candidates emerged from a field of 6,143 to gain admission to what is widely considered the nation's most prestigious law school. Five-hundred forty-nine of them registered two weeks ago. Thirty-five percent are women; 17 percent are minorities. Close to 70 percent will receive some form of financial assistance. Despite reduced federal funding, the Law School has been able to uphold its commitment in meeting "all demonstrated financial needs."

And while 200 colleges are represented in the incoming class, 65 of the first year students hail from Harvard, making the College the largest sing contributor to the student body. Yale runs a distant second with slightly less than half that number enrolled.

This year's crop, of new students includes a former pro basketball player and a former dean from Princeton University (see accompanying story), an Alaskan fisherman and several Midwestern farmers, and ranges in age from 18 to 41. All have survived a tortuous--and some would say torturous--weeding out process that began a year ago.

Each fall, Geraghty embarks on an aggressive recruiting campaign that takes her to campuses across the nation. "People have referred to me as Bear Bryant," she says. A host of student recruiters assist in the ambitious drive, and Geraghty says they have been the school's most effective advocates.

While the recruiting effort is geared specifically toward minorities. It also ensures that institutions like Goshen College in Goshen Ind., (total enrollment: 1,000) do not go totally unrepresented at the Law School.

In July, the admissions office begins sending out applications. Before the mailings end, the law school will have responded to requests for more than 30,000 of the official packets. Roug 6,000 of the applications will return completed, 300 from Harvard College alone.

By mid-September, a steady stream of the completed applications trickles into Geraghty's Pound Hall office. In a matter of months, the office is inundated with paperwork. Under a system of rolling admissions, most candidates are notified of the committee's decision within four weeks, making Harvard the fastest law school, Geraghty says. "We tell you right away," she explains. The first denials are mailed before Thanksgiving--just in time to ruin the holiday.

Some applications are denied very quickly, and a select few are almost instant admits. Still others receive hours of painstaking attention, but roughly half of the stack gets no farther than Geraghty's first reading. An application must receive at least two favorable readings before the office extends an offer of admission; when the initial readers disagree, the application goes before a larger panel.

Fewer than 600 applicants each year receive consideration by the full six-member committee, which includes no students despite repeated calls for representation by campus groups. When the committee convenes, impassioned debates are not unusual. "Emotions can run fairly high. I've had tears in my eyes," Geraghty comments.

An excess of qualified candidates forces the admissions office to make subjective and potentially arbitrary decisions. "If you put 10 applications on that table and said, 'Molly, pick out the two you admitted,' I'm not at all confident I could do it," Geraghty says.

Unlike the undergraduate admissions process, the Law School's admissions office bases its decisions on four streamlined sources of information: standardized test scores, academic transcripts, personal essays, and letters of reference. There are no indulgent interviews; there is no provision for "supplementary materials." The undergraduate admissions office has more information at its disposal, Geraghty concedes. Sheer numbers make the same depth impractical at the Law School.

While the Harvard admissions process tends to emphasize the objective criteria, some other schools attempt to weigh subjective considerations more heavily. Columbia Law School, for example, attaches equal value to what Dean of Admissions James Milligan calls "the enrichment factor."

"We're looking for a dimension that goes beyond academic and intellectual concerns, involving demonstrated personal skills," Milligan says.

Although the Harvard admissions office applies highly quantitative standards, it employs no rigid cutoff levels or weighted formulas, and it demands no specific preparation. At Harvard Law, there's no such thing as a pre-law major.

All applicants are required to take the Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT), which measures reasoning abilities. While critics charge the test can be culturally biased, the admissions office stands by its value as a common predictor of law school performance.

The point scale on the revised LSAT ranges from 10 to 48, but Harvard will not disclose the mean score for the student body. "We don't want to scare people off." Geraghty explains, saying only that it's "very high." The average score for the entire applicant pool is 39, in the ninety-sixth percentile.

The Law School Admissions Council, the organization that administers the LSAT, also prepares students' academic transcripts for evaluation by the admissions office, converting grade point averages to a standard four point scale. Straight A's from Harvard undergraduates are virtually unheard of, Geraghty notes. The average undergraduate GPA at the Law School is 3.5, but courses receive almost as much scrutiny as grades in the admissions process. Geraghty studies the transcripts to weed out the gut-seekers from the achievers, and she says she's familiar with the course offerings at 20 to 30 schools.

The application essay gives candidates their only opportunity to personalize an otherwise quantitative file of information. "Present yourself and your qualifications as you wish in a brief statement below," the form directs, allowing two pages for the response. Geraghty notes that students who begin along the lines of "Law is an integral part of modern democratic society" tend to fare poorly in the final judgment.

The application also includes two letters of recommendation and an official certification form submitted by the applicant's college, all of which figure into the complex deliberations of the admissions office.

In the end, Harvard is able to hand-pick its students to a degree unmatched by any other law school. And very few people turn down an offer to join the original paper chase.