19 May Harvard Law Offers Early Admit With a Condition: Wait Two Years

The Harvard Law School is piloting an innovative and fascinating idea. It will offer admission to those in their junior year of college, with one condition. The acceptance is deferred until two years after college. The stated reason: to give candidates some real world experience before returning to the academic rigors of law school. Build additional maturity and life experience to bring you to school as a more developed human. Some cynics of course say that it is a way to get an early grab on top students who might consider Yale, Stanford, Penn or other top law schools.

For students, this obviously seems very attractive. Spend senior year looking for a job instead of applying to law schools. Look for that job already having Harvard Law on your resume. Be done with the admissions process at the same time as you get your first legal drink. One presumes, if this pilot is successful, that other top schools will do the same. One wonders what those jobs might be. A stint at a top consulting firm? Peace Corps in Kenya? Teach for America? Paralegal at a top law firm?

Law school applications are way down. Many are looking at different ways to reverse that. This appears to be one, though one assumes that HLS is not struggling to fill the seats in their ivy halls. The bigger discussion: can we replace the third year of school with real world clinical training? I think we can.