Also, keep in mind that when it comes to law, “Ivy League” doesn’t necessarily mean that the school is the best regarded in the country. Cornell is an Ivy League school, but its law school isn’t even in the top 10. There are several non-Ivies that outrank it.

The top schools will take a few students from schools that are not prestigious — but for those people, everything else has to be perfect — everything.

If you go to a top tier private university or one of the better public universities, then your chances of getting into a great professional school will increase.

I’ve attended two top professional schools (business schools at Duke and Berkeley) and taught at Wharton and MIT’s Sloan School. There were a few students who went to schools like Southeastern Michigan — but very few. On the other hand, there were LOTS of students who did their undergraduate work at Ivy League schools, schools like Duke, Rice, Northwestern, Emory or the better state universities (Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Penn State, Minnesota, Maryland), etc.

As for Black students — about half the blacks in my Duke MBA class went to HBCUs and half went to schools like those mentioned above (or one of the military academies). In my opinion, the ones who went to the HBCUs were not as well qualified as those who went to non-HBCU schools (with the exception of those who went to Howard or Morehouse).

As a side note, a couple of my MIT students told me that they felt they had a better chance of getting into Yale Law than students from Harvard — because so few MIT students apply, while lots of Harvard students do. This may be true.