It’s time to answer the age old question: how useless are political science majors?
Actually the question is what undergraduate majors provide the best credentials to a law school admissions officer deciding how to best game the U.S. News rankings create a mutually rewarding academic environment. Political science majors don’t look so hot as a category. Even philosophy majors do better than poli-sci students on the LSAT. I guess realizing that law school is the only marketable skill they’ll be able to get since Slavoj Žižek already has “being paid to spout off about ‘The Real’ while dressed as a homeless man” locked up is a powerful incentive to study.
Professor Derek Muller of Pepperdine Law took the time to crunch the numbers for the 2013 incoming class and arranged the findings into a handy chart.
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So how did your major fare?
Now admittedly, some of these majors weren’t heavily represented. Professor Muller limited his inquiry to majors that had 150 or more students, explaining that 150 may be a small sample, but that a more inclusive study was more interesting. Here’s the chart:
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As you can see, the best prospective law students were the Classics majors. Even though there were just 190 of them, they achieved a 159.8 LSAT and a UGPA of 3.477–the highest in both categories.
Among the rest, there is a pretty good correlation between LSAT and UGPA. As expected, some of the majors with disproportionately low UGPAs but high LSATs were in the sciences (I labeled Biology, specialization; Biology, general; Electrical Engineering; Mechanical Engineering; and Mathematics on the chart.) Among majors with disproportionately low LSATs but high UGPAs were Accounting, Law, Social Work, and Spanish.
In case you were wondering, the lowest performing group of applicants are criminal justice majors, which is sad, because unlike someone majoring in medieval French poetry, the criminal justice kids expected to go to law school all along and still couldn’t get it together.
Sad face.
If you want to see the data for all the majors, there’s a full table available at Excess of Democracy.
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