Starting with next year’s admissions cycle, Harvard Law school will launch a pilot program allowing applicants to apply with either the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT), the standardized test that nearly all law schools have used for decades, or the GRE General Test (GRE), used by many graduate programs outside of law or medical school. …
[M]uch of what makes Harvard Harvard is the quality of the talent it is able to attract. The lure of Wall Street or Silicon Valley, the availability of capital for everything from biotech to software to social media start-ups, and the increasingly tenuous ROI for students ready to invest time and money in an expensive law degree are all siphoning off their share of recent college graduates who might otherwise have chosen law school.
It is to Harvard’s advantage to increase access to top talent and to be able to cast a wider net. As Jessica Soban, Harvard Law School’s Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives and Admissions, put it, “Harvard Law School works to eliminate barriers to legal education for top talent. We seek that talent from a variety of backgrounds: across different academic disciplines, different countries, and different socio-economic backgrounds.”