International student with a US bachelor's degree

abhi.ruparelia

I recently attended 7Sage's webinar hosted by (I believe) David Busis, where he talked about international students applying to US law schools. An interesting thing he talked about was that international students face a disadvantage when it comes to law school admissions because of a variety of reasons, including GPA conversion, language, and financial issues. However, I am not sure if the same applies to my case. I am an international student studying at top liberal arts school in the US (which means that I won't have language or GPA conversion issues). In this situation, would I still be at a disadvantage, solely based on the fact that I am not a US citizen?

_oshun1_

I don’t think you would be considered an “international student” since you are getting your bachelors in the US. Not sure if law schools put any weight on whether or not one is a citizen...

Leah M B

I don't think so! @"David.Busis" would be more the expert on this, but I think the disadvantage he's specifically talking about are those things which you said really don't apply to you. If a school is trying to evaluate a student with a vague non-convertible transcript/GPA, that's tough. But you'll have a US GPA that's easy to read. And it sounds like little to no language barrier. Finances could still be an issue, not sure of what the specifics are there. But by studying at a US undergrad, you'll be in a much better place for schools to evaluate your credentials.

David Busis

Good news and bad news. The bad news is that the trend we noticed does pertain to international students with American undergraduate degrees. Students who checked "international" on their LSN profile tended to do worse than students who did not check "international" on their profile. That is, a self-described international student with, say, a 3.8/170 did worse, on average, than a domestic student with a 3.8/170. The international students in our dataset have LSAC GPAs, indicating that they went to American or Canadian schools.

The good news is that we can't say that being international causes you to do worse. As you know, correlation is not causation, and as I mentioned in the webinar, we don't know the mechanism of our finding. It may be, for example, that international students tend to submit weaker applications than domestic students, which might make sense if many international students speak English as a second language. And if that's the case, then you're not at a disadvantage at all. You're just a member of a group that has, as a whole, underperformed another group—namely, domestic applicants.