How did you spend puberty? 
My concern (as a parent) would be his social skills. He earned his degrees online and isolated at home.
Socializing with other students will be a new experience. But they’re adults and I wouldn’t expect bullying.
What I find interesting is here’s a young genius that isn’t into science or medicine. You don’t hear about teenage geniuses going into accounting and/or law very often.
As someone who went to University at a young age (15) I found the social challenges to be far greater than the academic ones. Even though I graduated in the top 10% of my class in a very selective program, I was totally unprepared for the working world on graduation and I actually ended up further behind I my career than my classmates who were three or four years older.
That’s a good point. I can’t recall a situation like this.
Physics and math is more common with genius level teens.
I am surprised any Online College degree would qualify someone for Law School.
I hear stories of Applicant’s resumes from online schools getting thrown out. Its very unfortunate because these people spent the money for that degree.
It depends on the college - an online degree from a for-profit institution like the University of Phoenix and an online degree from a non-profit or public institution like Rutgers are not going to be seen as equivalent.
Isn’t law school based on LSATs?
Western Governor’s is fairly highly regarded in their niche. I mostly hear about career development degrees, but they have a good reputation.
Some combination of LSAT’s, college transcripts, and “life experiences.”
In my view, they put too much emphasis on LSATs, which really measure only how well you do on the LSATs.
ETA: Socialization was a much greater part of my undergrad experience than law school. You don’t need to be socialized to get through law school.
I’ve never been a big proponent of standardized testing (tho I greatly benefitted from my ability to score highly on them with little effort.) But my vague recollection was that LSATs purportedly correlated with prospective students ability to succeed in law school.
Likely puffery (and I’m not a big fan of law school education either!). But I thought I recalled hearing at one time that LSATs had better predictive value than some of the other standardized tests.
Ronan Farrow started at Yale Law School when he was sixteen, after graduating from Bard College at fifteen. (Later, he was at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.)
That could be true. I wasn’t relying on any studies, just my vague memory of what the test was like. (I have read studies about the poor predictive value of the SATs however)
Why is the kid in such a rush to be a lawyer? Does he need the money?
The sooner he starts, the sooner he can retire.
So he’ll get to enjoy life as an old man instead of as a young one. Isn’t he supposed to be smart?
At the rate he’s going, he’ll retire a millionaire at the age of 35. Prime years to be rich and idle.
Especially on the age of COVID.
As an aside, I find the claim that 174 was the highest LSAT score in the state to be… dubious. Plus, how would he know what score others got?
Yeah. We got raw scores and percentile scores. I think the highest score possible was a 50 when I took it. (I guess they changed a few things).
Indeed. It’s 180 now. It is a forced normal distribution, of course, and so only a very will get the highest scores. A *quick Google suggests a 174 correlates to the 99.4th percentile. So only a very small portion of test takers would score higher, like half a percent in theory, but then with thousands of test takers each year, I’d be… very surprised to learn that not a single person scored higher in the entire state.
And, again, even if he might theoretically have scored the highest… how would he know? Who would tell him?
*ETA: And another, slightly longer, search suggests the percentile ranking shifts a bit from year to year just due to chance (for the highest grades, the difference between one reported score and the next is just a single question, so there is plenty of room for year-to-year variation). I saw for some years 174 was as low as the 97.8th percentile.
So, again…. not sure how he can know it was the highest in the state, or how that could even be possible unless this was a very odd year for the LSAT, or maybe (just maybe) there is some self-selection in terms of where would-be top test-takers go to school for undergrad, and by extension take the LSAT. I would imagine, for instance, that Connecticut and Massachussets have an abnormally high number of top-tier LSAT takers per capita. States without an Ivy League school or near-peer public institution, on the other hand, might be expected to have disproportionately fewer.
He’s smart enough to figure it out himself,.
Maybe he is. You can get data by state. And the top category is 175-180. If no one is in that group in your state, then 174 is the highest. Maybe he tied for the highest.
A valid concern, but I know plenty of lawyers who managed to cobble together enough social skills over time to act like normal humans (more or less)