Paying for law/med school

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My DD was offered a full tuition scholarship at GMU/Scalia Law but nowhere else. GMU is now ranked 31. She has two Oxbridge degrees, great college GPA-and a 175. White. She picked a T4 (no merit) with our blessings. But her friends with weaker LSATs and record had to drop down to T4Os to pick up half or full tuition scholarships.

Mine with a 174 and Phi Beta Kappa got nearly a full ride to a top 20 but was rejected or WL at all 6 T13 they applied to.

You just don’t know what they’re looking for. It’s become more like undergrad and the right stats are not enough anymore.

[Anonymous]

DC had 174, 3.9 (Summa Cun Laude) from a state University and got 2 large Merit scholarships from 2 top 7 schools … DH is a lawyer and we are white. I’m not suggesting it is easy to get these sorts of awards but they are out there and not just for URMs or low income applicants.

[Anonymous]

I would pay for med school but would likely not pay for med school because I generally think too many people go to law school without a clear reason for going and then end up miserable. So I would not want to make the decision of whether to go to law school any easier.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My DD was offered a full tuition scholarship at GMU/Scalia Law but nowhere else. GMU is now ranked 31. She has two Oxbridge degrees, great college GPA-and a 175. White. She picked a T4 (no merit) with our blessings. But her friends with weaker LSATs and record had to drop down to T4Os to pick up half or full tuition scholarships.

Mine with a 174 and Phi Beta Kappa got nearly a full ride to a top 20 but was rejected or WL at all 6 T13 they applied to.

You just don’t know what they’re looking for. It’s become more like undergrad and the right stats are not enough anymore.

FWIW, the admissions offices seem to communicate and waitlist any law applicant who might go elsewhere because that upsets the school’s yield numbers. Chicago and Georgetown are notorious for this. If they don’t communicate then they have an elaborate algorithm for estimating the chance that the student, if accepted, will go elsewhere, thus upsetting the yield statistics (did Dad go to YLS? Did someone in the immediate family teach at Stanford Law? etc.). The consultant we used thinks they communicate but he can’t prove it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My DD was offered a full tuition scholarship at GMU/Scalia Law but nowhere else. GMU is now ranked 31. She has two Oxbridge degrees, great college GPA-and a 175. White. She picked a T4 (no merit) with our blessings. But her friends with weaker LSATs and record had to drop down to T4Os to pick up half or full tuition scholarships.

Mine with a 174 and Phi Beta Kappa got nearly a full ride to a top 20 but was rejected or WL at all 6 T13 they applied to.

You just don’t know what they’re looking for. It’s become more like undergrad and the right stats are not enough anymore.

FWIW, the admissions offices seem to communicate and waitlist any law applicant who might go elsewhere because that upsets the school’s yield numbers. Chicago and Georgetown are notorious for this. If they don’t communicate then they have an elaborate algorithm for estimating the chance that the student, if accepted, will go elsewhere, thus upsetting the yield statistics (did Dad go to YLS? Did someone in the immediate family teach at Stanford Law? etc.). The consultant we used thinks they communicate but he can’t prove it.

Thanks. It was surprising. I assumed it was that they were fresh out of undergrad and weren’t convinced they were dedicated to the profession. It worked out. Kid is graduating with zero debt and got a job with a top firm. But it makes me always want to warn parents and kids that having the right stats is not enough anymore.

[Anonymous]

More rich parents are paying for law school:

"At the nation’s top 50 law schools, the proportion of students who graduate without loans increased between 2010 and 2024 from 17 percent to around 40 percent. Class divide at law schools can be found pretty much everywhere now."

From "Is Law School Only for the Rich?":
https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-law-school-only-for-the-rich

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I don’t know if school policies have changed, but when DH went to ivy law school the financial aid application required parents’ info if student hadn’t been financially independent for at least 7 years. So school expected parents to help pay.

Nope. Not any more. There are scholarships for the brightest of the bright at all law schools these days. They will pay for the right stats no matter what your income.

Yeah, but if they are trying to up the stats by funding merit aide scholarships with the tuition from average students then what happens when the average student can’t take out loans to fund it? If those scholarships are funded via donations the I assume they are fine.

Incorrect. It’s a Seller’s market today for law schools. For example, Harvard, where I attended and DD just started, doesn’t offer any merit aid. https://hls.harvard.edu/sfs/prospective-and-admitted-students/prospective-and-admitted-need-based-aid-philosophy/. DD applied to 8 law schools and was not offered any merit aid notwithstanding top GPA, LSAT and a D.Phil from Oxbridge. When merit IS offered, it is to lure a URM away from attending another top Law school. Now, if you want to drop
Down to T40 schools you might get half-tuition or full tuition but only if the applicant has something that that law school wants.

This is not exactly true - for top stats all law schools except for HYS offer various major scholarships for merit with no thought of how much your parents make - this includes Penn, Chicago, Columbia, Duke, UVA and all the others. Our DS took one of these and graduated with no debt- scholarships like these look great on resumes too.

But almost all of those go to URM students. My DD used an online service recommended by her LSAT tutor which laid this out via self-reporting from students who used the service. (The schools themselves don’t want to acknowledge this). There might be a few merit scholarships in the T14 for the perfect 800 but schools like Harvard already get enough applicants with 800s so doesn’t need to offer merit at all. I’m getting the name of the service from her and will post back.

I hate this kind of cope. My kid is as white as they come and got a full ride merit scholarship to a Top 6 law school. They also had a 180 LSAT and a 4.0 GPA and were Phi Beta Kappa at an Ivy League school. That’s who is getting these merit scholarships but instead people make up a fictional person of color to be mad about instead of conceding that for these extremely selective scholarships, there were more qualified applicants than their own kid