Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Congrats to everyone accepted into HLS! I know that HLS is typically viewed as the gold standard among the legal community and lay people, but now more than ever, accepted students should really consider the financial impacts of going to HLS compared to a "lower" ranked school with a larger scholarship. The out-of-pocket cost of HLS is $120,000 per year, and with the way the incoming administration is set to declare war on higher education, there's a good chance that it actually might go up even more (a higher endowment tax, less federal funding available to universities, more lawsuits against universities, may mean that universities will pass these costs on to the consumers, i.e. the students). HLS only offers need-based aid, which maxes out at around half of the cost of attendance, and also factors in parental income (somewhat disingenuously). Less than half of HLS students receive need-based aid.
So if you are an accepted student at HLS who does not qualify for aid, and are looking at a $120,000 bill to cover through loans (the availability of federal loans might not even be a guarantee given certain political promises made during the last election), it probably makes more sense to accept a full ride scholarship from one of the lower ranked T14 school (e.g. the Darrow at Michigan, the Rubenstein at UChicago, the Hamilton at Columbia, the Mordecai at Duke, the Dillard at UVA). If you got accepted to HLS, chances are, you are also in the running for big merit scholarship money at these lower T14 schools, and in all likelihood, these schools will still give you the same range of outcomes: Big Law, clerkships, prestigious PI (the Skadden fellowship, ACLU, etc.), legal academia (although you might need to work a little bit harder compared to the HLS/SLS/YLS students). Also, whereas the availability of PSLF would been a safe harbor for Public Interest students wishing to take advantage of HLS's prestige in public interest circles, PSLF might be on the chopping block for the next Congressional budget overseen by Musk.
Just a PSA, since I've seen a ton of students buy into the prestige of HLS and reject big scholarship money from Columbia, UChicago, Duke, NYU, and other "lower" T14 schools, only to realize they need to work at least 5 years at Kirkland after graduation to pay off the $500,000 in student loans (at a Big Law job they could have gotten at one of the lower ranked schools that offered them free scholarship money).
Don’t forget the Dan Fielding scholarship at Cooley Law.
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}