Reply to Hypothetical law school question

Forum Index » Jobs and Careers

Reply to "Hypothetical law school question"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP -- I haven't read through all the responses, but I'm a law professor, so I probably have a better sense of what's going on in law school right now than most people on this thread.  With those kind of numbers, your DH can probably get a full ride (or very close to it) at a good law school in this area.  Make sure it's a guaranteed 3-year scholarship (not the type that lapse if your DH doesn't do particularly well his first year).  If your DH does well at the lower-ranked school, he will get a job in big law.  If not, he can transfer to a higher ranked school.  Trust me, higher-ranked schools are letting tons of transfer in to make up for the revenue they are losing from first year students (since fewer people are going to law school these days).  This is especially true if you guys want to end up in DC.  If you want to end up in NY or California, then HYS might make sense because you'd have to give up your job in a few years anyway.[/quote]

[b]This is horrible advice, listen to the people who actually work in law firms.[/b]  I'm the pp who went to Penn. [b] It is not easy to transfer [/b]and even the top students at schools outside the T14 can have trouble getting jobs.  If he can get into Penn or Georgetown, I'd go for it, but even then, he will need to be in the top quarter of the class to have the best shot at a good job.  Going elsewhere, GW, Notre Dame, or Temple, probably not worth the risk.  Any other T14 school would be worthwhile as well.[/quote]

How do you know more about students' chances of getting hired than I do?  You see what your firm does.  I see the experiences of many, many students every single year.  I bet I also know far more than you do about the type of money schools are willing to give students like OP's DH, and about transfer policies.  If OP's DH is in the top of his class at a good law school, he will be able to transfer.  Here are the transfer numbers for some of the big "transfer-in" schools for last year:

Harvard -- 33
Berkeley -- 55
Columbia -- 46
Georgetown -- 113
GW -- 97
NYU -- 50
Chicago -- 23
Northwestern -- 35
Michigan -- 19
UCLA -- 44

These are just transfer students who enrolled, so these schools obviously accepted many more students.  Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Duke, UVA, etc. also play the transfer game, the numbers just aren't as high.  At a time when applications to law schools are plummeting, this is how law schools make money.  They keep their first year class small (so that the average LSAT and GPA is high), and then accept a bunch of transfers w/ lower indicators because US News doesn't take transfers into account.

OP -- a lot of people will tell your DH to go to the best school he can get into.  Many of those people are just giving the advice that they followed and don't understand that very good schools (e.g., in the top 25) will give your DH a lot of money to go there.  Good luck to you and your DH!

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics