Reply to Per ATL: Yale & Harvard Law No Longer T14

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Harvard, Yale, and Stanford (although Stanford does give out a little bit of merit aid through the Knights-Hennessey program) give out all of their aid through "need" only. That means they will almost always take into account parental wealth and assets. Harvard is known to be the least generous in this regard (over half of their students pay the full $320,000 price tag), whereas Yale and Stanford are known to be more generous with "need" aid. I put "need" in quotations because how each school calculates "need" is somewhat suspect.

Other law schools in the T14 (Columbia, Chicago, Penn, NYU, UVA, Michigan, Berkeley, Duke, Cornell, Northwestern, and Georgetown) give out the majority of their aid through merit alone (i.e. GPA + LSAT score). Consequently, if you're looking at the financial side of job outcomes alone in getting a legal education, deciding to attend a T14 school on a full or even half tuition merit scholarship might be a better decision than deciding to attend Harvard Law at sticker price, since generic Big Law outcomes are going to be very similar across 12 or so of the top law schools. If you're angling to go into academia, become a judge, get a COA or SCOTUS clerkship, then the decision might be javascript:void(0);a little less clear, since Harvard, Yale, and Stanford (and Chicago) do have somewhat of an advantage above the other schools. [/quote]
+1. Spouse turned down HLS for a full ride to another T14. Very financially successful, retired rather early. Obviously, this was many yrs ago, but it sounds like merit is even more common now than back then. It would be hard to imagine a better financial outcome happening from HLS; he was never interested in clerking and many of his partners were former S. Ct. clerks, all ending up in the same place, financially. My perspective is that, at least for law school name, a T14 is enough to get any student where they want to go in BigLaw. Like any other career, the rest is up to the person and their qualities: the intellectual goods, the drive to work hard, etc.[/quote]

I don't think you are correct that HLS and YLS take into account parental assets in admissions decisions (if that's what you were saying) -- the application process is need-blind and then they do the financial aid separately.  I turned down a full ride at a T14 for YLS which was definitely the right move financially.  YLS gave me need-based financial aid, and I took out about $90K in federally subsidized loans.  I would have had to borrow money at the "free ride" school to pay my room and board (which would have been more than in New Haven anyway) and would not have received subsidies for all my unpaid summer internships.  I paid off that $90K a long time ago and YLS definitely made me more competitive for fellowship, clerkship and employment.  Plus, the students there are really wicked smart.  Some of them are irritating, yes, and some of them are socially awkward, and some are pretty arrogant.  But they were universally wicked smart.  It's a small class so they can be pretty selective.

But I agree that every case is different and people should consider their options.[/quote]
Sorry for the confusion, I am the immediate PP and did not read other PP's post as referring to parental assets being considered in admission decisions - I think they were referring to cost only.

To clarify my own post, the full ride I was referring to was not need-based, but merit scholarship (tuition, living expenses + extra stipend + summer associate spot for first summer in BigLaw). My general point was merely that there was not a better financial outcome to be had from borrowing to attend HLS that he missed out on by taking the full ride to the T14, in my spouse's individual case. (Certainly, if he hadn't had the big merit scholarship, and borrowed for either the T14 or for HLS, it would also have worked out fine, though there was some freedom in not having that debt starting out.)[/quote]

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