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[quote=Exlawdean][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As a parent, my 1st question is how hard or is it possible to get scholarships/FA from a top 14 law school? DC is attending college in the fall at a top SLAC and is aspiring to study environmental science, law and public policies. Any advice will be appreciated! [/quote]

Not OP, but I got one at Georgetown.  My sense of what were the contributing factors: (1) high LSAT (174); (2) hard-core major (math); (3) good undergrad grades; and (4) documented interest in a particular specialty (law & econ/antitrust).

Other people had better LSAT scores and better grades than I did, so it was not just about those two numbers.[/quote]

Georgetown law school is well known for awarding lots of merit scholarships to both incoming first year law students as well as to transfer law students.

The top 3 law schools (Yale, Stanford, & Harvard) do not award merit scholarships, but these law schools do award need based financial aid.[/quote]

[i]I thought I would add some context to the discussion of scholarship availability. First, I had intended this thread to be about much more than the T14. Most lawyers do not go to T14 schools. So, from time to time, I will try to widen, a bit, the discussion.

Second, the practice of awarding scholarships varies dramatically from school to school. As one of the commenters, above, noted, Yale, Stanford, & Harvard claim not to award merit scholarships, and have stuck to this claim for years. On the other hand, the University of Chicago -- a very fine school which has occupied the #3 spot on US News for the past couple of years -- clearly gives merit scholarships. And many of the other 25 law schools that claim to be in the top 20 also give merit scholarships. There is no hard and fast rule. Instead, you have to go school by school in whatever year you are accepted and find out what a particular school's policies are at that time. This goes further than just need v. merit. Many schools have scholarship endowments from alumni who want to give to law students who are "like" the donor. Thus, there are law schools with endowments for scholarship funds for veterans of the armed forces, for immigrants, for the first to go to law school in their family, and so forth. NYU has scholarships for those who plan to practice public interest law. Some law school may even have a scholarship fund for those who were mathematics majors. I don't know which school that might be, but I can't rule it out. You must work with an admissions and financial aid officer at each school to find out if that school has narrowly drawn scholarship assistance that might work with your situation.

Third, the regularity that we have observed for the past decade or two -- some schools say no merit scholarships -- may turn out to be quite contingent. Why do I say this? There are two phenomena that may destabilize our equilibrium. (1) The reformation of US News rankings in response to continued attacks by law school deans and others has shaken up the methodology and the rankings. The schools that have fallen may well feel pressure to do something about the situation. Consider Harvard Law, ranked number 5 this year. Do you believe that the Harvard Board of Trustees, the alumni of Harvard Law, or the Dean of Law at Harvard will be satisfied with that ranking? I don't. I believe that pressure will build to "do something." And part of "doing something" may well include putting some money on the table for merit scholarships. (2) We are approaching a small demographic cliff. As all academic administrators know, people stopped making babies after the advent of the great recession at the same pace that we did before the great recession. Most of the articles that I have read indicate that undergraduate admissions should expect approximately a 20% reduction in applications in 2028, give or take. And this reduction will persist for a while. By 2032 or 2033, this reduction will hit law school admissions. The effects of this very large reduction in the applicant pool will pressure admissions offices, even those at T14 law schools, to work much harder to enroll the classes they want and to keep their rankings. The obvious outcome will be that if you have a child in the seventh grade at this time who decides that they want to go to law school, they likely will be able to get into a higher ranked law school ten years from now than they can with the same LSAT and UGPA, etc., right now. And, as a corollary, that same child may find it possible to get some merit scholarship ten years from now at a law school that claims never to give merit scholarships today.

I hope this helps.[/i][/quote]

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