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[quote=Anonymous][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 [b]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[/b]. 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]

What???  I can assure you that Dean Manning and the rest of the Harvard types like myself don’t give two figs about USNWR! If you are going to write a book about this (which is the only reason I can think of you wasting the time to crowdsource here) you need to gather better info. HLS wasn’t even no. 1 when I graduated eons ago but it was the top sought out school because of law firm and law clerkship status. It hasn’t been no. 1 as by USNWR due to its size as far as I remember but no graduate (or Boards) has ever cared give. Harvard has never sent out a fundraising letter saying “OMG HLS is no 4 ! send in money!”  It has been no 2,3,4 or 5 since the 1990s but no one cares. That’s one of the many reasons John Manning followed Yale in pulling out of USNWR - not to mention the costly venture of voluntarily supplying voluminous data to an archaic publication that should have been doing it’s own data sampling since the 80s. Google worlds best law school. It is always Harvard. And that’s also where all the international students prefer to go. Yale and Stanford can continue to turn out the arrogant law professor type (who can’t pass the bar because they’ve been too busy with “space torts”) but I would always recommend HLS over most of the other T5s simply for the vast array of connections. Most Harvard judges have one Harvard clerk every year. I undoubtedly benefited from that. I did get into the other top schools but it never even occurred to me to go there.  Ask any Harvard grad if they think Harvard worries about being no. 5. I can assure you that it never cared about being 2, 3 or 4 or whatever it was when I attended. And we are all glad that HLS followed Yale (which has been no 1 as long as I can remember so had to go first). USNWR may remain important or self-important  for undergrad purposes but with 65 law schools pulling out for law school rankings are over.[/quote]

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