Choosing a Law School

Graduate School Law School
1

<p>Hi, </p>

<p>I am graduating from undergrad this fall and I am trying to make my decision for which law school to attend. I would appreciate any helpful insight and advice from those with experience in making this decision. </p>

<p>Acceptances--in no particular order (with fin aid and cost of attendance):
1. Emory University, Atlanta GA offering $30K per year to offset total cost of $71K per year
2. William and Mary, Williamsburg VA offering a Graduate Fellowship and $31K per year to offset a cost of $45K per year
3. Wake Forest, Winston-Salem NC offering $36K annually to offset $60K per year
6. University of Georgia, Athens GA offering $10K annually to cover costs of $22K per year
4. George Washington University, DC offering no money as of now but will evaluate me for a merit scholarship AFTER the seat deposit deadline of 4-1-13
5. George Mason University, Fairfax VA (15 min from DC) offering no money as of now</p>

<p>I want to do human rights or international law, but I am open to other options depending on the job market. Also, I understand that I should graduate with as little debt as possible, but I don't know where to weigh different schools' name recognition/prestige and job possibilities versus how much debt I would graduate with. Finally, I did my undergrad at UGA and I have lived in GA my whole life so I am less enthusiastic about UGA/Emory than the rest. </p>

<p>How should I make my decision? </p>

<p>Thank you for the help and advice--I really appreciate it because I am the first in my family to go to school in America, let alone get a graduate degree so it's been tough to find good resources.</p>

2

<p>Indecisive: Lawyer (20 + years out) here. You need to carefully research the options—and minimize your debt, if possible. The law market for newbies right now is terrible, and many people believe there is a systemic change happening in the market (so that it might not get better). Many people say don’t go to law school right now unless you can go to a T15 school (none of yours are) and are confident you will be in the top half of the class. The average salary for a lawyer is about $60K. </p>

<p>Here are a couple links to consider:</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/lsd/legaled/value.authcheckdam.pdf[/url]”>http://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/lsd/legaled/value.authcheckdam.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>[Make</a> an Informed Decision When Considering Law School - US News and World Report](<a href=“http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-law-schools/articles/2013/03/19/make-an-informed-decision-when-considering-law-school]Make”>http://www.usnews.com/education/best-graduate-schools/top-law-schools/articles/2013/03/19/make-an-informed-decision-when-considering-law-school)</p>

<p>[url=&lt;a href=“http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com%5DInside”&gt;http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com]Inside</a> the Law School Scam<a href=“Professor%20Campos’–a%20law%20school%20professor’s—%20blog”>/url</a></p>

<p>This is not to discourage you; I just want you to be familiar with all sides of the law school proposition since you don’t have a relative in the biz. I LOVE my career. Being a lawyer is a great profession—if you can get a job these days. But, I see a LOT of young people deep in debt and there are no job prospects for them. They are frustrated and feel taken advantage of by academia. Make a firm plan. Check US NWR about the law schools employment statistics post-graduation. Take seriously a place where you or your family have existing connections. Your loans will come due 6 months after you finish—whether you have a job or not. And, you cannot bankrupt out of the debt.</p>

3

<p>Look at each programme and determine which ones are good for human rights and international law. Also, if you want to live/work in DC, then go to school in DC or VA. If you want to go back to Georgia, go to school there. If you don’t want to be in Georgia for the rest of your life, do NOT go to Emory - you’ll never be able to explain to a recruiter that yes, you grew up in Georgia, you went to college there, you went to law school there, but you totally want to live in DC.</p>

<p>If you can put down a seat deposit at more than one school, do that and see what GW offers. </p>

<p>W&M is $54k for out of state residents, and it’s tough to get in-state tuition in Virginia. You need to demonstrate an “intent to stay” and also be a resident (license, car registration, voter registration, etc.) for more than one year prior to the school year in which you are seeking in-state aid. I know of someone who got in-state rates his second and third years by purchasing a condo near campus. </p>

<p>Nothing against Wake - it’s a great school - but don’t go there at that price. Historically, their career placement rates have been below peer schools; they are out in the middle of nowhere, NC, and don’t really get many recruiters on campus. It’s also tough for them to send kids up to DC for a day of interviewing. Nothing against the quality of the education, but unless law school is liberal arts school for another three years, not professional school, knock Wake off your list.</p>

<p>Mason is a good school, but not at out-of-state tuition prices. Knock that off your list.</p>

4

<p>

</p>

<ol>
<li>The first thing you need to do is figure out how much each school will actually cost. I’ll do one as an example, but you should run the analysis for each other school.</li>
</ol>

<p>Emory University, Atlanta GA offering $30K per year to offset total cost of $71K per year</p>

<p>1(a). The first thing you should do is figure out what stipulations attach to the scholarship. There’s usually a GPA limit on these and you need to compare that to the curve at the school. [url=<a href=“http://www.top-law-schools.com/emory-law-school.html]Emory[/url”>Emory Law - TLS wiki]Emory[/url</a>] curves to a 3.17 (it’s worth noting that this number does not appear anywhere I could find on Emory’s website - an instant red flag). I’m going to assume for sake of argument that the stipulation is relatively generous, requiring you to only maintain median or better. If it’s something else, you can adjust the probabilities accordingly. Assuming a median stipulation, you have a 50% chance of losing your scholarship every year. That means there are 3 possible scenarios: you keep the scholarship through all of law school, you keep it through 2 years of law school, or you keep it for only one year of law school. We will run each.</p>

<p>1(b). The second thing you have to do is figure out how much the law school actually costs, not what they say it costs. Law schools hide the ball by chopping up the cost and feeding it to you in independent chunks. We’re going to put it all back together. Emory’s [url=<a href=“Tuition and Financial Aid | Emory University School of Law | Atlanta, GA”>Tuition and Financial Aid | Emory University School of Law | Atlanta, GA]tuition[/url</a>] is $46,414 per year. This generally rises at about 3% per year for any given law school, so we can assume the 2nd year will cost 47,806 and the 3rd 49,240. They estimate the cost of living to be 24,720 (I’m just assuming it’s constant because I don’t know how the Georgia housing market fluctuates). So, we are looking at 3 year totals of: 1: 71,134; 2: 72,526; 3: 73,960.</p>

<p>1(c). Third, we plug in the numbers for each of the available scenarios. [url=<a href=“Financial Aid | Georgetown Law”>Financial Aid | Georgetown Law]Georgetown[/url</a>] has a very handy calculator for these purposes. They assume the annual tuition increase is 3.5%, but I think 3% is fine for our purposes (if you really care you can go back and see how much they actually increase by tracking their tuition over the last few years).</p>

<p>The first scenario we’ll plug 30,000 into the first box available for scholarship. Pretend “Georgetown” says “Emory.” Now scroll down and take a look at “Total Debt at Repayment.” Assuming you maintain your scholarship for all years, your total debt will be $153,496. At 25 year repayment that’s 1,125 per month</p>

<p>The second scenario you only get 30,000 for 2 years of law school. Same analysis as above, so now your total debt is $187,411. At 25 year repayment that’s 1,384 per month.</p>

<p>The third scenario you only get to keep your scholarship during 1L. Same analysis as above, but now your total debt is $223,784. At 25 year repayment that’s $1,662 per month.</p>

<ol>
<li>Now that we know how much your schooling will actually cost, we need to figure out whether it provides sufficient benefit to offset that. For that information, we look to job prospects. [url=<a href=“6 Keys to a Stellar Law School Resume - Professional Resume Writers”>6 Keys to a Stellar Law School Resume - Professional Resume Writers]Emory[/url</a>] is employing 57.3% of its class (subtracting the school-funded, 9 month jobs which don’t really count). Emory doesn’t provide information on salaries (want to guess why?) but we can estimate from the type of jobs Emory grads get since we know a lot about law salaries overall. If you look at Emory’s [url=<a href=“6 Keys to a Stellar Law School Resume - Professional Resume Writers”>6 Keys to a Stellar Law School Resume - Professional Resume Writers]NALP[/url</a>] report and scroll down to jobs by firm size, we can use that as a good proxy for salary. </li>
</ol>

<p>Let’s just be generous and say that any firm with more than 100 lawyers is paying NY market rate of 160,000. That accounts for 19.1% of the class. Lawyer salaries are [url=<a href=“http://www.nalp.org/salarycurve_classof2011]bimodal[/url”>NALP - National Association for Law Placement | The NALP Salary Curve for the Class of 2011]bimodal[/url</a>], so for the remaining part of the employed class we’re looking at 40-65k. That’s roughly 20% of the class making 160, 40% of the class making between 40-65k, and 40% of the class unemployed or on the doc review circuit. </p>

<ol>
<li>Putting all this information together, you will be paying a minimum of 150,000 for a 20% chance of a job that will provide enough income to support your minimum $13,500 annual loan payment. If you live as spartan as possible (no family, house, decent car, etc.) you may be able to get by on the 65k that at best estimate 5% of the class obtained (25-100 attorneys). I don’t know how risk averse you are, but those numbers would scare me. </li>
</ol>

<p>You should go through this process for each school you are admitted to and determine whether any of the schools available is worth the cost. After that you should come back and we can chat about things like loan repayment and forgiveness.</p>

5

<p>

A 25-year loan payment. (Run with the 10-year numbers first; you do not want your life plan to involve paying your own student loans while your kids are in college.)</p>

<p>On the flip side, you might be able to get out of W&M for about fifty grand, total. (100% of W&M students have kept their merit aid in the last three years.) Even if you hated being a lawyer, or couldn’t find a good job, you could service $50k in debt on $40k a year.</p>

6

<p>I picked 25 year repayment because it has the lowest monthly balance due and I was going for best case scenario. The 10 year repayment is also on the calculator.</p>

<p>A quick calculation shows a minimum of 87k debt at W&M (600 per month at 25 year repayment) with 55% employment divided into half lower-end private sector work at 65k and half public sector work at 50k. Doable but not great.</p>

7

<p>Take a year off and retake the LSAT.</p>

8

<p>Thank you so much for all the advice. I think I am going to go with William and Mary who is offering a Graduate Fellowship and in-state tuition which will really help with lowering the amount of debt I will graduate with. I appreciate all the insight and suggestions!</p>

9

<p>16 year lawyer here. Lowest possible debt is your goal.</p>

10

<p>Whoa, W&M is giving you in-state? And by the way, 100% of the people in the last three years kept their merit scholarships. So $45k, plus interest, minus anything you earn over the summer or during 3L year, for a law degree from a top-30? </p>

<p>That’s really good. You almost cannot go wrong.</p>

11

<p>indecisivejd:</p>

<p>Scholarship remains if you remain in good standing. Mo GPA we could find. Less of a problem than maintaining above that 3.1 GPA. </p>

<p>Don’t know how they come up with $24K for cost of living as Demo, above poster writes. Sons shared 3 BR house is $1200 or $400 per month per person. Cheap!! Food, books will be the same anywhere you go.</p>

12

<p>Just read your W&M choice. congrats!</p>

13

<p>Crazed: the OP said that he’s a Georgia resident. Demo used the out-of-state prices at W&M (which would mean $24k per year), not knowing that part of the deal was in-state tuition. </p>

<p>W&M states that 100% of the conditional merit scholarships that were given to the class of 2011 were renewed every year (i.e. 0% of people failed to maintain the requirements), and only 1% of conditional fellowships were rescinded: [William</a> & Mary Law -*Financial Aid](<a href=“http://law.wm.edu/admissions/financialaid/index.php]William”>http://law.wm.edu/admissions/financialaid/index.php)</p>

14

<p>Sounds like W&M is offering you a very good deal, as long as you are open to staying in Virginia at the start of your career. I think it’s a reasonable gamble. Good luck!</p>

15

<p>A contrarian note: for its graduating class of 2012, per its own website, W&M law school hired 41(!) of its own graduates to “full time long term” positions. No information is given about what “long term” means, or what the pay for these jobs is. The only possible explanation for doing this would be to artificially inflate the number of graduates hired in jobs requiring a JD.</p>

16

<p>Above the Law had a more positive take on the practice of law schools hiring their own grads yesterday, and made a good argument for the practice: [In</a> Defense of Law Schools Hiring Their Own Graduates « Above the Law: A Legal Web Site ? News, Commentary, and Opinions on Law Firms, Lawyers, Law Schools, Law Suits, Judges and Courts + Career Resources](<a href=“http://abovethelaw.com/2013/03/in-defense-of-law-schools-hiring-their-own-graduates/]In”>In Defense of Law Schools Hiring Their Own Graduates - Above the Law)</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>The article cites Law School Transparency for the following list of the percentage of 2011 grads from each T14 school in school-funded jobs:</p>

<ol>
<li>Yale – 12.2%</li>
<li>Harvard – 5.7%</li>
<li>Stanford – 1.6%</li>
<li>Columbia – 8.3%</li>
<li>Chicago – 12.3%</li>
<li>NYU – 12.2%</li>
<li>U. Penn. – 4%</li>
<li>UVA – 17%</li>
<li>Berkeley – 4.5%</li>
<li>Michigan – 3.2%</li>
<li>Duke – 5.3%</li>
<li>Northwestern – 3.8%</li>
<li>Cornell – 12.9%</li>
<li>Georgetown – 13%</li>
</ol>

17

<p>Couldn’t disagree more. The schools entice students in with the promise of jobs-and the promise is hollow. So the school then hires the same students, now grads, for a pittance. And these aren’t just any jobs: they are classic dead-end jobs. No career potential at all.
The article you mention may as well have been written by a law school dean-it’s one long apology for the fact that a lot of law graduates can’t find jobs, but hey, that’s not the law school’s fault. My favorite line: “3. School-funded jobs can and often do turn into non-school-funded jobs.”
There’s not an iota of evidence to support this;none. There’s nothing to support any of the other assertions made in the article either(some income is better than no income, etc). Why do law schools do this? Because it makes them look better. How can they afford it? By charging ridiculous tuition, then “rebating” back a fraction for these “jobs”.
Only law schools would have the gall to do this; if dental/medical/pharmacy were to try, people would be shocked.
The fact is, almost all law schools are beholden to USNWR rankings, and will do anything to artificially inflate their stats, job stats included. The reality is-there’s a lawyer glut, which the schools are doing their very best to hide.
All prospective law students ought to abide by the old adage: Caveat emptor. By attending law school, you are purchasing an education/degree in the hopes it will get you a job. Period.</p>

18

<p>I don’t disagree with everything you say, com - it’s surely something for prospective law school students to consider. But some evidence that “school-funded jobs can and often do turn into non-school-funded jobs” is quoted in the article linked above, for the UVA fellows program at least:

Certainly the guy who wound up a counsel on Capitol Hill landed on his feet, as did the guy who went on to two nice clerkships.</p>

<p>It’s a bit surprising that Yale would want/need to employ 12 percent of its own grads, given that it’s considered the most selective law school.</p>

19

<p>Brian Leiter on his blog also addressed this issue a few days back. He noted that Chicago and Virginia had increased their allocation of fellowships in public interests as part of a long range strategic planning. Surely they are doing this to advance their reputation but not for the reason put forth by Cranky. Long-term employment data for Yale are readily available on the school website. The employment statistics of graduates indicated that only ~50% of students are in law firms, whether they are recent or 2003 (over 95% response) graduates, 40% in nonprofit/government and ~10% in business. </p>

<p>I might add that elite LACs have been doing this for years with fellowships to enable graduates to work for nonprofits as well as to pursue master degrees in foreign institutions. I don’t believe I had to explain ever why my D’s school funded fellowship to the </p>

20

<p>Frazzled, I see your point, but it’s important to note that this business of a law school hiring its own graduates only started relatively recently. If all these self-hires find jobs, great, but for a school with the reputation of UVA to need to do it-and to justify it-shows how difficult the market for new lawyers is.
And why padad is such an apologist for law schools will never cease to amaze me; as he points out, the LACs have been doing this for YEARS-not starting recently to beef up phoney-baloney USNWR stats. And I’m well-familiar with the LACs; unless I missed something, there’s no master’s degree of any type at the end of these “fellowships”. And I’ll point out that several name law schools-GU for one-have had actual fellowships for years; you’d work as an adjunct(usually in a clinic at the law school), recieve a stipend(years ago it was about $35K), write a thesis, and get your LLM. Again, if all these programs are offering that-and W&M’s webite makes no such indication that it does-then I stand corrected. What we’re talking about in most of these cases are “jobs”; not fellowships or anything similar. No teaching, no research, no LLM, so padad’s analogy is utterly inapposite.<br>
When I was in law school-30 years ago-this wholesale hiring of new grads by a school was absolutely unheard of. And now, no other professional school does this-when was the last time you heard a medical school brag about hiring their new grads? Or a dental school? Or pharmacy school?
This is only happening because the law grads can’t find jobs. WE live in an era where US Attorneys Offices across the nation are offering non-paid “jobs” to bar-admitted applicants-no benefits, either; and it’s made clear to any accepted applicant that a year’s commitment is required, but if a paying job does come open, that person gets no priority.
And using a school like UVA as an example doesn’t really further the discussion; OP wasn’t talking about attending a T14 school. OP may do very well coming out of W&M; I hope s/he does. That said, in making a decision about a professional school of any type, the prospective student needs to know what the job prospects upon graduation are.</p>