<p>Hi, I am currently a college student majoring in econ looking into law school after my bachelors. I am interested in working in biglaw in either Chicago or New York. I am willing to go into a decent amount of debt as long as I am able to pay it off in a decent amount of time, so I'd have to go to a top school to make it worth it in my mind. What I am wondering is how each of the T14 schools are with scholarship money. What are there reputations? And info and resources are greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot!!</p>
<p>I got Duke to give me a little under a year of tuition about 15 years ago.</p>
<p>They made the initial offer and I asked for more.</p>
<p>It was spread out over three years but it was not contingent on anything.</p>
<p>I presume that they wanted my LSAT score.</p>
<p>All the schools (except HYS) are good about scholarship money… if you meet the numbers. Get above the 75th percentile at a given school and they’ll happily lower your tuition.</p>
<p>Another place I really am interested in is San Fran. How good is Berkely in particular with aid?</p>
<p>Same response as before…</p>
<p>I am no sure how accurate this is… My son got accepted this year by 6 T-14 schools… Only Duke gave $17k per year… NYU; Penn, Georgetown; Virginia & Cornell gave nada… E decided to do Penn at full price…</p>
<p>It’s accurate… if you have the numbers. If your son was above the 75th percentile in either GPA or LSAT he should have been able to extract quite a bit of money.</p>
<p>Demosthenes49, that has not been my experience personally or with the students with whom I have worked. Law schools are not particularly generous with grants/scholarships, especially at top law schools, unless you are maybe 95th percentile or higher. At the 75th percentile you are not even guaranteed admission.</p>
<p>In fact, it is a common law school practice to offer some amount of grant/scholarship aid during the first year and then to offer less the second and even less the third year. Occasionally, a law school will offer a guarantee of the same amount of aid from year to year. I don’t know how frequently that occurs as a percentage of the total.</p>
<p>However, there are typically plenty of federal and private loans available (if you have good credit) to pay your tuition and other costs of attendance.</p>
<p>The idea that T14 schools are handing out money has become something of an urban legend on CC. We had twenty interns in our offices this summer, and not a single one had heard of it. There may be some money being given, but it’s either a pretty small amount or only generous to the very top applicants; while my experience is anecdotal, I have seen no objective/verifiable numbers to support the idea that the top schools are being generous with grants.</p>
<p>The one nice thing about Penn was, they offered to give him 5k for the summer each year if he cannot find a paid position…which will allow him to work somewhere for free if needed…Georgetown’s summer offer was $3k under the same circumstances…not sure about the others…
I am not sure what my son’s percentile was…he got accepted by 6 immediately and wait listed for Columbia and Stanford …rejected by Harvard and Cal…
I personally was actually totally surprised about the 3 year Duke offer…did not think that any top law school would throw money at anybody given the number of applicants dying to get in…so I believe that none of the top schools will throw merit money at you…needs based money may be a different story, but we are part of the typical middle class not qualifying for that.</p>
<p>The 75th percentile of admitted students is rarely the same thing as the 75th percentile of enrolled students. Even CCN lose a substantial chunk to HYS; they may be willing to buy a student away from Harvard, but not from each other or a lower ranked school.</p>
<p>I know a few people who wrote offered merit aid at T14 schools; one ended up at YLS. Some turned down HYS for another T14. But none were offered money at the best school they got into.</p>
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<p>Well, duh. Above the 75th for GPA+LSAT will do it. And the data is easy to verify, for those that care. </p>
<p>As an example, below is the link to Penn, where nearly half the class received a grant, and 9% received more than half tuition. Searching for the Michigan report will verify the fact that nearly 70% of the class got some money, and ~8% received at least half tuition. The numbers for UVA are 45% with some money, and ~14% over half tuition.</p>
<p>And yes, I would hope that these are top applicants!</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/publications/2013og/aba2926.pdf[/url]”>http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/publications/2013og/aba2926.pdf</a></p>
<p>Just outside the T14, Vandy awards merit money to 75% of its class, with a quarter receiving over half tuition. WashU is 70%, with nearly a third of the class receiving at least half tuition.</p>
<p>Well, duh, you must feel very lucky to think that 8 and 9% are anything more than a statistical abberation. And stating “nearly 70% of the class got some money” and “45% with some money” is essentially meaningless. How much money? But you don’t say, because you don’t know. And what’s the nature of the grant-one year? two years? three years? And is the grant tied to school performance? If it is, are those standards reasonable and realistic? OP asked about scholarship money; you’ve supplied exactly zero information about that.
OP: be very cautious; CC is trolled by many who are law school apologists. Unless someone CC is an admission counselor at a T14, there is no way for them to know how much and to whom grant money is given. Attending law school is a huge decision. If you really want to go, apply to the T14 schools and see what happens. Nobody here has any reliable numbers regarding grants and how they are awarded.</p>
<p>Go to Lawschoolnumbers.com and look at the user profiles for those admitted to the T14. Some users post the $$ they received from each school they were admitted to.</p>
<p>Pointing out the obvious here: if law schools used to charge $30k/year in tuition, but are now charging $55k, they can easily afford to"discount" tuition by $25k for “top” applicants.</p>
<p>Please also bear in mind that a lot of this is in response to the softening of the legal job market and the reality that many of the top-scoring students are eschewing law school. Law schools are not doing this for your well-being; they are doing it to get butts in seats.</p>
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<p>Perhaps to you, but to me it means that at most, only 30% and 55%, respectively, are paying full sticker.</p>
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<p>Not in the Stats classes I took, particularly when the numbers are consistent over several years. :)</p>
<p>deleting dupe post…</p>
<p>OP, I think that you can find some helpful information if youre willing to dig through the various law school websites. UVA seems fairly detailed regarding how many students receive scholarships and loans: [Financial</a> Aid - University of Virginia School of Law](<a href=“http://www.law.virginia.edu/html/prospectives/finaid/finaid.htm]Financial”>Financial Aid) In 2012, 428 students received $11.4 million in scholarships; 731 students received 37.4 million in loans. There are 1,078 JD students, so about 40 percent of students received some merit aid at UVA. (To me, the big surprise is that more than 300 students apparently didnt receive loans.) Some folks may not find this info especially meaningful, though I do.</p>
<p>The site goes on to say that merit scholarships range from $5,000 to full tuition, and that </p>
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Again per the website, good academic standing is defined as a 2.0 or above GPA.</p>
<p>Since the OP mentioned Berkeley, I checked out their site and did not find scholarship information laid out as clearly as on the UVA site. Their Matching Scholarship program caught my interest, because it formalizes what many law schools apparently do on a regular, though informal, basis: [Berkeley</a> Law - Matching Scholarship](<a href=“http://www.law.berkeley.edu/6957.htm]Berkeley”>http://www.law.berkeley.edu/6957.htm)</p>
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<p>These are the schools whose offers the program considers matching: Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, NYU, Stanford, Chicago,Michigan, Penn, UVA, Yale. Of the T14 schools, it seems that only Northwestern is missing. I wonder why?</p>
<p>My d starts her 3L year next week. When she went through her admissions cycle, she received several ½ tuition (and more) offers from T14 schools, and an acceptance from 2 top 5 schools, without scholarships. She negotiated for a more generous offer from UVA, her first choice. Her GPA was at the 75th percentile for most of these schools, and LSAT a few points higher. I don’t know how much things may have changed in the past few years.</p>
<p>I’ve actually heard stanford often gives scholarships, but most are need-based.</p>