Scholarships and deciding where to go

Graduate School Law School
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<p>This might have already been discussed, but I didn't see it so I figured I would post here. I urge all of you who are deciding now where to go next year and scholarships are part of your equation, look up on each law school's website, how many of these conditional scholarships were renewed. This is an ugly secret that schools do not talk about. I know a girl (Phi Beta Kappa undergrad) who chose her law school based on the least amount out of pocket (from the schools that she had applied to- had only applied to schools that were T1 and T2). She was offered a substantial scholarship that required she maintain a 3.0. Given that she had a 3.9999 undergrad, this did not raise any flags. Turns out that a large proportion of her class was given a scholarship with the same condition, and yet the school curves to a less than 3.0. Not only did she lose her scholarships and now has LARGE loans that she wasn't counting on, but 25% of her class lost the scholarship. I am not making these numbers up- you can look them up yourself on each schools website.</p>

<p>My son knew this when he was evaluating his offers. His school's scholarships require only that you maintain a 2.0 and curves to a 3.2. No one lost those scholarships in the last three years. They also have fellowships that require a 3.0. Last year, of 41 kids awarded them, one lost that.</p>

<p>ABA requires that the law schools report the conditional scholarship numbers and how many kept them- it may take some digging on some schools website, but the info is out there. Get it and use it to make smart choices.</p>

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<p>I’ve heard the stories too and a friend sent me THIS:</p>

<p><a href=“How Law Students Lose the Grant Game, and How Schools Win - The New York Times”>How Law Students Lose the Grant Game, and How Schools Win - The New York Times;
“How Long Students Lose Grant Game and Schools Win”</p>

<p>A must read!</p>

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<p>Thanks for the link! Makes it much clearer than I did. Not sure when the ABA started requiring the reporting, I stumbled on it when looking to see if my son needed to file the FAFSA for his current law school to keep the merit scholarship. It mentioned that it was an ABA mandate to report it, so then I went to his friend’s law school site and looked at theirs.</p>

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<p>My D is choosing between full cost at one of the HYS schools, Columbia as a Hamilton Fellow or Chicago as a Rubenstein Scholar. The latter two programs cover tuition cost. I don’t recall whether there were GPA stipulations, and the Hamilton Fellowship is not even mentioned in the school website. That said, it would seem to me that a GPA stipulation of better than the class average is not unreasonable for any scholarship award.</p>

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<p>Disagree padad.
All the kids deserve to be at these schools that accept them and they get them in and give them money based on LSAT and GPA hoping the students attend and keep rankings up. Many schools curve to less than 3.0 which to me is a horrible trait. Reason? </p>

<p>Sons school curves lower than 3.0 but his stipulation for merit is to “Maintain good standing” with no GPA requirement. I like that!!!</p>

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<p>@crazed, I thought the word “merit” carries a defined meaning in plain English, and we all understand that neither merit nor the word scholarship should apply to below average GPA. Moreover, the GPA stipulation is clearly spelled out and the student has the option to discontinue as well. I think such stipulations are not unique to law school. In most graduate school programs, the passing GPA is usually set at 3.0.</p>

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<p>@padad: That’s complete nonsense. It’s not your job to negotiate on the school’s behalf. You shouldn’t accept any stipulation if you can at all get out of it. Hell, you should make them pay her a salary if you can negotiate it. The school wants what is best for them. They aren’t offering your daughter money because they like her, they’re offering her money so they can get a boost in their stats. That boost will later turn into more money for them. In turn, you need to negotiate what is best for you and to hell with some silly, pseudo-objective “reasonableness” that means you should accept less than what you can get.</p>

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<p>@Demosthenes49, i don’t see your points. I thought scholarship offers were made based on personality and good looks, both of which my D would add a great deal to any schools.</p>

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<p>“That said, it would seem to me that a GPA stipulation of better than the class average is not unreasonable for any scholarship award.”</p>

<p>The problem comes when all the merit scholarship winners are packed into a section and graded on a section-specific curve, so you actually have to out-shine your fellow winners, not the rest of the class, to continue the scholarship. Alternatively, the problem also comes when a student is used to grade-inflated undergraduate programmes and thinks that maintaining a 3.2 is insultingly easy, only to find out that said 3.2 may put her in the top of the class. </p>

<p>That said, as a full-tuition payer, then a Latin honours graduate, I did get irked when people who were near the bottom of the class kept their scholastic merit awards while I took on loans.</p>

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<p>The thread is not arguing per se that such scholarships are worthy or not worthy.</p>

<p>The thread, if I read it correctly, is arguing that students choosing a law school should not assume that they will have three years’ worth of scholarship support, and should accordingly discount the consideration of the scholarship when making a law school decision.</p>

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<p>Do your due diligence if you want to go to law school!</p>

<p>Mind you, I’m not addressing borderline dishonest practices like putting all of the high performing students in one section and curving them against one another. That said, a law school with a significant disparity between its potentially highest and lowest performing students, may see a significant academic benefit for the brightest students in placing them together.</p>

<p>Any time a scholarship or grant is conditioned upon a particular GPA or any other criteria, it is incumbent upon the accepted student to find out information about maintaining that GPA or meeting those other criteria. Call the financial aid office. Ask what percentage of students maintain their scholarships through all three years of law school. Don’t just assume. Notably, it is always a bad assumption that just because you did exceedingly well as an undergrad that you will similarly knock it out of the park in law school. Grading curves at law school can be brutal (when I first got there, my law school was curved to a B- - and the curve was skewed towards the bottom). </p>

<p>Read the fine print. </p>

<p>Hmmmm . . . sounds like good training for practicing law.</p>

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<p>Merit scholarships are based and offered on undergrad GPA and LSAT score. They are not based on law school grading though some schools cancel the scholarship or can even offer you more money based on this. </p>

<p>No PAdad- "In most graduate school programs, the passing GPA is usually set at 3.0. " You mean under 3.0 you are put on probation or asked to leave the university. Not so. Don’t know where you come up with this information. Don’t even explain yourself. With each post you offer worse and worse information.</p>

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<p>I assume you are being facetious here. Or not, I don’t really care. I’m not the one on the hook if your daughter ends up bottom of the class and loses the scholarship. Take good advice, or don’t, but it’s your daughter’s future on the line.</p>

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<p>@crazed, I am a professor and teach only graduate and medical courses. </p>

<p>@demosthenes, what else could it be but in jest since i have a hard time picturing a student negotiating the terms of a Hamilton or the Rubenstein. But you should have faith that while the U of Chicago and Columbia may try to entice students away from Yale, Harvard or Stanford, these two schools do not need the fellowships to entrap students so that only a percentage of them will be kept.</p>

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<p>Actually, it is “so” at many Unis. And has been that way for a long time, at least since the dark ages. (however, I do know of a rare grade-deflated grad program which curves to a C+.) </p>

<p>But just to verify, I looked up my local UC grad division. A 3.0 or better is considered good standing at UCLA. Any two terms below a 3.0, or cumulative below a 3.0, is subject to probation and dismissal with no degree. A 3.0 or better is required for the degree. Thus, a B- or worse is the effect of fail.</p>

<p>Note, however, those are grad programs as opposed to professional school, like law, where C’s maybe liberally awarded.</p>

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<p>^Yep. I went to grad school 20 years ago, and passing GPA was set at 3.0.</p>

<p>Edit: went to the school web site to make sure if it’s still the same, and it is, “Students are expected to maintain a cumulative grade point average of at least 3.0 on a 4.0 scale in courses that count toward their 72 hours.”</p>

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<p>Anything below a B, and with some programs below an A, is rare in many grad programs. The same cannot be said of law schools - except for many of the top law schools that don’t give merit aide anyway. Note that getting B- can put you below the 3.0 cutoff.</p>

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<p>'My D is choosing between full cost at one of the HYS schools, Columbia as a Hamilton Fellow or Chicago as a Rubenstein Scholar. The latter two programs cover tuition cost. I don’t recall whether there were GPA stipulations, and the Hamilton Fellowship is not even mentioned in the school website. That said, it would seem to me that a GPA stipulation of better than the class average is not unreasonable for any scholarship award."</p>

<p>The top scholarships in the Top 14 generally do not carry GPA requirements at all. (They may require you to remain in academic good standing, but that isn’t hard.) You should, of course, read the fine print in your individual offer, but this is the norm. The scholarships would not be effective at luring students away from YHS if they carried real risk.</p>

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<p>I hadn’t looked at this thread that I started in a while- but would like to bump it up so that people making their decision now about next year will see it. And just to clarify the situation of the girl I know who lost her scholarship- the school gave more than 70% of the students scholarships that were dependent on keeping a 3.0 when the curve was below that- so mathematically, at least 20%+ of the of the 70% HAD to lose their scholarships. ( If you aren’t familiar with a curve, let me give you another example. My son purposely avoided one law school professor because he was way too easy. Son’s room mate received 97% in the class and with the curve, that was a C. )</p>

<p>I am not talking about people slacking and deserving to lose their scholarships- I am talking about schools who in my mind are doing a “bait and switch”.</p>

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<p>I agree - there’s a difference between giving merit scholarships to a small percentage of high-achieving applicants and expecting them to remain in good standing and giving merit scholarships to the majority of the incoming class with full intent to discontinue most or a large proportion of them just to get butts in seats.</p>

<p>At the school cited in the linked NYT article, 57% of first-year students (or about 153 out of 268) are offered a merit scholarship. But only the top 1/3 of Golden Gate students (or about 89 of them) get a 3.0 or better. Even if we assume that everyone in the top 1/3 of the class is a scholarship student, that still means that 64 scholarship students are not in the top 1/3 of the class with a 3.0+. We’re talking at least 40% of the students who had a merit scholarship losing it in their first year. And that’s if we assume that every person in the top 1/3 of the class was a scholarship student, which I bet they weren’t.</p>

<p>Here’s what the dean of Golden Gate had to say in response.</p>

<p>“Of course some students are disappointed,” she said. “I thought I’d be 5-foot-10, and I’m 4-11. But if you gave students sodium pentothal,” also known as the truth serum, “they’d say, ‘This is a new and very difficult undertaking, the school will support me as best they can and, hopefully, with hard work and good luck, I’ll be able to retain my scholarship.’”</p>

<p>The school is clearly trying to buy higher GPAs and LSAT scores to raise their profile, but the dean is being overly flippant about the essential bait and switch that the students are experiencing here. According to her, only the top third of students wound up with a 3.0 or better. Yet she says it’s statistically possible for 70% of first-year students to maintain a 3.0. Even if that’s true, statistical possibilities mean nothing in the face of actual realities.</p>

<p>To be clear, I don’t see anything morally wrong with this. A scholarship is a scholarship, and paying for 2 years of law school is better than paying for 3. Personally I see more fault on the students’ side for not doing their homework - forgiveable for undergrads, perhaps, but less forgiveable for adults who are about to undertake graduate work. Knowing how glutted the law market is, I wouldn’t opt to go to Golden Gate’s LS even if it were 100% free guaranteed. Golden Gate’s bar pass rate is 60%, up from 30% 6 years ago, and it’s a bottom-ranked law school. With an oversupply of lawyers, where did they think they were going to work? The student cited in the article is currently volunteering. With a JD. IMO it’s better to rack up $180,000 in debt at Harvard or even Vanderbilt, where you can be reasonably be sure you can get a job with the JD.</p>

<p>As a side note, I think it’s interesting how much of an impact U.S. News is having on the law school market (and the higher education market in general). I wonder how much of their revenue and appeal comes from college rankings; the only reason I had ever even heard of this magazine was because of the rankings. I know that issue is their best-selling every year.</p>