Hello, I recently joined and am currently graduating from a top LAC. I am graduating phi beta kappa and have my mind set on law school. I applied to top law schools across the country but as it has come down to decision time, I really want to stay in Northeast to be closest to home. I loved BC Law more than Cornell, Georgetown etc. Would it be silly for me to choose BC Law over these options? What is the reputation of BC Law in Massachusetts and in the Northeast? I believe the school is the perfect fit for me but I want to make sure I am not shorting myself.
yes, it would not be a good idea, unless BC is free.
If you are PBK, that means you have an awesome GPA, which is Harvard Law-worthy. If your only choices are those listed, the standard answer is retake that test. With a higher LSAT, you could attend others in the T14 for real cheap.
I have no advice since I know very little about law schools. Coincidentally this was posted to the BC website so I thought you might be interested; just wanted to share it with you http://lawmagazine.bc.edu/2015/04/student-spotlight-alvin-reynolds-15/
Thanks for the advice so far. I just feel as though BC is a great fit for me and it does very well in Boston/New England which is where I want to be.
BC is a fine, regional school, as is BU. But the numbers are not to be ignored. BC does not do âwellâ where it counts, i.e., a high paying job.
If you have to pay a lot to attend, just know that only ~40% of its grads earn a job with a high enough salary to pay off the school loans. In other words, 60% will have school loans to payoff for many years. Not a good plan, unless they throw big merit money at you, or your family is wealthy, and expenses are not an issue.
Whatever happened to âfitâ?! The OP has expressed a strong affinity for BC Law, and said that he/she wants to be in the Boston/New England area (for that purpose alone BC Law would serve him/her very well indeed). And, I think that characterizing it strictly as a âregional schoolâ is quite short-sighted. BCâs reputation extends well beyond the âregionâ. Furthermore, do you really think that the OP would be the first and only phi beta kappa at BC Law?! â hardly. It has drawn Ivy and other top-college grads for many decades. They form a large part of each incoming class. Take a look at the top (even the old-line) Boston law firms. Youâll see a healthy number of BC Law grads â partners, too!
"Fit"is fine for an undergrad, but not so much for a professional school. What good is a wonderful three years if you end up a median, with hundreds of thousands in loans, and no job?
Did I say or imply that I did?
IMO, professional school is all about jobs, jobs, jobs. A pbk has an awesome GPA which the top law schools love. With a few more points on the LSAT, the OP could be offered a near/full ride at many of the T14, which will serve the OP much, much better over a 30+year career. Isnât a few months of studying for a 4 hour test worth perhaps $100+k tax free in merit money?
Heck a few points higher, and the OP has a good shot at Harvard (i.e, the Boston connection.) To use your analysis, how many partners or federal judges hail from HLS???
Sure, John Kerry did (and married well), but he had a blue-blood trust fund to start with.
But the point is Irrelevant. Many of those partners graduated a long, long time ago, and the market has changed: the US produces 2x as many lawyers as there are jobs. By definition (and AP Stats), 50% of all JD grads will not be a practicing attorney upon graduation. (Might as well keep that job as a barista and forgo the 3 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars.)
Others may have a different pov, but since the OP asked, I offered my $0.02.
On the contrary, given BCâs Jesuit ethos - âmen and women for othersâ - , fit is very important even at the professional school level. That ethos is emphasized there as well as at the undergraduate level â itâs common knowledge. And, do you have proof for your assertion that a BC Law grad (while having a hefty amount of debt) will have âno jobâ after graduating? Yes, the market may be oversaturated with lawyers, but I believe BCâs stature in the legal profession is sufficient to at least give its grads a strong shot at being employed in the field for which they were trained. But, please give me facts to show that I am wrong.
I said ~60% will graduate and not earn enough to pay back their school loans, i.e,., Big Law and Fed Clerkship. (Anyone can get a âjobâ as a barista and be employed after graduation.) But even if one gets a JD-required job in âsmall lawâ, it the market pay is ~$50k, which is clearly not enough to service loan debt.
And the data is readily available from BC Lawâs own public reports which it files with the ABA and on various websites like law school transparency.
market picking up, kinda.
http://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2015/04/american_bar_associa0.html
tbf: the number for BC is 73% employed, but that includes all legal jobs, many of which will not pay enough to enable the grad to service the loan debt.
âthe number for BC is 73% employed,â - hmm, a far cry from âno jobsâ.
This âservice to othersâ model that BC champions may well mean that its graduates refrain from going after the big bucks upon graduation in favor of working in the public sector, at least for a while, â not a bad thing. Itâs not a place for just anyone. One should want to be there â maybe thatâs what the OP liked about it most.
Do you have specific examples of BC Law alumni overwhelmed with debt?
Hi Leanid, havenât seen your posts for a long time. Welcome back! Trying to be gentle here, bluebayou, but when I read some of your responses I, like Leanid, wondered what your sources were. Itâs one thing to offer your $0.02, and quite another to go out of your way to disparage BC Law in such a (please no offense intended) blatant and opinionated manner. At least, this is how it comes across. Just my $0.02 worth :)>-
Thank you, carla. In fairness to bluebayou, I recall him (?) expressing admiration for the Jesuits and BC in a post (or two) some years ago â maybe that was just for undergradâŠ
you are correct, carla, my post is opinionated and blatant (on purpose). My blatant opinion is that the OP should NOT waste that GPA and settle. And donât look at law school thru colored lenses of âfitâ. First year courses are essentially dictated by the ABA, and are standard everywhere. Torts is torts, Con Law is Con Law. The Jesuit ideals have nothing to do with Contracts, which would be the same if taught in Chestnut Hill or at BU.
http://www.bc.edu/schools/law/services/academic/programs/curriculum/guide.html#first
Law school is a whole different ball game than undergrad. The Op should post on ccâs law school forum or better yet, on the major forum that deals specifically with top law schools. (canât post link due to TOS.)
Do the math. At sticker price and full loans, a graduate from BC Law will owe a quarter of a million dollars. Payments will total $3k per month.
Nothing wrong with going into service for others, but not if you have to borrow money to do it. (If the 'rents can pay comfortably, go for sticker price.)
Someone not going into Big Law can expect to earn $50-$60k. How is that person gonna make a loan payment of $3k and rent and food and taxes? (And yes, I have a personal bias against IBR and carrying that debt for 20+ years, hoping for federal relief of the tax hit.)
And note, a quarter of the class does NOT have a JD-required job. Pretty lousy odds for a quarter of a mill investment and three years of a personâs life, huh?
Or, take the same OP with 5+ more LSAT points. Perhaps BC then becomes FREE, and the 'rents can give the OP the money that they would have spent on tuition as a downpayment on a house. Awesome deal.
btw: leanid, I donât get your mis-reading of my posts in which I clearly tie the income of a legal job such that is suffices to pay school debt. (Too many 22 year olds have no clue about what that kinda debt can do to a life.)
btw: my rant is about law school in general and has nothing to do with BC in particular. If the OPâs post was about BU, I would say the exactâŠsameâŠthing. Heck Iâd say the same thing about paying sticker for Georgetown a T14.
yes, Big Law is not for everyone â and most donât last, but it is the only assurance of being able to payoff school debt. And yes, there are some <250 boutique and other firms that pay market.
http://tippingthescales.com/2015/02/the-2015-go-to-law-schools/
The chart on the bottom of the link is instructive, while thinking of $250k in debtâŠ
http://www.businessinsider.com/new-ranking-lists-go-to-law-schools-2015-2
I am in the no agenda camp
bluebayou,
I am well aware that the curriculum at law schoolâs is determined by the ABA and that âtorts is tortsâ no matter where one goes, but I am afraid it is you who is missing the point about âfitâ. Fit actually does matter even here because of the overall âcallingâ, if you will, at schools like BC.
If being hired by âBig Lawâ (meaning the top 250 firms as presented by the link above, which you kindly provided) is so important to oneâs ability to pay off student debt then it looks like even in the âtopâ schools the odds of landing one of those coveted jobs is far from a sure thing.
Note the âPercentage at NLJ 250 Firmsâ, where even Columbia, ranked number 1, one has a 2/3 chance of âsuccessâ (your measure, that is). And Yale didnât even make the top ten! See the results below for the top ten:
Rank
School
1st Year Associates in NLJ 250
2014 Class Size
Percentage at NLJ 250 Firms
Tuition
U.S. News Rank
1
Columbia Law School
310
468
66.24%
$60,274
4
2
University of Pennsylvania Law School
177
278
63.67%
$56,916
5
3
University of Chicago
129
211
61.14%
$55,503
4
4
New York University School of Law
287
479
59.92%
$56,838
6
5
Harvard Law School
326
586
55.63%
$55,842
2
6
Cornell Law School
101
191
52.88%
$59,360
13
7
Northwestern University School of Law
144
291
49.48%
$56,434
12
8
Duke Law School
105
215
48.84%
$55,588
10
9
University of Virginia School of Law
163
349
46.70%
$51,800
8
10
Stanford Law School
85
187
45.45%
$54,366
3
Exactly. So why attend a less-than-top school when the odds are much, much lower? It just makes no sense to me if one has to pay to attend; OTOH, if it was free⊠(but that would require a retake of the LSAT to get BC to pay the OP to attend.)
But even if Jesuit schooling was primarily desired, why not retake the LSAT and get money to attend Georgetown while at the same time enhancing career prospects?
btw: to be fair, the âcovetedâ jobs should include federal clerkships in the numerator count, since 99.99% of those taking a clerkship first (like the Yalies) would easily land a job in Big Law. Heck, most of them will go straight to big law, with a signing bonus, after completing their 1-2 year clerkship.
1 Like
Quite logically this raises the question as to why law school should cost as much as it does. An article I read recently (which, regretably, I cannot cite) pointed out that law school used to be a bargain as it does not require a lot of expensive facilities, like labs, to deliver its program, but universites have become greedy and converted their law schools into cash cows, banking on the presumption that their product is so valuable applicants will pay much more for it than they did in the past.