Final thought and then I’ll take my leave; some terrific up and coming schools are buying top students with generous aid packages. I’ll plug Case Western again because they offered many strong students on CC merit aid equal to 50% of tuition with their acceptances the year my son applied. I am sure other strong schools are doing the same, especially if they are often used as safeties for more prestigious universities.
Good luck to you, wherever you land.
But will I significantly hurt my law prospects by going to Alabama?
Students from many many colleges attend various law schools. Your LSAT, LOR and GPA will be very important for law school admissions.
take a long look at CU Boulder’s Honors College
I intend to! It has been high on my list for a while
Your prospects of getting into the top law schools in the country? No, you’d be fine. With a very high LSAT and very high GPA, you could get into a top law school from Alabama, and from there, anything.
If you were to be tempted by Alabama’s offer of first year tuition at their law school, then you’d definitely have a harder time becoming a Supreme Court justice or Atty Gen’l (unless the president were an Alabamian whom you’d known, too). I assume that the same would apply to the big NYC law firms. But not impossible. You can take the bar anywhere you want, but you won’t have the same connections in NYC/DC/Boston/Chicago/LA that you would have had, had you gone to a tops in the nation law school.
The fact is, Alabama is having a lot of NMS students going there for the money, and so its reputation has to be improving. You could save close to 400K on undergrad, use the 529 to go to a tippy top law school, and you’d still be on track for whatever plum positions you desire.
You can major in anything, get your bachelor’s degree, and then go to law school. I have heard that law schools like high GPAs, high LSAT scores, and some evidence of logical thinking and the ability to write. I do know several people who majored in one of computer science, engineering, or mathematics, and who then went on to law school. Most of them ended up working in some place where their undergraduate degree was at least vaguely relevant, such as legal issues related to computer science and/or engineering. Some of this may be patent related.
I agree with the last two posts re: law. Pairing a STEM-related degree w/a JD is usually a plus & almost never a minus. Attending a T14 law school certainly doesn’t guarantee a successful law career, but it definitely seems to make it easier. You should consider doing a legal-related internship or summer job during undergrad so you get some relevant experience to include in your law school applications. If you can do more than one, try to get some variety & don’t just focus on one area. Good luck!
Just to add, my D18 went to Utah with a full ride (Eccles scholarship). Unfortunately they don’t tend to offer these to OOS students any more, but the top merit still makes it very cheap. She had a great time amongst a very smart group of students, who were all really outdoorsy, and they did a lot of skiing, climbing and backpacking together, even during COVID. The top students there have some excellent opportunities (her freshman year roommate won a Rhodes scholarship), and my D had her 529 money left over after graduation which has been incredibly useful now she’s a poor ballet dancer.
But it is very much up to the student how ambitious they are and what they want to be. Utah has several students a year who are willing to put in the effort to win top graduate scholarships: the girl who won the Rhodes scholarship was picked out at the end of freshman year and dedicated two and a half years to becoming a competitive candidate. But there are also a lot more students who aren’t like that and though they picked the full ride for the money, they aren’t looking for a high end career. The money gives them the freedom to do that: many of D’s friends stayed in the Mountain West and aren’t very career oriented. In comparison a higher proportion of her brother’s classmates at UCLA were more ambitious and goal oriented. So you need to think carefully about what you actually want in life.
You can also withdraw the amount of the scholarship from a 529. No penalty but taxed of course.
I hope you applied to Pitt and Penn State. Honors and a shot at Chancellors from Pitt. Schreyer at PSU is about as close to a small, top LAC at a large school as you can get.
What about McGill in Montreal?
Alabama is not this.
This is actually a very complex question. It is true your law school admissions are very much a function of your LSAT and grades. However, it is also true some law schools will go deeper into some college classes than others, which among other things gives you more margin for error (say if you start out in a major that turns out not to be so good for you).
But not arbitrarily deep, and then there is a question of how much, if any, of that effect would survive controls for LSAT scores and other less significant factors? And then how much value-added is there in going to more selective law schools anyway? The same control issues exist there too, and it very likely depends on what sort of legal career you want to have, and where you want to have a career, and how you actually do in law school anyway, and so on.
My two cents is this is all way too complex to map out neatly at this point. So my suggested rule of thumb is to think carefully and honestly about where you are likely to do really well in the end, including if you think you might do some exploration before deciding on your major. Just barely scraping into a highly selective college is not necessarily the best answer.
Then once you have identified the range of colleges where you are comfortably confident you can do really well, you might want to favor the colleges in that range which would also give you a bit more margin for error.
That, of course, is still just one possible consideration among many, including cost of attendance. Still, to be frank I do think this is part of why not every kid with law school ambitions is rushing to take their lowest-cost option.
It is absolutely true some kids from colleges like Alabama are going to go on to next steps like top law schools, but they are usually REALLY outstanding students. And if that is your goal, that puts a lot of pressure on you, including because you will very much not be the only kid with good numbers who got wooed to a college like Alabama by a sweet financial deal. So the competition to be one of those REALLY outstanding students can be quite intense, again with little margin for error.
There’s a lot here but a few things:
No undergrad college will impact your law school admissibility. Your gpa, test, work experience after college (more common today) will.
Last year Harvard was represented by 170+ schools. This year nearly 150 including Bama.
Also Central Oklahoma, Georgia State, Memphis, Montana, Ole Miss, URI, WVU and more. Last year had Fairleigh Dickinson and if I recall properly Lamar or Ga Southern etc and more.
I see a recent comment from @mtmind about weather - correct. No big name school - not CU Boulder, U Denver - will give you the winter sport access that Utah will. Not even close.
To the genesis of your question - should you chase $$- that’s a family discussion.
If you go Dartmouth, it’s 88k this year. More when you go. So let’s say $380-400k vs Bama since it’s one you mentioned - you pay food but get a stipend. Let’s say $25k all in and likely less.
Is saving nearly $400k important to your family - especially with impending grad school costs.
In my full pay family - heck yeah !! But alas my family isn’t yours.
That’s a discussion with mom and dad - anyone can spend their own money as they see fit.
But that’s a lot of $$ without a lot of upside - especially of law is the future. But again, explain what NMF can bring - from near full ride at Bama or full ride at Tulsa to $0 at others other than the NMF funds that come from NMSC - and others in between and let them direct you.
Best of luck.
You can also withdraw the amount of the scholarship from a 529. No penalty but taxed of course.
This is good to know, thank you.
Pitt, Penn State, and McGill are all on my list. I think at this point I need to wait for things to pan out and see what eventually makes the most sense.
Thank you! This is really helpful. I hope to get to some of the campuses, as I think that will help answer my questions of location and whether or not I could see myself at Alabama (or Tulsa or Dallas, etc.). I have lived in a relatively mild climate my whole life, and, as mentioned, really enjoy skiing, but I also understand that cold climates come with depressing winters. And the more I think about it, shorts and t-shirt weather year round or close to it might not be so bad! But this thread has also opened my eyes to the other opportunities and honors colleges that are out there. I’ll be sure to check out Utah and other places, and have a conversation with my family about the finances of it all. Thanks!
OK, but there are about 560 students per class at HLS. A lot of those colleges are typically going to have something like 1 or 2 HLS enrollees (actually it is more like 0 to 2 in many cases as the list varies year to year). A few colleges, though, regularly send far more students, and that is even more of a distinction if you control for class size (although ideally you would be controlling for something like the size of the people who at least would have wanted to go to Harvard Law if things had worked out, which is not really an ascertainable number).
So, it is quite true that law schools like Harvard take students from a wide variety of colleges. It is also quite true that law schools like Harvard typically go much deeper into the classes at some colleges than others.
And what that all means for college choice is very complicated. Including because it is not easy to be one of the very top law school applicants from Alabama. You definitely will not be alone if that is your goal.
I thought withdrawals from 529s up to the amount of the grant/scholarship were not taxed. Do you have a source for the possibility that they are taxed?
Thanks.
Withdrawals matched to scholarships are exceptions to the 10% penalty. But the earnings portion of such withdrawals are taxed if you don’t use the withdrawn funds for qualified expenses. See here:
There is no tax on the contribution portion, and the earnings still compounded tax free. But this is one of the reasons that people with scholarships do not necessarily withdraw.
With this I’d say - if you’re in Utah and world class skiing is 30 mins from campus, you could in there go many days a week. My daughter’s bf at Denver has classes two days and goes to Arapahoe - he says an hr but it maps farther - many days.
At Bama, you’re going at winter or spring break - so it’s four or five days a year.
Yes but even if 100 colleges are represented by one kid and 47 two or more it’s not a ton. And we don’t know - unless I’m missing - which are the single source schools. Maybe it’s 60, 100 or 140.
And I’d argue, that same kid with that same LSAT at Bama or Dartmouth, considering other similarities -gpa, etc.
It’s just that the initial student bodies ( at the undergrad level) are higher powered to begin with - so they graduate a more concentrated higher stat class.
At one school we visited, the prof was giddy about a student who had a 99th percentile LSAT. I asked where will the student go. His answer ? Anywhere they want.
The point being - from a financial pov and only from that pov, spending $400k vs )25k is a huge risk with zero assurance. Also with five years tuition, one can get free law school tuition at Bama if that’s an interest. More than one year of coming in with advanced status. OP would have to look at other schools to see what their scholarships cover. Bama is #35, been higher, so it’s not a bad get per se.
Again it’s a family call as it’s their money but I would personally dispute your assertion here.
Stud students are stud students no matter where they go - especially at the test taking level.
What I would find interesting but don’t know if the data will ever exist is - how did TO students do (especially from elite schools) in law school admissions.