<p>I am looking into UNH School of Law. Based on rankings, I believe it would be considered a tier 3 or tier 4 law school. It's highly ranked for its Intellectual Property specialty, but this is not where I would like to specialize. Now, conventional wisdom that I've seen often states, "law school is only worth it if you are going to a top school, i.e. T14, maybe top 30)." However, I am not interested in working in BigLaw. I would be just fine with a smaller firm or on my own, and I'm not concerned with making $160k. Now, as for the primary reason I am interested in UNH (aside from NH being my home state): cost. Students with a GPA over 3.5 (mine is 3.82 and this is my last term of UG) and an LSAT of 160 or above receive a minimum merit scholarship of $30,000. This means I'd be looking at $10,000 a year at most. This is why I'm not concerned with working for a big law firm as I won't be saddled with $100k+ of debt (and I don't like the idea of working 70 hour weeks or living in a big city). </p>
<p>So...my question is, do you think the trade-off of going to a not-so-reputable school is worth the investment, given the lower cost and my goals? Or do you think going to such a school would hamper my ability to work with any firm?</p>
<p>That is the million dollar question that no one can answer. There are literally thousands of T14 grads who cannot find legal jobs, any legal jobs. (The legal market is horrible.)</p>
<p>BB hit it on the head: there are 44,000 new JDs minted every year. How will your degree hold up in that environment? And go to UNH’s website-I just took a quick look, and of 147 graduates in the 2011 class, 93 had jobs with “Bar Passage required”; another 30 had jobs with “JD advantage”. I have no idea what “JD advantage” means in the real world, so I’m going to discount that. So 147 people graduated, and only 63% found jobs which required them to pass the Bar; the whole point of going to law school is to practice law, so you can judge if 63% is a good stat or not. And I’d note that per its own stats, the law school employed 20 graduates after graduation. The question: why would a law school employ 20 of its own grads?
On the flip side, 30k of debt isn’t a lot of debt: my recommendation would be to go to UNH, find the student lounge(or whatever) and ask 3Ls what the job prospects are. Anecdotal? Yeah, but you’ll get some honest answers also.</p>
<p>Check to see what GPA you have to maintain to keep the scholarship. That is a big bait and switch with some schools. It is very difficult to predict grades in law school. I knew some clearly brilliant people in law school who didn’t get the top grades because of the testing methodology.</p>
<p>“JD advantage” is usually “JD preferred”, meaning that you do not need to be a licensed attorney, but having the law degree is helpful. Also, please note that the 63% could include the 20 students whom the law school hired. </p>
<p>"On the flip side, 30k of debt isn’t a lot of debt: my recommendation would be to go to UNH, find the student lounge(or whatever) and ask 3Ls what the job prospects are. Anecdotal? Yeah, but you’ll get some honest answers also. "</p>
<p>Great advice. </p>
<p>The other great piece of advice is to find out the requirements of maintaining that scholarship. Law schools have put all of the scholarship students in one section, scaled them all against each other, and then, voila, half the scholarship students lose their scholarships. Or you think that making a 3.2 is easy, then find out that less than some percentage of the class (20%, 50%, etc.) manage it.</p>
<p>If you maintain the scholarship throughout and take out student loans to cover the balance, you are looking at a total law school debt of $81,870.</p>
<p>If you maintain the scholarship through your first two years and take out student loans to cover the balance, you are looking at a total law school debt of $115,784.</p>
<p>If you maintain the scholarship through only your first year and take out student loans to cover the balance, you are looking at a total law school debt of $152,158.</p>
<p>That’s a lot more than the total debt of $30k they’re selling you.</p>
<p>Now let’s turn to employment. Employment at UNH is, to be kind, [not</a> great](<a href=“6 Keys to a Stellar Law School Resume - Professional Resume Writers”>6 Keys to a Stellar Law School Resume - Professional Resume Writers). Only 40% of the class is walking out of there with a job as a lawyer. Of those, 12% have public service jobs and 7% have big firm jobs, either of which are necessary to pay off those student loans we calculated above. That means 60% of the class failed to get a job as a lawyer at all, and of the remaining 40% only about 20% had what we could consider a decent outcome. If you go to UNH, you have a 4/5 chance to graduate in heavy debt with no visible means of repayment.</p>
<p>Excellent points from all of you. I appreciate it.</p>
<p>I think I’m one of those classic not-positive-what-I-want-to-do-next-so-I-go-to-law-school-students. I recognize this is a terrible reason to go to law school. UNH’s potentially cheap (for LS) program caught my eye and naturally had its appeal. But the employment numbers are quite poor and when I consider that I will already have a good amount of debt to take care of from my UG degree, it’s fairly apparent this isn’t in my best interest. I suppose this is why I asked in the first place. Thanks for steering me back onto the paved road.</p>
<p>Right now, you don’t know what kind of scholarship you will be offered. You only know the minimum. It might be more. I don’t think it hurts to apply and make your decision based on the exact offer they give you.</p>
<p>I talked to a few undergrads about that the other week. What I tried to stress to them is that once you are in law school, you are going to be on the hamster wheel for the rest of your life. You’ll work incredibly hard 1L and 2L year, relax a bit 3L year (or job-hunt like your life depends on it), take the bar (mega stress), then be in a high-stress, long-hours profession for the rest of your life. You’ll have loans that need to be paid back when you graduate, and after that, you’ll have a mortgage, a family, and a 401(k). </p>
<p>If you didn’t have the debt, you could get off the hamster wheel for a while - relax, move somewhere, start a different career, take a long vacation. But once you’ve graduated from law school, you’re running to make that wheel turn every day until you retire. Do NOT rush into that, and especially do not rush into that because you don’t know what else to do.</p>
<p>I would be shocked if 40% of the graduating students from UNH law walk out of there with actual jobs as lawyers. If those statistics are out there in print or on the internet, they are simply untrue/skewed/falsified. Having worked with lawyers and law clerks for the past 25 years in firms in Boston and NH, I know this to be impossible in 2014. Do not invest in a law school at this tier unless you have no undergraduate debt and a parent who can guarantee you a job upon graduation (or some similar situation). The job market is <em>that bad</em></p>