Wednesday, December 19, 2012

Hurry, quantities are limited



Seton Hall University to Extend Tuition Reduction Initiative to Law School
Seton Hall Law School reduces tuition by more than 50% for eligible students, offering ‘A Private Legal Education at a Public School Price’
Newark, NJ – Seton Hall University has announced that it will extend its widely acclaimed merit-based tuition reduction program to its School of Law, reducing tuition by over 50% for eligible students. The tuition cuts for undergraduate students at Seton Hall University went into effect in 2012 and were recently extended for the 2013-14 academic year. The University will now extend the program further, offering “a private legal education at a public school price” to eligible incoming students at Seton Hall Law School, the only private law school in New Jersey.
Dr. Gabriel Esteban, President of Seton Hall University, said “Similar to the program for undergraduate study, this initiative reflects Seton Hall’s commitment to serving our community. It provides access to a high-quality private education at a cost comparable to a public institution.”
For eligible incoming full-time first-year students, tuition at Seton Hall Law School will be reduced in the 2013-14 academic year to $22,330.
“The legal industry is undergoing substantial change,” said Patrick E. Hobbs, Law School Dean, “and for those who choose law, we have a duty to respond in a meaningful way – making legal education more practice oriented and employment focused as well as more affordable. Our Legal Practice Curriculum, numerous clinics, pro bono programs and comprehensive intern and externship programs address the first concerns; this tuition cut will help to answer the next, making Seton Hall Law School more affordable for those who wish to attend.”
Gisele Joachim, Dean of Enrollment Management, added, “Extending the University’s tuition reduction program to our Law School helps lend clarity and transparency to merit-based financial aid and the process of financing a legal education. We believe it’s critically important to share as much information as possible with our students about the economic drivers of a legal education: tuition, financial aid and employment outcomes. In this instance, the tuition reduction program is quite simple: admitted students who meet our eligibility criteria automatically receive the reduction. And if they meet our criteria for renewal, they will receive that tuition reduction until they graduate. ”
Program specifics include the following:
§  To qualify for this tuition discount, students must have an LSAT score of 158 and higher and an undergraduate GPA of 3.5 or higher;
§  Students who apply to Seton Hall Law and meet the academic criteria will automatically receive this tuition rate reduction;
§  Open to first-time, first-year full-time or part-time students entering Seton Hall Law in Fall 2013;
§  This program is open to students from all states; and
§  Students may also be eligible for additional merit and/or need-based financial aid.
To learn more about how Seton Hall Law makes a private legal education available at a public school price, visit: http://law.shu.edu/tuitionreduction

A 158 LSAT and a 3.5 GPA are the current 1L class medians, so in other words current applicants who simply hit both of last year's medians automatically receive a 53% discount off sticker tuition ($47,330). Sticker cost of attendance is a startling $69,916 per year. (Fully debt financing a Seton Hall law degree will, assuming annual 3.5% increases in COA, produce a debt load at repayment of $259,299).

I think it's fair to say that at this point prospective law school applicants should treat sticker tuition prices as they might treat the advertised price of a collection of ABBA CDs at a yard sale.

77 comments:

  1. At the risk of sounding juvenile...

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

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  2. So at the discounted rate you're only looking at $120,000 total cost of attendance, plus interest, plus undergrad debt, an a Bar loan? Not too shabby for a $2800 check!

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  3. Now that I'm done laughing...

    The terms do not sound that bad - you can keep the discount tuition provided that you are in the top 75% of the class or 2.80 GPA (whichever is more favorable). I just hope that the sticker price will not balloon up to $70,000 later in order to compensate for the revenue loss.

    Let's hope there is no sudden increase in unrelated fees.

    Will there be an increase in class size?

    Ultimately, as Lawprof said, the tuition discount should be the starting point in negotiating the first year entry fee.

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  4. In tomorrow's news:

    Seton Hall's current law students revolt en masse as they learn that their own tuition will subsidize all new students with identical credentials.

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    Replies
    1. This should be emailed to current SH law students.

      David, Elie...I hope you are reading this...

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    2. Does SH stand for "shithole"?

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  5. I just looked for what I was sure would be a bugger-all requirement for retention (inasmuch as it wasn't spelled out in the advertisement, figured it would be onerous).

    Turns out I was wrong - they just have to stay out of the bottom 25% of the class and maintain a 2.8.

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    Replies
    1. (oops, sorry, commenter WCL already posted this info)

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  6. Beautiful, is Seton Hall the school with the dean who has really white teeth and makes $800,000? I think this is the first time I've seen a dean say the word affordable.

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  7. You smell that, Rabbit?

    Fear.

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  8. For married couples who are applying this year it is like a Buy One Get One Free* compared to last year's tuition rates.

    *Some restrictions may apply.

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  9. ABBA is a world class group !!! I would put their music in the same category as HYS in the realm of old CDs found at a yard sale.

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    Replies
    1. I didn't even know that they were on CD; I last heard them from an eight-track tape.

      Guess I'm showing my age.

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  10. Not worth it.

    If a law degree from Columbia, NYU or Penn puts a lawyer in competition with tons of other unemployed lawyers from their own law schools, as is the case right now, how much could a Seton degree be worth, even for free?

    The headhunters say they are flooded with unemployed Columbia, Penn and NYU Law even for temp or doc review work, and cannot place the grads from these top schools because there are too many of them for too few jobs. Good luck trying to get work if you are a grad of one of these schools and your job does not work out, which of course happens all the time in the legal profession.

    The Seton degree has to be a disaster for most people in this context. Not worth it at any price, or even for free. The degree is not likely to lead to a job, but to a lifetime of unemployment.

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  11. I would not go to Seton Hall, even if you paid me. A law degree from a lower tier law school like Seton Hall makes you "overqualified" for most non-legal positions. Paralegal, legal secretary, and legal administator classified ads in the NYC metro area clearly state "No JD's need apply" in their job descriptions. The best you can hope for out of Seton Hall is a one year judicial clerkship in the traffic court, or a temporary stint at a fly by the night discovery mill chop earning $25 an hour without benefits. Good luck trying to survive on that while trying to service your "discounted" 150k in student loan debt.

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  12. What are the conditions? If you read the fine print there may be conditions which make keeping this discount harder than it appears. Would you trust law school administrators not to jack up tuition to full price in 2nd year for some arbitrary reason?

    Is this sustainable for the college? I would bet they spent and borrowed recklessly fully assuming they could keep increasing class and tuition sizes forever. What are they going to do now if this is so? Keep borrowing until they go completely broke and hope the government will bail them out?

    $22k is still twice what it should cost.

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    1. "Would you trust law school administrators not to jack up tuition to full price in 2nd year for some arbitrary reason?"

      I bet that is how the T14s will sustain its USNWR ranking for the 1L classes. Tons of transfers and higher tuition in year 2 and year 3.

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    2. Maybe the next year or two will be the first time when a school falls out of the so-called T14. Is there one that's running particularly short of funds with which to buy high LSAT scores? Maybe Georgetown?

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  13. It boggles my mind why anyone would pay for a SHU law degree when Rutgers is literally three blocks away and will cost you 1/3 the price for the same prestige - or lack thereof.

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  14. This was almost as boring as a DJM post.

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    Replies
    1. Or something on Leiter Reports.

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    2. These tuition cuts worry me. Lower-tiered law school need to extract as much money as possible, so that they can afford to fill their faculties with the illustrious likes of Michael Sevel, whose complete lack of legal experience is more than compensated for by his prodigious ability to stroke Brian Leiter's vanity.

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  15. tuition "reductions" are going to be different for the nonT14 LSs. no one cares about Seton Hall.

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    Replies
    1. I disagree. This is where the chips are going to fall first. This is a harbinger of the changes to come.

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  16. "I think it's fair to say that at this point prospective law school applicants should treat sticker tuition prices as they might treat the advertised price of a collection of ABBA CDs at a yard sale."

    Epic.

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    1. If anything, it's insulting to the ABBA CDs. You could use the CDs as coasters, or make shiny Christmas Ornaments.

      WTF are you going to do with a Seton Hall degree?!

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    2. Put the diploma on the spindle in the necessary room?

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    3. This sounds like Seton Hall Law's "Waterloo."

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    4. @209,

      If you play that SHU degree backwards, you will definitely hear the devil speak.

      Delete
  17. I'm surprised the desperate swine don't toss in weekly massages and quarterly oil changes "at no additional cost."

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  18. Enrollment at this school has been plummeting. It looks like they are getting desperate.

    Class of 2013 358 students
    Class of 2014 266 students
    Class of 2015 206 students

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    Replies
    1. http://marcianos.com.mx/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/nelson-simpsons-riendo-laughing.gif

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    2. Class of 2016: 146 students
      Class of 2017: 86 students
      Class of 2018: 26 students

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    3. Class of 2019: 0 students.

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  19. Go, Valvoline Dean, Go!

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  20. I can hear Hobbs singing now:

    ♪ If you change your mind,
    I'm the first in line.
    Honey, I'm still free:
    Take a chance on me! ♪


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    Replies
    1. This reply deserves more recognition that this! Nice.

      Delete
    2. Thanks. Guess an old geezer who remembers ABBA is still good for something.

      Maybe I chose the wrong song, though:

      ♪ Where are those happy days?
      They seem so hard to find.
      ………
      So, when you're near me,
      Darling, can't you hear me?
      SOS!
      The love you gave me—
      Nothing else can save me.
      SOS!
      When you're gone,
      How can I even try to go on?
      When you're gone,
      Though I try,
      How can I
      Carry on? ♪

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    3. Or maybe:

      ♪ I work all night, I work all day,
      To pay the bills I have to pay.
      Ain't it sad?
      And still there never seems to be
      A single penny left for me.
      That's too bad!
      ………
      Money, money, money,
      Must be funny
      In the rich man's world. ♪

      Delete
  21. Seton Hall may be the worst positioned law school in the country. It's in the NYC market where it competes with Columbia, NYU and Fordham, three schools well ahead of it in the rankings. To top it off, as someone above pointed out, it's down the street from a one-third priced but similarly ranked public school in the NJ sub-market. Deadly, just deadly.

    I nominate SHU for the top of MacK's Law School Death Watch List.

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  22. Say, do you think that Hobbs could be talked into giving a set of ABBA CDs to each of the first fifty takers? That might sweeten the deal just enough for me.

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  23. This school should just give up and close. It has no reason to exist. As others have noted 1/2 price is still double or more what it should cost.

    Does anyone get a job from this school ? The top students could probably walk into Columbia. Who is left?

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  24. "Does anyone get a job from this school ? The top students could probably walk into Columbia."

    Given how many transfers Columbia is taking, you are correct.

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  25. What it is about these Roman Catholic law skules? Seton Hall, Barry, Loyola—they've been making the headlines here lately.

    I don't know why a religious law school is needed at all. But these places all seem to be hell-pits.

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    Replies
    1. Don't forget Villainova - they're always in the headlines.

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  26. Wait.., does this mean some people are paying $44,000 to go there ? How is this possible?

    I have a more general point: I know people talk about how the wealthy kids get better advice than the poors. I wonder if that is because the wealthy understand how much money $44,000 is and wont spend it in a terrible school. Or, if they do spend it, it is because they have enough so their kids will never have to work.

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    1. Tuition at Seton Hall for this year is listed at $47,300, plus another $800 in mandatory fees.

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    2. But do they get cookies delivered at night? Focus on what's important!

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    3. I would say that it is an accurate statement that the wealthy understand money in general moreso than average. The wealthy overwhelmingly dominate the stock market and can afford to hire financial advisors. They also are more likely to be privately and more educated than the non wealthy.

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  27. I promised my spouse I would watch and follow a single Bravo show with her, because, heck, I thought it a nice gesture and would give us something to talk about as after our last kid headed off to college. I chose the Real Housewives of New Jersey, figuring I could channel the Sopranos and somehow endure it (I was right). One of the best moments for me on the show is where the oldest Manzo kid, Albie, gives the news to his overbearing mother that he has been asked to leave the first year of law school because his learning disability has caused him to receive an unsatisfactory grade average. The disability is more than a bit trifling, as he only has trouble with reading and reading comprehension. Sleuthing on my part informed that the law school in question was Seton Hall. The mother of course told him to fight, because he had a right to be lawyer, even if reading comprehension somehow stood in the way. I believe in market signaling events, like when I learned from a mortgage broker friend people were receiving no documented income mortgages in 2005 even though they were unemployed. Imminent doom was around the corner. The Albie moment on Real Housewives was yet another signaling event for me, meaning if Seton Hall was accepting students like this to stay in business, well, they wouldn't be in business much longer, at least not in the form to which it existed. Of course, in the fictional series Tony Soprano attended Seton Hall for a year or so to play baseball, where he too flunked out to enter an environmental consulting business, which seems to operate with many of the same methodologies as law schools. This school should not rely on the entertainment media to market its benefits.

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  28. In the old days, the last gasp effort of the kids that couldn't get into a NJ Jersey Law School was to run to Touro.

    Maybe now they can stay at home.

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  29. 2:13 asks, "Does anyone get a job from this school ?"


    Actually, the answer is that this school (Seton) is considerably better than average in at least this regard.

    c/o 2011 stats say about 63% got full-time, JD-required, non-school jobs.

    When you toss in the "JD preferred" jobs (whatever that means), it's pushing 71%.

    This is not a Barry or Touro or whatever where under 40% of the kids get lawjobs.

    On the other hand, "The Rent Is Still Too High" even for those who do get jobs.

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  30. "c/o 2011 stats say about 63% got full-time, JD-required, non-school jobs."

    Half those jobs are state judicial clerkships though. (I guess NJ has a very extensive clerkship system). How many of those positions are likely to lead to real legal jobs a year later? Not a rhetorical question -- I'm genuinely curious.

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    1. Oh - thank you. I didn't realize how many were state court jobs.

      And I think your question is on the money - those are not too likely to lead to jobs a year from now. Certainly nowhere near all 90 of them. Probably less than half, although this is just a WAG.

      So if you remove the state court clerkships, you do hit right at 40%.

      Delete
  31. I would only add that setting a GPA mandatory minimum is a bit disheartening. I've avoided law school, thanks in large part to this blog, but while I received a 163 on my LSAT my undergraduate GPA was 3.3 at Purdue University. The school is notorious for having had no GPA inflation in the past century, and public school GPAs tend to be comparatively lower than their private school counterparts.

    And while many parts of admission processes are subjective in nature, GPA without consideration to course load, course relevance, and institution seems unfair and surely leave much context out of the discussion.

    But perhaps this is a bit of a digression or me venting about my poor performance in French, now five years out. But I certainly think that the lack of uniform standards of GPA is problematic, especially when many institutions view it as uniform. Not that I have a sensible solution other than to hope that context matters in regard to subjective evaluations.

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    1. So right you are. A few years ago there was a student revolt at Princeton on account of the low grading curve - 3.1 in science and 3.4 in everything else on average. If you were a science major and 3.3 with a very high class rank you would get screwed on going to law school. Princeton's admissions results for law school were bad compared to those of Yale, which had more grade inflation.

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    2. T14 Law schools treat GPA as uniform because their prestige demands that they only accept the highest of scores no matter the relevance of the institution. There is many perverting factors when it comes to rankings, and a GPA free of context is certainly one of them.

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    3. More importantly, You Ass News treats GPA as uniform even though it varies a lot by institution, major, and other factors. Thus a 3.8 in underwater basketweaving from Bumblefuck U is much better than a 3.3 in molecular biochemistry from Princeton.

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    4. What else can US News do, besides omitting GPA altogether? If they actually graded major against UG quality, those rankings would be about 5000 pages long.

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  32. The one thing that I know about Seton Hall Unifarcity is that this lawsuit revealed to people interested in private international law that New Jersey exempts "charitable" institutions such as Seton Hall from tortious liability:

    https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F3/332/332.F3d.105.02-7524.html

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  33. Why is COA 22K higher than tuition?

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    1. Clearly. My question is more that 22K per year seems very high for COL.

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    2. Depends on the city. 22k in metro NYC, DC, or Chicago or LA is not "very high." For someone who doesn't have savings, it'll be a necessary plunge to take. Remember that a good chunk is going right back to the school (admin fees, textbooks, etc.). To get a decent 1BR, you're looking at $1k a month easily. That leaves a few thousand to cover food, transportation, clothing (incl. suits and dress shoes), internet/cell phone (both necessities nowadays), etc.

      Yeah, some people can cut it down by living like frugal champs. Others can't for a variety of reasons. Bottom line is that 22k doesn't go far at all in some places.

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  34. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2012-12-19/sorry-poor-kids-road-rags-riches-no-longer-goes-through-college

    This article shows how expensive college is for the poor....the guy in question quit college to join the Military.

    The system needs to be broken as it is only creating debt-serfs. The closings of law schools may help to start an avalanche of destruction.

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    Replies
    1. High-school students from Mexico win a contest in underwater robotics (thought I was going to say underwater basketweaving, didn't you?) against well-funded students from MIT yet cannot afford to attend university:

      http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/robot.html

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  35. 22k tuition for one year is a complete joke!!!
    I graduated from medical school in 1994 and the total tuition I paid for 4 years of medical school was 23K.

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    Replies
    1. Ah, but law school is so much more demanding of resources than medical school. Your teaching hospitals, laboratories, equipment, technicians, and so on are nothing compared to our monstrous staffs of professors with lower-case names (either one or four; any other number is déclassé) and such vitally important research products as self-indulgent blather on the intersection of law and hip-hop.

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  36. Has anyone ever watched a really high-end department store start these discounts...and then the store slowly evolved into a really low-end department store?

    "50% off tuition now!" sounds very similar.

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  37. I'm glad this toilet was finally featured on this wonderful blog. It is a disgrace and if you are able to get a hold of their historical employment stats from
    02-08 you will see the degree of their shamelessness. They used to boast a median starting salary of $100k for nonlegal jobs in "business" and i believe $140k in law. Thanks to.blogs like this these roaches are scurrying away from.the lights

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  38. The premise of the offer is flawed: there is no longer any such thing as a "public school price," unless you are in-state. These days, most "public" law schools offer a public LS education at a PRIVATE school price.

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  39. any employment stat from Seton Hall or the two Rutgers schools is going to be distorted by New Jersey's extensive clerkship system: there are three court levels with approximately 400 judges, all of whom get funds for at least one clerk - the Supreme Court and Appellate Division are prestigious and will likely guarantee a post-clerkship job - but the vast majority are trial level courts and I know for a fact of couple of people for whom a trial level clerkship led straight to doc review - not true 10-15 years ago but this is the new reality

    someone needs to ask Seton Hall and Rutgers how many students are in state trial clerkships

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  40. This makes me want to throw up

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    Replies
    1. The idea of somebody paying $70k a year for law school, with loans, is nauseauting.

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