Wednesday, August 17, 2011

The student scholarship game

The following email is from a recent graduate of a Tier II school:



[A law professor] let me in on the dirty little secret of law school admissions -- those with the very highest LSAT scores and who are very likely to do well academically get the fattest scholarships.  The books are balanced on the backs of those with lower LSAT scores and who are likely not to do as well.  I remember it seeming kind of astounding to an outsider that this was how the system worked, but it's absolutely true.  in my application process, I was able to get insane scholarship offers from schools where my LSAT number was at the 75th percentile or above.  Where I was at the median or below, I was paying full boat.

Ultimately, I had to pick between a highly ranked top 20 school and [the school I chose].  It was a tough call -- some innate voice and lots of misguided friends told me to go with USNWR rankings.  [The professor] told me to take [the lower ranked school's] money and never look back.  I did the latter and don't regret it for a minute for my personal reasons.  I did very well academically (summa cum laude), was EIC of the law review, etc.  I was able to obtain a great job at a terrific law firm that will pay me very well.  Because of the scholarship, I have little debt.

BUT there is a certain amount of moral outrage I feel about the system.  I have many, many friends at [the school I chose] who did not do as well, who never had a scholarship, and who have six-figure debt with zero job prospects.  They essentially "paid" for my legal education and the whole enterprise makes me feel uneasy.  Probably in the same way that you feel uneasy about being a professor.
This is yet another example of the invidious effects of the rankings game.  Because the entrance qualifications of students make up a significant portion of the USNWR rankings, schools spend a lot of money buying good students (although not as many as they could buy if more students realized it almost always makes far more sense for a student who has the choice to go to the 70th-ranked law school and pay no tuition than to pay $40,000 a year to go to the 25th-ranked school).

As my correspondent notes, in effect this system guarantees that the vast majority of students who are going to get less of a return on their investment in law school anyway, because they won't finish near the top of their classes, are subsidizing the small number of students who have a far better shot at securing decent jobs.  At my school students pay a mean tuition of 80% of full price -- but the median student pays 100%. A handful of students with excellent entrance numbers get full rides, as do a few minority students, in order to keep up our "diversity" numbers. Almost everyone else pays the MSRP, or something very close to it.  Almost no need-based scholarship money is available.

All these factors conspire to produce an extremely strong class bias in law school admissions. Since people from upper class backgrounds (including minority students from such backgrounds) are more likely to have the strongest admissions numbers, because of all the advantages that are part of having such a background, the people who end up getting scholarship money are often the people who need it least, both in terms of being able to attend law school at all, and in terms of making law school pay off in the long run.  And the most unjust feature of this system is that the students who can least afford to pay the currently absurdly inflated price of attending law school are actually subsidizing the students who can afford it most.

Conservatives like to complain, with some justification, that law school faculties are dominated by political liberals.  But it's remarkable how little effect the supposedly liberal political commitments of law school faculty members have on basic issues of economic and social justice such as this one.

Update:  From Comments

The Tier 2 school from which I just graduated played an interesting (and perhaps unethical?) variation on the scholarship theme. The school proudly offers a merit scholarship to all incoming students who have a certain LSAT/GPA combo. This scholarship renews for the 2L and 3L years provided the student maintains a certain GPA (namely, a 3.33), with this information receiving far less prominence. So far, nothing is out of the ordinary.

However, a large majority of the merit scholarship recipients were placed together in my 1L section (this school operates three 1L sections). This particular practice was discussed by several of our professors, and it seemed plausible at the time based on conversations among us classmates. From talking among ourselves at the beginning of our 2L year, it seemed that my particular 1L section suffered the most scholarship losses. This, of course, would be the purpose of bunching scholarship winners together in one 1L section. With exceptionally fierce competition and many more recipients than the grade curve can handle, the school would be able to revoke many scholarships over that first summer.

Allow me a few more pieces of information about the school to help understand this claim. First of all, a B+ at my school was only a 3.25, even though the scholarship maintenance GPA was a 3.33. Second, after the 1L year, there are no more assigned classes and the sections dissolve. After the last two homogenized years in the school any idiosyncratic 1L grade curves should be highly diluted, if not wiped away completely. However, my 1L section accounted for several more than half of the Summa and Magna cum Laude honors (top 1% and 5%) as well as very nearly half of the elections to the Order of the Coif. Having run the numbers (being done with the bar exam betrays how much spare time I have), my section is more than three standard deviations away from an expected normal distribution of graduation honors. This empirical evidence therefore supports the theory that a large majority of merit scholarship recipients were grouped into my section. (In addition, my section's GPA cutoff for Law Review at the end of 1L was significantly higher than the other sections', selection being done by section to account for each section's grading idiosyncrasies).

So, not only did my school not really explain the possibility and probability of merit scholarships' disappearing, but it appears to have actively engaged in practices designed to invalidate as many as possible after the first year. That's really special.
 I had noticed a number of claims on the scam blogs that some law schools engage in the practice of "stacking" 1L sections in this way.  I must admit that when I first encountered them these claims struck me as highly implausible and even a bit paranoid. I mean surely no law school administration would engage in behavior that was both so grossly unethical and so easily discoverable in a civil action, right?

I guess we're going to find out.

47 comments:

  1. This is absolutely true. Unless, perhaps, if you got into a world famous brand like Harvard then you are much better off taking a scholarship at a lower ranked school. If you got into Virginia or Georgetown, take the scholarship at American. If you got into American, take the scholarship at Hofstra or NYLS. If you got into NYLS, take the scholarship to Tourro.

    I know it sounds crazy superficially, but you'll thank me in three years when you look at your no-debt finances and compare it to the finances of your friend who went the opposite route.

    P.S. Be careful about exploding scholarships (those you get to keep only if you are in the top xx percentile).

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  3. It's an interesting balancing act when making the decision to go with a higher ranked school and take out huge loans or go with the lower ranked school offering free or discounted tuition. Prospective students really need to assess what they want to do with a law degree, which is hard for most of the youngsters going to law school because they really have no idea what the practice of law is like. If you really want to get into Big Law, go with the higher ranked school hands down. In the Los Angeles market, for example, a second tier school like Loyola has comparable good connections with the local offices of the big firms, but a student will still have to be at least in the top 10% to sniff a job at such a firm. On the other hand, you won't have to be nearly so successful at USC or UCLA to land a comparable job. Unless you're in a big firm and see the recruiting sausage making process from the inside it's hard to fully appreciate the importance of the numbers game in terms of GPA and class ranking. A student simply has a much better shot of getting into Big Law coming from a higher ranked school.

    Of course, big law is hardly the ultimate goal for everyone attending law school, and there are plenty of people I work with in big law who hate the life. So getting a big law job is only one possible worthwhile outcome. If a student is open to other possibilities, then defnitely go with the financially better deal over the prestige of a higher ranked school.

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  5. In the Los Angeles market, for example, a second tier school like Loyola has comparable good connections with the local offices of the big firms, but a student will still have to be at least in the top 10% to sniff a job at such a firm. On the other hand, you won't have to be nearly so successful at USC or UCLA to land a comparable job.

    ----------------------------

    It might be nearer than you think, at least at UCLA.

    http://abovethelaw.com/2011/06/ucla-laws-job-placement-numbers-strain-credulity-but-did-you-read-the-fine-print/

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  6. It's been said many times in the last year, but it needs to be said again: prospective law students should be able to look up how many (for example) UCLA law grads had big firm jobs nine months after graduation. They can't. The only reason they can't is because law schools aren't required to reveal it. Law schools compile this information (not very rigorously, but they do have the basic info). They should be required to publish it.

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  7. Plus, contract positions or hourly doc review positions at big firms should be distinguished from associate positions. Plus, deferred hire dates (which often turn into no hire date) should be distinguished.

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  8. Right, *real* big firm jobs. It's good to be reminded that law schools will cook the books at the slightest opportunity. The (non) response of the law school world to the Law School Transparency folks, who have been all over this issue, speaks volumes about how interested law schools are in disclosing accurate employment numbers.

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  9. An addendum to this discussion is that law schools will never reward you for excelling in law school. I, for instance, graduated in the top 5% from a pretty good first tier state law school (maybe even the one LawProf teaches at). I was on law review, the national moot court team and I was an RA doing as close to real scholarship as is possible for a law student (I know what real scholarship is because I used to be a graduate student). Do you think I got a penny for any of that (other than my RA pay)? Of course not. They only care what your incoming undergraduate GPA & LSAT scores are, because that is the only thing that US News cares about. I say this not because I feel entitled to have received a scholarship, but to underscore the point that law school "scholarships" have nothing to do with the common meaning of scholarship--they are not a reward or encouragement for contributing as a student to the law school academy. They are solely a means of buying the approval of a second-rate news magazine.

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  10. Like the OP, I got a full ride from a decent school. My school (a T30 that shall remain nameless) takes "Gaming the Rankings" to an all new level. It seems like the school purchases the vast majority of its 75 percentile+ students via full ride scholarship, leaving the rest to pay the balance. So you either get the full ride or you got next to nothing. Funny enough, those that are paying the balance have terrible lsat scores that indicate they could never compete with the full ride group of the class (scores that make their other options between T60-T100). They are paying horrific tuition to attend, justify the cost by pointing to the USNW and talking about Fed forgiveness programs. It's almost kind of a sad, feudal hierarchy- extracting wealth from the poor scores and transferring it to the high scores.

    Personally, this program benefits me. I assume that professor feel similarly (they are cashing out at 200k-300k a year), and that is the reason they don't speak out about the extremely hierarchical nature of the class.

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  11. The rankings have definitely been a pernicious influence on legal education. But don't all academic scholarships benefit some students at the expense of others?

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  12. I agree with the preceding comment in that I don't see anything wrong with the law schools seeking to attract the best students with scholarship incentives. It seems that the morally acceptable alternative among the commentary on this site is that every law student receive the same level of financial assistance regardless of their incoming merit to reduce the burden upon those that make up the bottom of the class. In my opinion that is a socialist point of view.

    Furthermore, these more qualified law applicants that choose the lower-tier school are obviously making a trade-off, i.e., attending a lower-tier school in exchange for a smaller debt load. For the less qualified student, the "burden" of paying full tuition is at least partially justified in that the higher LSAT/GPA student required the scholarship in order to attend the school and in turn benefited the less qualified students by increasing the school's collective ranking (and arguably the value of a law degree from that institution).

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  13. Similar to the OP, I had to select between at T15 school paying out-of-state tuition, or a T30 school paying in-state tuition. I selected to go in-state and saved myself at least $20,000 per year.

    The best part-I don't regret it at all. I ended up working at the a highly respected firm with many T10 law students, and I didn't have the crushing student debt they did. The USNWR rankings aren't everything, and some prospective students should take a step back, put their ego in check, and make the intelligent decision.

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  14. LP, I agree with your description of what happens, that the students most likely to succeed also end up paying the least. But, I disagree on the normative assessment. I don't see anything particularly invidious about schools giving merit scholarships. Sure, it might be motivated by a desire to increase their rankings, but it does also benefit the students at the school. You spend a lot of time learning from your classmates, both in seminars, and in large classes using the Socratic method. In either format, you're much better off having smart people sitting next to you. Not for your position on the curve, but for the actual quality of your education.

    So far as schools want to attract the best and the brightest, which I think they'd want to do even without the rankings, there's nothing wrong with merit scholarships. I'd call the effect an economic anomaly, and prospective students should take a lack of scholarship as a hint about where they'll fall on the curve, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it "unjust."

    Where I agree with you is that more emphasis should be on need-based scholarships.

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  15. This is just another example of how law schools don't inform their prospective students as well as they could. It's not as egregious as what they do with employment reporting, but it's close.

    If a client walks into my office and trusts me with his claim in return for payment, I should answer all of his questions. Beyond that, I am ethically bound to volunteer any advice that I think he needs to make his decision, even if that means he won't litigate or hire someone else to do it. Why that standard of disclosure varies when the client becomes a prospective student, and the lawyer becomes a law school, I don't know.

    If you offer a scholarship based on keeping a 3.0 at your school, and 150 of 300 1Ls will fall below a 3.0 as a byproduct of your 1L curve, include it in the offer. Don't rationalize your bullshit by saying, "Well, it was obvious if the student went on our website, and looked at the following documents, and performed the necessary calculations, blah blah blah." At that point, you become exactly what the scamblogs say you are.

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  16. The Tier 2 school from which I just graduated played an interesting (and perhaps unethical?) variation on the scholarship theme. The school proudly offers a merit scholarship to all incoming students who have a certain LSAT/GPA combo. This scholarship renews for the 2L and 3L years provided the student maintains a certain GPA (namely, a 3.33), with this information receiving far less prominence. So far, nothing is out of the ordinary.

    However, a large majority of the merit scholarship recipients were placed together in my 1L section (this school operates three 1L sections). This particular practice was discussed by several of our professors, and it seemed plausible at the time based on conversations among us classmates. From talking among ourselves at the beginning of our 2L year, it seemed that my particular 1L section suffered the most scholarship losses. This, of course, would be the purpose of bunching scholarship winners together in one 1L section. With exceptionally fierce competition and many more recipients than the grade curve can handle, the school would be able to revoke many scholarships over that first summer.

    Allow me a few more pieces of information about the school to help understand this claim. First of all, a B+ at my school was only a 3.25, even though the scholarship maintenance GPA was a 3.33. Second, after the 1L year, there are no more assigned classes and the sections dissolve. After the last two homogenized years in the school any idiosyncratic 1L grade curves should be highly diluted, if not wiped away completely. However, my 1L section accounted for several more than half of the Summa and Magna cum Laude honors (top 1% and 5%) as well as very nearly half of the elections to the Order of the Coif. Having run the numbers (being done with the bar exam betrays how much spare time I have), my section is more than three standard deviations away from an expected normal distribution of graduation honors. This empirical evidence therefore supports the theory that a large majority of merit scholarship recipients were grouped into my section. (In addition, my section's GPA cutoff for Law Review at the end of 1L was significantly higher than the other sections', selection being done by section to account for each section's grading idiosyncrasies).

    So, not only did my school not really explain the possibility and probability of merit scholarships' disappearing, but it appears to have actively engaged in practices designed to invalidate as many as possible after the first year. That's really special.

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  17. "However, a large majority of the merit scholarship recipients were placed together in my 1L section"

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    LOL. evil genius.

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  18. "First of all, a B+ at my school was only a 3.25"
    ---------

    WTH? Alright this is really over the top gamesmanship.

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  19. Yep. An A- is a 3.75 and a B+ is a 3.25. It's the same for all of the other letter grades.

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  20. Do you know how many of them fell below the GPA maintenance requirement after first year? It's hard to be magna or summa with any lower grades. That so many of them ended up at the very top would indicate that despite being bunched together in the first year, they did not exactly wash out. Of course some could still come in just below the cutoff and do very well. But we would have to know exactly how many people from that section lost their scholarships after the first year. If you could get that information over a span of a few years, then you would be able to get an accurate picture of what may or may not be going on.

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  21. Stunning if true. But do law faculty members control stuff like this, or even have access to information about how scholarships are awarded or administrated? Faculty governance varies tremendously across law schools...

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  22. Faculty governance may vary tremendously across law schools, but I do not believe that law faculties control who is in what section or even play much, if any, role in awarding scholarships to incoming students.

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  23. "Faculty governance may vary tremendously across law schools, but I do not believe that law faculties control who is in what section or even play much, if any, role in awarding scholarships to incoming students."

    That is my experience as well, but of course to some extent this is because many law faculty are all too happy to abdicate self-governance matters to the school's administrators. Individual faculty members who object to this arrangement tend to get labeled as troublemakers, who are disrupting supposed norms of "collegiality."

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  24. NYU plays a different game with their scholarships. They state you must keep an acceptable GPA, but don't tell recipients what sort of GPA would cause them to lose their scholarship. I never heard of anyone losing theirs, so I imagine it's something like you're getting Cs and Ds in your classes. But, the school also does not have an official GPA or class rank. I wonder, if they ever cut off someone's scholarship, if that student could claim they couldn't possibly have a low GPA because they don't have a GPA at all.

    Anyways, on to the game that the play. In your third year your scholarship is reduced by 50% unless you work a public interest job in your second summer. This is very clearly disclosed to students.

    What the school keeps hidden is the fact that if you want to go in to a firm after law school, you need to work at that firm during your second summer. The whole law firm hiring process is pretty convoluted, and there's no way an incoming student should be expected to know before starting law school what the consequences of taking that public interest gig second summer will be. But, once OCI is explained, you figure it out, and kiss 17% of your scholarship goodbye.

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  25. This is one of the strange aspects of this discussion. Many of the phenomena being described are features of higher education in general. Yesterday it was "merit scholarships that benefit the people who get them and hurt the people who don't", as if this were some new idea that law faculties just dreamed up. Some things are particular to law schools--rankings and what they mean for job prospects, to take one example; although academics don't control that either try as they might. But the other things are part of the entire system of higher education. Someone, I can't remember the name, just wrote a whole book about "the rise"of administrators in colleges and universities. I'm not so sure professors should get involved in picking students for sections and determining students scholarships. In the Oxbridge system the Dons at each college pick every student that comes in. They abdicate little. There are, however, upsides to that and downsides. But it is not the way it is done in most American universities, law schools or colleges.

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  26. Loyola Law School in los angeles also purportedly stacks the scholarship kids in one section. I believe it is section 4.

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  27. An addendum to this discussion is that law schools will never reward you for excelling in law school. I, for instance, graduated in the top 5% from a pretty good first tier state law school (maybe even the one LawProf teaches at). I was on law review, the national moot court team and I was an RA doing as close to real scholarship as is possible for a law student (I know what real scholarship is because I used to be a graduate student). Do you think I got a penny for any of that (other than my RA pay)? Of course not.
    -------------------------------------

    At non-top tier schools the siutation is the exact opposite of the one you describe. I didn't have great grades or LSAT score when applying, but landed in the top 5% after the first year. At lower ranked schools they are desparate to make sure top students don't transfer higher up the food chain so they throw money and other perks at us. I received about a 70% discount off tuition for the rest of my time at a Tier 2 law school, and so did my classmates who did well.

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  28. For those who suggest that ordinary law students should happily fund the free education of their intellectual superiors--so that they may reap the great benefits of being in the presence of such prodigies--I offer you the following facts. (1) Above an IQ of 120 (moderately above average), there is no statistical correlation between undergraduate GPA and intelligence. Indeed some studies suggest that there is a negative correlation between extremly high IQ (150+) and undergraduate GPA. (2) While there is some correlation between LSAT scores and IQ, it is well established that LSAT scores are hugely influenced by preparation courses, which can add as much as 10-15 points. Obviously, taking such a course doesn't make persons more intelligent. So it is a stretch to suggest that people with higher LSAT scores are always smarter than those who with lower scores.

    In other words, get over yourselves.

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  29. The problem here isn't really one of fairness (i.e. is it fair for the bottom to fund the top vs. shouldn't those who succeed reap the benefits). The problem here is money, the well has dried up. In the past, when the economy was chugging along and tuitions were cheaper, lower ranked students would have been less likely to care about funding higher ranked students, because they could get a bite at the apple, too. Jobs were more plentiful and better paid, and you weren't forking over an arm in a leg in tuition, so who cared about funding the top 10%. But that's ending now, because the poor can't really afford it anymore.

    This shouldn't come as a surprise, this is basically what happened in the US economy.

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  30. Please for Christ sake help this poor boy from Haiti.

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  31. Done Majid. But why can't you borrow money for your tuition? Doesn't your government guaranty student loans?

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  32. DRATS! If it weren't for you meddling kids, we would have gotten away with it!

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  33. Please explain how any -- any -- of this is different from what ordinary universities do every day. And don't just say "because the students think they'll make $160K."

    Overpaying for education is the norm in this country. I'm not only talking about the obvious, such as BFA's and art history MA's. I'm talking also abt science and engineering degrees -- 4 years at a typical private undergrad today, all-in paying full sticker, is over $200K, and no one thinks they'll make Biglaw money when they get their BA/BS, even if they work in Silicon Valley, Big Oil, or Wall Street.

    I favor greater disclosure, but I'm having trouble seeing law schools as singularly bad actors. The main difference I see b/w overpriced law and grad schools as against undergrads is that most people who attend extremely expensive undergrads (except possibly Ivies, which offer lots of aid) have their way paid by their parents, and most who attend expensive grad schools, including law, pay their own way with loans. Subsidies -- from parents or the federal gov't -- make attending such schools more likely.

    Is an undergraduate degree in anthropology from a non-Ivy private school a "scam" as well? What if *some* anthropologists made $160K to start?

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  34. Private education at all levels is not only expensive, but tends to cost about the same in any given market. That is so even though there are often great differences in the outcomes they achieve for their students. In major cities the tuition for private independent elementary and secondary schools is all within the same range. It's now about 40K for private high schools in NYC, 160K for four years or 13 years, depending upon how long the kid is there. People pay, and are lining up to do so. The same is true at colleges, where tuition in non-top ten schools can be higher than some top ten schools. Whether it should be or not, buying an education is not like buying a car where you expect to pay more for a BMW than a Hyundai.

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  35. "Overpaying for education is the norm in this country."

    Oh never mind then.

    In all seriousness, what possible difference does it make whether or not law schools are singularly bad actors? It's possible to come up with reasons for why they are, but why bother? I'm a law professor, not an anthropology professor. If I were the latter I hope I wouldn't consider "law schools are screwing over our students even worse than we are" to be some sort of defense, if I believed there were ethical issues raised by the current model of undergraduate education at my institution at others like it.

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  36. Because if you really want to solve a problem--not just talk about it--it helps to know the exact nature of it. Is it a part of a bigger picture that requires a different type of response? Or is it sui generis, which would allow a more targeted response? It always helps to know exactly what you are dealing with.

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  37. Put another way, if the situation is all the creation of law professors who could rectify it on their own, without regard to the universities to which the vast majority of their schools are attached, then that might suggest a course of action. Could law schools bump their tuitions down to, say, 20k, while the colleges continue to cost 50K?

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  38. Obviously law professors can't rectify the situation all by themselves, but their (our) current passivity isn't helping. There is no reason that law school and undergraduate tuition at the same institutions need to have anything to do with each other, and at many places they don't. For example in-state undergraduate tuition at Michigan is around $10,000 per year, while in-state law school tuition is around $45K.

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  39. Do you think the same would hold true at private schools? Are there places where college tuition is in the 40s range, and the tuition of the law school is lower?

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  40. If not lower, as seriously out of the range as you describe the situation at Michigan?

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  41. Many of the top law schools (possibly Michigan, definitely UVA) choose to forego state money for greater independence which accounts for some of the cost difference.

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  42. When I was in Law School, I used to call those scholarship kids: "Ringers"

    As in, they made the Law Review/House Organ.

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  43. @ BL1Y

    Columbia does a similar trick. They give you a scholarship for the first two years and then cut it in half the third year. Although they don't place any conditions on it- they just leave it unsaid that you'll use the biglaw money to pay the difference. That was fine when everyone at CLS could get biglaw jobs, but when a good 20% of participants strike out at OCI...

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  44. From an admittedly cursory run through the information provided in USNWR rankings of colleges and law schools-- considering schools at different levels of prestige--it appears that in most private universities, tuition at colleges and law schools are within range of one another. They may exist, but I didn't see any private school with a 35k difference between the undergraduate tuition and the law school tuition.

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  45. Michigan's story from its website appealing for donations:

    You help offset the continued decline in state funding: State funding has declined to less than 3% of the Law School's annual expenses. That means Michigan Law relies on private gifts to attract and retain top-tier faculty; provide financial aid to students; and develop and maintain programs that sustain the Law School's stature as a world-class legal educator. By giving to the Law School Fund, you help fund not only day-to-day operations, but also the Law School's growth and expansion.

    Also, from law.com:

    In fact, Virginia's law school receives no public funding, said Stephen Parr, associate dean for management and finance. The school moved away from state funding in the early 2000s, with the idea that it would have more autonomy and wouldn't be subject to funding cuts by state legislators, Parr said. Similarly, only about 3% of Michigan's law school budget comes from public funds, said Dean Evan Caminker.

    Michigan law is pretty much a private school.

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  46. Regarding all education as overpriced, keep in mind that a lot of people go to law school as a way to correct the mistakes of their undergraduate education. They've already been burned once, and they see law school as a way out. Instead, they end up being burned twice.

    I agree in principle it is all the same thing. But since the law school rip-off is experienced on top of the undergrad rip-off, the negative reaction is going to be stronger and more bitter.

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  47. Would banning scholarships ultimately make law school more affordable? If everyone played by the same rules, there would be no impact on rankings.

    A law degree is a professional degree. A degree that is ultimately for the express purpose of performing a profession. Any debt incurred should be supported by the future earnings. There is no logical reason for scholarships - other than to attract better students than you would normally get.

    That's why I don't get so outraged by students losing their scholarships - if all the students had to keep their scholarship this game would just be more expensive for law schools to play and they would up the tuition even more.

    One undergraduate institution (Sewanee) recently cut tuition by 10% and made up for it by awarding less merit aid. It can be done.

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