How Law Schools are Enticing Applicants and How Applicants Should Take Full Advantage
Law schools are focusing on ways to improve their enrollment numbers. We offer advice to prelaw students on how to use this trend to save money on law school.
Today’s LSAT advice comes from our friends at Blueprint LSAT Prep. Check out Blueprint’s new LSAT book The Blueprint for LSAT Logic Games.
Law school numbers are down. Way down.
And like any business that suddenly finds itself with fewer customers, law schools are looking to entice new students to apply. Because – and it’s always important to remember this – law schools are a business, at least as much as they are academic institutions.
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Will they take a hint from used car salesmen, setting up whacky, inflatable, arm-flailing tube men to draw the eye of passing motorists?
Or possibly Red Lobster, offering shrimp AND lobster with any JD?
Or, more likely, will they try to improve their job numbers while offering larger scholarships?
If you guessed door number three, you’d be right.
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Law schools are focusing on two ways to improve their enrollment numbers – getting their scholarship offers up (not always through legitimate means), and getting their employment data up as high as possible (again, not always through legitimate means). Let’s see how you can use this information to your advantage, while avoiding some of the pitfalls and traps being used by less scrupulous institutions.
Scholarship Offers
Your financial outlay should definitely be an important consideration in your ultimate law school decision, and law schools know this. So they’re cranking up the scholarship offers to entice more students.
Which means it can be a great time to apply to law school. As the most qualified applicants stop applying, law schools are scrambling to maintain their median LSAT scores. This means they’re accepting and offering scholarships to students who, a few years ago, would have begged for just an acceptance. Any money you take in scholarships now is several dollars you don’t have to pay back after your education is complete.
Definitely capitalize on this by negotiating for as much additional scholarship money as possible. Law school is now a buyer’s market, so levy that buying power to wring a few extra thousand dollars of scholarship money each year.
Of course, law schools are also cranking tuition up. Way up. Which, in conjunction with a weak legal employment market, means it can also be a bad time to apply to law school.
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It’s important to compare the absolute cost of the education, not just the absolute value of the scholarship. If tuition is $50K and you receive a $5K scholarship, you’re paying $45K. If tuition is $60K and you receive a $12K scholarship, you’re paying $48K. The former is the better deal, even with the bigger scholarship of the latter. Simple math, I know, but you’d be surprised how many people see that $12K scholarship and don’t think the rest of it through.
Deciding on which law school to attend is no longer a simple game of “Compare the Ranking!” Now, you need to take a look at the financial numbers involved – tuition, living expenses, scholarship offers. And, finally, employment data.
Employment Data
People go to law school to get a job as a lawyer. As much as some schools like to sit in an ivory tower of theory, it’s still a professional school.
One of the main factors in your decision regarding law school should be how good your employment prospects are coming out of that school. However, it’s important to verify the data presented to you by the law school. They’re going to paint a rosy picture because they want prospective applicants to believe their employment rates are high. But you wouldn’t trust a used car salesman’s claims about a car’s past – why would you believe a law school’s claims about your future?
The reality of the current legal market is rather grim. There are almost twice as many graduates as jobs, and that trend doesn’t appear to be changing in the near future. Which means you shouldn’t take the decision of your law school enrollment lightly.
But even if there are twice as many graduates as jobs, that still leaves a lot of jobs out there – over 20,000. So it becomes a job of putting yourself in the best position to make sure that one of those jobs has your name on it.
The best way to do that is to take all the numbers into account. Tuition and living expenses. Scholarship offers. Employment data. Average salaries. And, yes, even the rankings. Like all worthwhile things in life, there’s some risk in the law school application game. But if you play it right, you can maximize your chances of coming out a winner if you get into a solid school with a great scholarship, leading to a less stressful experience that will translate to better grades. From there, you can graduate with less debt, allowing you more flexibility in accepting job offers. And once you get that first job, you’ll start building the experience that will hopefully ensure your second job is even better.
And then you can buy your own lobster and shrimp.
Blueprint offers live LSAT prep classes throughout the country and online LSAT courses for those who want to study in solitary.
