Law Schools

The Absurdity Of Current Law School Scholarship Offerings

This is ridiculous.

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Everyone knows that for the past several years, law schools have been plagued by a shrinking applicant pool. In order to survive and to convince students to commit to three years of legal education amid terrifying tales of debt and joblessness for recent graduates, law schools have either slashed tuition, upped their scholarship offerings, or both.

How much have law school scholarship offers changed since legal academia went into crisis mode? Professor Derek Muller has a stunning graphic at Excess of Democracy to show us how dramatically different applicant cycles have become. Here’s the methodology he used in preparing the illustration:

Gleaning data from LawSchoolNumbers (of course, with all the usual caveats that come with such data), I looked at the profiles of similarly-situated law school applicants applying to a similar set of law schools in the 2010-2011 and 2014-2015 application cycles. I included their self-reported (all the usual caveats) outcomes. (I found applicants with identical LSAT scores and similar UGPAs, but I ensured that if the UGPAs were different, the 2014-2015 applicants always had the slightly worse UGPA.) I anonymized the schools, even though they’re easily discoverable, simply because the precise identities of each school don’t matter terribly much; instead, the illustration of the dramatically different outcomes for similar-situated applicants four years apart stands alone.

All of the scholarship offers listed are for three years of law school. Prepare to be shocked.

Click here to see the full graphic. Would you attend a law school where applicants who would’ve been waitlisted or rejected a few years earlier are now receiving nearly full scholarships? This is absolutely ridiculous.

A tale of two law school applicant cycles [Excess of Democracy]

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