The Decision: Full Scholarship, Location, Or Prestige?

Joe here. You know, the hardest decisions are the ones where you really can’t go wrong. Come out of a top-tier school debt-free, make local professional connections at one of the top programs in the area of the country where you want to work, or get a degree from Harvard? What to do, what to do?

On our most recent podcast, we invited our prospective law student listeners to write in with the law school decisions they’re facing. We’ve received a number of submissions and while we can’t get to them all, we’ll be going through a bunch of them on our next show, so stay tuned. In the meantime, here’s one that we pulled aside for the written treatment in our long-running series The Decision.

Today’s student has a lot of factors to weigh. She’s an older student — in her early 30s — with a passion for public interest work. Having worked in an arts-related field for the past decade, she has, unlike many aspiring attorneys, a pretty good sense of the financial sacrifices that life requires. But even if she’s ready for the pauper’s life of a public interest lawyer, that doesn’t mean she’s not worried about the high cost of tuition. That’s where this gets complicated:

I’ve narrowed it down to the following three:

– U Penn, where I was awarded a full scholarship.

– Harvard, where I have not yet received a financial aid package but anticipate being asked to shell out the big bucks.

– UC Berkeley, where I was offered a modest $60k scholarship (I’ve asked them to reconsider in light of their competitor’s offer, but am not expecting anything approaching Penn’s generosity – and there’s also the high cost of living in the Bay Area to consider).

If that’s not enough to consider, she also wants to ultimately settle in California for personal reasons.

There’s really no way to go wrong here, but let’s break this down.

First, if Biglaw were in the cards — even temporarily — it would have a huge impact on my take. But our reader has no interest in going that route at all. And it’s no small matter that we’re talking about a student in her 30s. I generally ignore students who claim they’ll never be seduced into a stint at the big firms because no 22-year-old really knows what they want no matter how many Save the Whales petitions they filled out in undergrad. But someone with life experience you can take at their word.

So with Biglaw off the table, let’s scratch Harvard off the list for now. Maybe they’ll come through with a big package that makes them worthwhile, but it would have to be pretty substantial because otherwise you’re not looking at standard debt-induced poverty, you’re looking at “when you die they reanimate your corpse to do their horrible bidding” debt. Harvard is prestigious, but we’re talking about three high-flying schools here.

For the California lawyer, it’s hard to overlook Boalt. If they match Penn, then go for it. That said, if they don’t and settling on the West Coast isn’t an immediate need, then there’s no reason to make the leap now. While it’s true that getting a public interest job often relies more on personal connections than for the big-box firms, those connections don’t need to come from law school. Work in public interest in D.C. or New York long enough and you’ll have a friend of a friend in California doing the work you want to do when the day comes.

Penn is free. Free! That’s literally the most important concern of an aspiring public interest lawyer. As our old public interest columnist Sam Wright explained, prestige isn’t as important to public interest work as protecting your finances:

Each nonprofit I’ve worked for has employed lawyers from a variety of backgrounds: Top-3 alums, unranked-school alums, and everyone in between. The same egalitarianism holds for most public interest organizations I’ve encountered personally and professionally, though the balance is different at different places. I’ve even heard some public interest employers profess an anti-prestige bias. Focusing on the (probable) minority of organizations that do value prestige is a terrible way to make a decision that could put you $200k in the hole.

And that’s before you consider that Penn may not be the “Harvard Law” that we make movies about, but it’s actually incredibly prestigious. In fact, it’s the highest ranked of the three schools we’re talking about in the ATL Top 50.

Given the facts as they’re laid out, Penn is the clear winner.

Lat, J., concurring in part and dissenting in part:

Lat here. I agree with Joe that this overachieving applicant can’t go wrong. And I agree that she should turn down Berkeley unless they can show her the money. I disagree as to Harvard versus Penn (although not very strongly, because it’s a close call; law schools are very good at calibrating their scholarship offers to take ranking and prestige differentials into account).

Yes, it’s true that Penn Law beats Harvard in the ATL Law School Rankings, which focus on post-graduation employment prospects (and, to a lesser extent, cost). But HLS has beaten Penn in prior years, and in the U.S. News rankings — which, for better or worse, remain the dominant rankings — Harvard has always been a member of the “Holy Trinity,” the perennial top-three schools, the “H” in the hallowed “HYS.”

And also for better or worse, Harvard is still, well, Harvard. It has an unmatched cachet and mystique, perhaps even more prestigious than Yale on a global basis. It’s the law school of One L and The Paper Chase and Legally Blonde. It’s the alma mater of President Barack Obama — who became a community organizer after graduation, showing that a Harvard degree can be used in many different contexts.

Also — and I am being only slightly tongue in cheek here — if you don’t go to Harvard, how can you let people know you got into Harvard, without being a total tool? As I wrote years ago about a cartoon I saw (maybe in the New Yorker):

It showed a car with a rear windshield sticker that proudly read, “Harvard.” Right below that sticker was another sticker, in smaller type, that read, “Also admitted at Princeton and Yale.”

Do you really want to be one of those annoying people who tells people, “I went to Penn because I got a full ride, but I got into Harvard too”? Just go to Harvard, so you get the bragging rights — and so you don’t have to wonder, for the rest of your life, “What if I had gone to Harvard?”

Finally, speaking of money, Harvard is richer than Croesus. Our questioner isn’t expecting money from Harvard, but I suspect that HLS will offer some sort of scholarship or financial aid (especially if a superb school like Penn is offering a full ride). And even if it doesn’t, Harvard does have what’s arguably the best loan repayment assistance (LRAP) program in the country, as this applicant noted in her email to us:

I know Harvard’s response to the money question would be “look at our great LRAP program.” But I’ve met so many recent grads who have given me the “I’m just working at a firm for a while to pay back my loans and then I’ll pursue my heart’s desire at a nonprofit” line that I’m worried about debt of any kind restricting my options.

But you know what? Maybe you want to be restricted a little, tied to the mast like Odysseus. It might be good to be nudged by financial considerations into public interest, so you won’t be tempted by the siren song of private practice (although note that HLS’s loan program offers broad coverage, including qualifying work at small law firms; it would just keep you away from Biglaw and other high-paying jobs).

So that’s this questioner’s enviable “dilemma.” Readers, what do you think?

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Joe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. He previously worked as a federal prosecutor in Newark, New Jersey; a litigation associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and a law clerk to Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at [email protected].