For anyone out there who is considering law school, and have been offered a scholarship (or just haven’t heard back yet), please take this to heart.
If a law school offers you a contingent scholarship, like “you have to be in the top 20%, 30%, 40% whatever% to keep your scholarship,” BEWARE. I don’t care how smart you are, or how well you did in undergrad. You’re about to go to law school. EVERYONE IS SMART. EVERYONE DID WELL IN UNDERGRAD. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be there. Period. The playing field is much more level than it ever has been before, I promise.Â
So if you’re offered a conditional scholarship, where you can keep it if you perform at a certain level, don’t take it.Â
Law schools are a business. They want to make money. And guess what? That conditional scholarship they offered you, they don’t want you to make the grades to keep it, because then you’ll have to pay them more money. And they’ll make sure that you don’t. They will group you in a section with other scholarship recipients to maximize scholarship loss (you can’t all make A’s - law school is graded on a curve). They know that after the first year, even if you lose your great scholarship and now will have to pay through the nose or owe your first born son to Sallie Mae, you’re more likely to stay because you’ve already invested a year of your life into law school, don’t want to seem like a quitter, etc. The point is that odds are you’re going to keep going no matter what the cost is, and they know it.
So what can you do if you’re offered a contingent scholarship?
I wish someone had told me that before I accepted my admission, and thus my scholarship as well.Â
You have the power to negotiate with them. Do not think that the initial offer that they make you is the one and final offer. Call them, talk about your concerns with a contingent scholarship. I know someone who did that, got his contingency completely taken away.Â
Please do not fall into the trap that I did. When the Dean of Admission called me and told me that I was being given a HUGE scholarship to one of the best law schools in the nation, she said “this is a BIG deal; no one was calling me and offering me this much money when I went to law school!” and “you have to stay in this top percentage of your class, but you did so well in undergrad, we don’t think you’re going to have any problem with that!”
And I believed her. Blindly. This woman who I had never met, who was southern and sounded so sweet on the phone. I liked her instantly. The thought that she was about to royally screw me over was the furthest thing from my mind.Â
I had plenty of generous scholarship offers, yet I chose the one offer that was contingent on my performance. My excuse: I had no idea that it was a bad deal, or that I could negotiate. Now my only prayer is that I get in-state residency so that I can stay in law school. If I don’t get it, I will have to either drop out or transfer, which is so sad considering that this time last year, law schools were competing over me, offering me ridiculous amounts of money to attend their respective schools.Â
So PLEASE. Learn from my mistakes. If a school offers you a scholarship that is wonderful, but then tells you that you have to maintain a certain GPA or be in a certain percentage of the class to keep it, DO NOT TAKE IT. You’ll want to at the VERY LEAST negotiate the contingency down (top 60% instead of 40%, keep a 2.3 instead of a 2.8, etc). If you can, negotiate the contingency away completely. I promise, you won’t regret it.Â
Also, look at the school’s scholarship retention information. The ABA requires all law schools to provide this information. If a school has a high number of people who either lose completely or get their scholarships reduced, that is a HUGE red flag. Do not ignore it. Do not think that it won’t happen to you because you’re smart. Because everyone is smart. And it most certainly can.
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