How Law Schools Trick Students Into Massive Debt

Here is the reality. Too many law school have created a cost structure that results in tuition and fees (the cost of legal education) that is too high, unsustainable, and which financially endangers their graduate's futures.

We have to begin to say what is really true. Whether as a result of chasing rankings or whatever, law schoolmanagement and administrations have become so universally deceitful and disrespectful of their applicants, students and the trust expected them that it stands to endanger the success of their alumni in the future, if not the entire legal community as a whole.

It is such that most high scoring applicants, who might have choices, would not agree to attend but for these inducements provided.

These inducements come in the form of scholarships to those with high LSAT scores, because the law schools are after rankings. In other words, law schools with outrageous costs and tuition have to buy LSAT scores in order to maintain their rankings. Or, at least, they have to offer to do so, and they have to pretend they will continue with this commitment after the acceptance.

So, what law schools will do is offer merit scholarships to those with high scores in order to get them to bypass lower-cost institutions, and especially state-supported law schools.

I have seen it time and again. Many of those who are offered merit scholarships feel so proud that somebody has finally recognized their hard work, intellect and self-worth, that they fail to analyze not only what is offered, but the barriers to actually getting paid the money. It is strange since these students are seeking to be lawyers, but most law school applicants accept their seats and scholarship with the same abandon as they do in accepting the terms and conditions to use a free website or app.

These scholarships tend to be gaged by the law school just as the house determines actual payouts of slot machines in Vegas. Let us just say they payout is designed for the house to always win.

The problem is that most of these law schools either cannot afford, or do not intend to actually pay, all of these students this money offered. They avoid this by setting up barriers that prevent most student from continuing to receive the scholarships after a short time. This, of course, then requires the law student to pay the full tuition and fees, usually through obtaining huge student loans that must be paid back. These are debts which the law student never intended to incur in the first place, and they are so large they might have avoided the law school had they known.

This essentially acts to entrap law students at the law school, and to borrow all of the money necessary to pay the school. This is so because generally by the time the student realizes what has happened, it is too late to effectuate a transfer to a lower priced law school, or to achieve any scholarships from the lower priced law school even if they had thought ahead this far. There is also the cost of moving. Then, of course, after you have been at a law school for a while, it is simply impractical to change.

Do not think that law schools do not understand exactly what they are doing.

Recently, David Segal of The New York Times wrote an article that covered this issue, entitled Law Students Lose The Grant Game As Schools Win.

One way that the law schools do this is to offer outrageous amounts of money to smart kids, but otherwise restricting the actual payment of the money to the law student unless they maintain an "average GPA" in law school. The schools understand that law school applicants have no familiarity with law school grading and the applicants judge this requirement from their ability to maintain their undergraduateGPAs. But, it is not the same.

No judgment call on the part of the applicant or students is meaningful because law schools do not publish or provide law students any statistical analysis of how many students maintain the average grade threshold or, for that matter, what percentage of students who have been offered these scholarships have managed to retain them. I can assure you it is few.

Law schools also do not disclose at the stage of acceptance that the law schools often grade on a curse, and intentionally ration the As and Bs necessary students to continue with their scholarships.

In the meantime, to fund this mania, law schools are skimping on financial aid to law students that can least afford the tuition.

How do law school afford to pay for this slight of hand?

The answer is by wildly increasing tuition, hurting the students even more once they have to pay for what they thought was being offered to them as free or low cost.

As I have posted before, there is a problem with transparency, truth and veracity in our law schools in this country, and that is really the biggest problem. If law schools are conducting themselves in this way, then what lessons are they passing on to those that graduate from law school. That is okay to lie and deceive? That lies ofomission are acceptable? That the gotcha practice of law is endearing? That the ends justify the means? Is this really what we need as the basis of legal teaching in this country?

 

Comments

[Betty Burley]

Chuck, I've seen this under-handed tactic up close and personal. I applied at 4 law schools in NE Ohio. the first to accept my application offered me a full-tuition scholarship PLUS a $15K cash stipend for my first year. I sent in my seat deposit quickly only to be told that they had "run out" of scholarship money and that they would add my name to the list of people waiting for scholarship funds to become available. Within weeks, they "found" some more money, but I was disgusted.

My 2nd acceptance was from the school that I eventually attended. I was awarded a full-tuition scholarship there, and decided to forget the first school. It was a good decision.

The first school required a very high GPA (I think a 3.6) to maintain the scholarship. My school required a 3.2. Even with the lower benchmark, it was incredibly difficult to maintain my scholarship - although I did.

There were many classmates who were lured to law school with full-tuition scholarship and were not able to maintain them. I would call myself "lucky," but it was sheer determination to get through school without paying tuition that kept me tuition-free.

Having easily earned a 3.95 in undergraduate, I had no concept of what it took to maintain a 3.6 - or a 3.2, for that matter, in law school. I remember a conversation with a group of scholarship students during my 1L orientation talking about what a "low" benchmark 3.2 was to maintain full-tuition. Little did we know...

I have yet to see any statistic for the number of merit scholarship that are non-renewed. Are the numbers out there?

[Patrick H. Stiehm]

Chuck, your comments here are extremely harsh but I fear, oh so true. Though I have had a long and very satisfying career practicing law and still I still enjoy it immensely, I have actively discouraged any of my children from following suit. That is indeed a sad commentary on the state of our profession, at this particular time in history. In addition to the problems you outlined here, I find it particularly irksome that law school faculties these days are in my opinion over loaded, over paid, underworked and in many if not most cases lack the credentials necessary to teach law students how to practice law. If you look at the biographies of the typical faculty you find the faculties at many if not most major law schools are for the most part, people who had clerked for one or more appeals judges, written books and/or articles of no or marginal practical value, spend much of their time as "Visiting Professors" at various institutions, other than their home institution but who have little or no experience actually practicing law. It is, in my humble opinion, ridiculous.

[dave]

I would love a little home like this one

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in particular in times of "green movement"