Scholarship Amounts Are Soaring

A Tale Of Two Law School Application Cycles

 
What is one of the biggest positives about applying to law school now? Schools are dishing out the money like never before. And schools are accepting students like they never have before. Don’t believe it? Derek Muller, a professor at Pepperdine Law offers proof on his blog, Excess of Democracy.
What exactly did he do?
“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,” Muller writes.
Just examining LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs obviously creates some limitations. After all, some law schools will look at the application in a more holistic way than others, but for these purposes, he considered the LSAT and the undergrad GPA scores to be the most objective and telling.
And what he found was shocking. Take for example an applicant with a 160 LSAT and about a 3.5 UPGA. According to Muller’s research, that was good enough to get rejected at School’s W, X, and Y and accepted at School Z in 2010-2011. However, in 2014-2015, that got the applicant waitlisted at School W, accepted and $30,000 for School X, and accepted and $102,000 at Schools Y and Z.
Here’s the graphics with the results:

To help control some of the outside factors, Muller avoided using anyone who identified as an under-represented minority or completed the early action application. The limitations to this study would be more of a concern if the numbers weren’t so drastically different. Not only do these results reflect a more forgiving admissions offices, they point to more drastically higher scholarship amounts the admissions offices have to throw around.
Yes, the job market is scary and despite huge scholarship dollars, tuition is largely still outlandish. Still, if you’re an average to elite law school applicant, it’s never been historically better to apply to law school in terms of getting accepted and scholarships.
Source: Excess of Democracy
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