I really don't get this mentality among OLs. Law school at any T14 will likely be the most work you will probably have to put in in your life so far unless you did undergrad at MIT or majored in engineering at another top school. Grades still matter at Boalt since it does curve to P/H/HH; you probably need at least some Hs to have a remote shot at biglaw, and probably need Hs and HHs to have a decent shot at certain biglaw jobs, and you probably need all Hs and HHs (predominantly HHs) to have a shot at clerkships. Law school isn't a joke at any T14 unless you don't care about having a job post-graduation. I don't get why some OLs expect to "cruise" in law school and expect a decent job. (This might only work at HYS, and even then Harvard used to sub-P.) I just really find it amusing what some 0Ls think - You guys have no idea the amount of hours that some of your future classmates will put in during law school and you will be competing against these people on a curve.

yeah but you guys are missing that incredible invention - ZipCar

for $7/hr you can do anything you want.

that said, I live in sf, have a car and am not planning on giving it up anytime soon.

You don't understand postit...I majored in Philosophy and got mostly A's...top 10% material right here

I understand your general drift; that said, I do think you're misunderstanding Berk's grading system. There's no bell-curve, it's more like 3 downward steps. 60% of the class gets Ps, so you're not really competing against a median.

I'm gonna agree with both sides of the debate, here's what I believe:

Yes, Boalt is competitive and yes you definitely will not cruise and accepts all Ps, the only people who do this are people who don't want BigLaw. There's no cruising as you guys correctly point out it's a competitive process.

Where you guys are out of your minds is that law school, like every other aspect of your life is overblown in terms of workload. Until a month before finals, law school is basically a 40 hour a week job, at least it was for me. It was a full-time gig but it by no means ran my life. You have plenty of time to do other stuff, but no its not like undergrad where you can spend an entire day playing call of duty in your boxers after a huge hangover. Law just takes prioritization of making free time count, but don't buy into the hype that you spend 80 hours a week on work, thats just plain bullshit, 30-40 hrs of work a week and you are plenty competitive.

Just 1ls 2 cents

You're right, and you studied two whole days before finals too. You're definitely going to graduate magna cum laude!



I knew this beforehand, considering no T14 has a real bell curve. It's 60% Ps. (There are sub-Ps but those are rarely given out.) 30% Hs and 10% HHs. You are competing against the 60th percentile, not the median.

I never mentioned 80 hour weeks, although there are some who study that much and many of them make top 10% grades in law school. If you put in 30-40 hours you probably won't get any HHs. I went to a top 15 undergrad and put in less than 5 hours of studying time weekly majoring in a science and graduated cum laude. For liberal arts classes I put in probably 2-4 days worth of work in a semester right before finals and did better than I did in science classes because they were so easy and not curved. 30-40 hours a week is a lot of work for many straight out of undergrad like me who didn't really do much work in undergrad. My first semester of law school I put in MUCH MUCH MORE HOURS than I did in undergrad and made only slightly above median grades. I actually read every single thing assigned, which I never did in undergrad. People just work a lot harder in law school and no matter what T-14 you attend there are people who put in 10-12 hours everyday on just studying. (These people generally do really well unless they are slow typists.)

Me =

OP, it sounds like you're in a committed relationship, and I think this advice is terrible. There are things that are just as/more important than law school. I will also likely be choosing between NYU and Berkeley for environmental law, and my partner is going to be a big part of that decision. Both of them are amazing schools, and if your SO's residency in New York won't be great for her, then I think you should just go with Berkeley. If you look at the staff profiles of environmental nonprofits around the country, you'll see that most of them have both NYU and Berkeley grads, and this is true for government jobs as well. Good luck!

the difference between NYU and Berkeley is not significant, in fact its quite minimal. the differences between the residencies apparently are quite significant. use common sense.

I don't know anyone for sure who puts in 10-12 hours a day. If you were even to ask me to do that, I wouldn't even be able to come up with enough stuff to do. There's only so many things to learn and then it's your application and reasoning skills. Maybe your school is just tougher, which could be completely possible...

This person is in the top 1% of the class, if not top 0.1%. This person got the equivalent of all HHs, in every single class ever taken in law school. The vast majority of people don't put in that many hours, but most at the very tippy top put in a lot of work (i.e. people who qualify for clerkships). You should wait for your first grades to see what you get. There's always "more to do" if you really want to (i.e. more supplements, practice problems) and this person probably utilized a ton of additional materials. Part of your grades depends on various other, somewhat irrelevant factors though, including typing speed/ability, etc.

I know one person who pulled all HHs and one H at Berkeley in his 1L courses last year, and he ended up transferring to Yale. He was amazing.

I've got a friend who is a 2L at NYU and he has always approached law school as a 40 hour/week job. He is on law review and in the top 5 percent of his class. He takes weekends off to come out to California for homecoming, football games, a beer pong tournament, etc. People in law school can work hard, do well and have a life at the same time. It's not impossible.

Since others have already addressed the car issue, I'll just comment on the financial aid stuff. The law school is basically independent of the main campus at this point. Consequently, there will likely be no effect on the law school as a result of what the main campus has to do. Financial aid goes down for students in years two and three because their financial need goes down. They pay resident tuition rates, and if they take a job their 2L summer, they make $30K. So, they don't need as much as 1L. As far as the financial aid comparison with NYU, NYU and Columbia are both very stingy in the aid department. I had this choice to make as well. I liked NYU very much, but I liked Berkeley better and it was a better situation for me personally. I love living here and have no regrets.

What berkeley does with tuition/aid seems really crappy. On the one hand, in-state tuition goes up. On the other, your aid goes down. It sounds like you can really only count on what you will be paying year one, and after that you can't count on anything at all. This seems like a major downside that other schools don't have.

Yes, but you say this as if aid goes down and nothing else changes. As a 2L and 3L, as Doomswitched pointed out, you are likely to qualify for in-state (read: cheaper!) tuition. You are also likely to generate some extra money with good summer positions (though this is less likely right now than it was 3-5 years ago, but is still a factor to be considered).

This is the best perspective I have seen yet on the tuition hikes at Cal:

we put berkeley first

That's great. If I were to choose berkeley, as an in-state resident, considering financial aid offered, over a school like Columbia with a substantial scholarship because they end up costing the same or because Berkeley is cheaper, it is not going to comfort me that Berkeley unilaterally changes my cost of attendance to maintain status quo. I'd sure as hell be thinking I should have chose Columbia, NYU, Chicago, or really any other school that is objectively better, that guarantees your grant/scholarship package, and doesn't raise your tuition by more than 30% over two years.

I went to a UC for undergrad precisely because of the cost over some top-ranked private institutions, and I passed up on scholarships to some of those schools. Tuition has doubled since I started UG. You can't count on any cost of attendance calculation with the UC's, and anyone contemplating attending should expect to pay full private school tuition for 2L and 3L, plus about 10% each year.

To be fair NYU isn't objectively better than Berkeley at all, but I see where you are coming from with your overall point.

Thanks. You can presume they are equal, and the same point could be made, especially if one of the peer schools gives some $$$. These decisions aren't easy to make, and changing the cost of attendance substantially is something I am no more comfortable with than if my school's reputation falls dramatically. And I don't want to invest in something that volatile and unreliable. That's a dealbreaka, ladies.

You appear to be assuming that what happens on the main campus is the same as what happens at the law school. The tuition increases for us are not unexpected. They are part of a five year plan that Dean Edley announced several years back to bring Berkeley to slightly less than peer tuition rates. Thus, it is highly unlikely that 2Ls and 3Ls will pay 10% over private tuition rates. Every school raises tuition every year. I also find nothing unreliable about need based aid being based on need.

I am talking about in-state tuition increases. There was no indication of the rise in that several years back, at least to the extent it did basically almost completely eradicate the notion of in-state tuition. They basically screwed people who made their decisions based on in-state tuition over scholarships at other schools. All I'm saying is that I fully expect them to continue to do it (and maybe even more so than they've projected), so you can't really accurately project your cost of attendance for IN-STATE. This applies to out-of-staters expecting to gain in-state status as well.

The 10% figure is just there for completeness, not because other schools don't increase tuition a little each year.

Also, all schools don't adjust need-aid year to year. My understanding is that you get a package laying out your aid for all three years, and you know you can count on that. Tuition may go up a few percent each year, but not the craziness that has happened to in-state tuition at the UCs.

The obvious solution is, if you are going to attend berkeley, you take into account in-state tuition for the first year and your aid for first year, but then presume you'll be paying out-of-state levels with no aid year 2 and 3.

Again, this was entirely expected at the law school. As you seem unwilling to believe what I tell you, here is a 2007 memo from Dean Edley explaining that this would happen. http://www.law.berkeley.edu/TuitionIncr ... lFinal.pdf


Correct, some schools give you a singular package that includes both merit and need. Columbia and NYU both do this and might offer you a 25K/37.5K/50K package. So for example, if you were to get the 25K package, your award would be 10K in year one, 10K in year two and 5K in year 3. So your point is not that need based aid being decided according to what you need each year is unreliable, but rather that you want to know your total cost out of pocket before choosing. Fair enough.


Again, this is not crazy at the law school, but I acknowledge that it was unexpected for undergrads.


I don't think you will continue to assert this if you read Dean Edley's memo and this more recent memo: http://www.box.net/shared/7ro2mj09c1

I think he was referring to the extent of the raise. There are no hard tuition numbers in that link. There was no indication that in-state tuition would be increased to such a high amount, essentially eradicating the difference between out-of-state tuition and in-state tuition. As for the tuition still being lower than peer schools, that's not true either. For example, this year's out-of-state and in-state fees are already higher than UVA's out-of-state fees and I can't see other schools increasing their tuition at a similarly rapid rate in the upcoming years.

The CA government is a mess, the Californian economy itself is a different matter. CA government has funding problems because it is poorly run (ie ballot initiatives run amock, illegal immigrants using govt services, unable to tax real estate well etc), if the CA economy tanked the US itself might tank.

go to Berkeley