You know, the results of this poll don't really surprise me at all. The T14 defintiely affords its graduates certain opportunities (placement, prestige, etc) that many other solid schools in the T30 could never really provide. The thing that has always bothered me to no end on this site, though, is how many posters blithely treat the T14 as a sure way to success. No matter how you look at choosing a law school, I have always viewed it as an investment, and like any investment, there is some level of risk. Many posters in this thread, I think, view it this way and have taken a calculated risk (whether it's T14, T30, etc), which is the way it should be. It's a shame that more TLS posters elsewhere, however, don't see it like this and will probably end up learning the hard way when it comes to paying off those loans. Nothing like paying off a mortgage without getting a house, right?

You can be confident that if you are getting half tuition somewhere you'll be in the top 25%. Full tuition top 10%. After all, anyone with less money than you are getting is dumber.

No.

ftfy

credited

One problem with this question is that the incentive for a T30 involves money. UW (My choice for a T30 school) is already half off (18k tuition for in-state). What's really important here, money or prestige and opportunity?
If you could guarantee me a good job (not necessarily a big law job, but it would be fun to have the option of a clerkship or to be a state prosecutor, etc.) in Seattle coming out of UW, I'd say sure, I'd love to go to UW. However, for someone who doesn't know what he wants to do or where he wants to live, a t-14 school is obviously the best and safest choice, simply because it opens so many doors.

Doors to the mortgage office, doors to compulsive freecreditreport.com checking, doors to the judge's chambers in bankruptcy court...

I see where you're goin with this.

This hypo is boring. T6 full ride or engaged to Jessica Biel? T3 full ride or the ability to fly (If Harvard assume that you can fly but have terrible flatulence whenever airborne)?

The latter in both. Of course. Anyone who chooses the JD is a moron.

Are we assuming the terrible flatulence is the source of the ability to fly in this hypo?

do i have to sign a pre-nuptial?

The bolded is completely untrue. Nowadays your options for where you want to work will be limited to where you lived prior to attending law school (assuming you have family and other ties there). Firms really hit hard about ties and even having friends and/or family in a certain city (along with having been there) isn't enough -- you pretty much need to have stayed/lived there for a substantial period of time & be able to give them strong reasons for why you would like to return there in order for a firm to feel that you have ties to that market (and without ties you pretty much have no shot whatsoever at working there).

Okay, this is just ridiculously stupid. Firms won't hire anyone unless those folks have lived in that city? So it's better to go to Fordham than Yale because if you go to Fordham you've lived in NYC for 3 years and if you went to Yale there's shit for a law market there and you're hosed if you didn't come from a large BigLaw market?

If anything I'd say the opposite is true--people at T14s are scattering to wherever the jobs are. I've heard from 3Ls here grabbing whatever job offers they can get, in Atlanta, Dallas, wherever they can find work. Since it's harder to find jobs people are looking into markets they wouldn't have personally considered before in order to get employed. It is a help to have lived in a place already, I'm sure, but there's nothing at all I've heard up until now to indicate it's required.

On the other hand, if you have lived in a place and want to return there to work, a T14 degree is still going to be better for you than a degree from your local T30.

Did you even read the post I was responding to? The point was that you aren't going to just have options nationally just because you go to a national school (at least not ITE).

Your point about attending a law school just to live in the city for 3 years really doesn't work either. From what I got out of OCI, living in a state while attending law school there for 3 years doesn't count as a tie (unless you lived there prior to attending law school). I really only did 3-5 OCI interviews (plus a few non-OCI interviews) with firms from the state I'm in just as a back-up, but they hit hard with the questions (and I lived in this state the past 10 months prior to that!). The questions ran from "well, why X state? (my answer- well, I like it here and have friends here) followed by- well, why did you choose X state to attend law school (my answer- well, I attended undergrad here and liked it), followed by- well, do you have family here (personally, I felt this was the biggest bullshit question considering my parents are the only family I have in the country limiting me to 1 market for the large number of firms that asked this -- which is fine in the sense that I want to go back there, but it really limited my scope in the event that didn't work out)? Then one firm went as far as to ask- "well, so you're really looking to go back to the state you are from, but are interested in working here if you can't find anything there" even though I gave them no indication of that whatsoever.

I think what it comes down to is that firms this year have people that are from the city they are applying to and it is easier for them to hire that person then someone who never lived there (or stayed there for a substantial period of time) because they have a lot less to worry about people just coming in to do a summer associateship and then bailing next year when/if things are better and can go to another city. This is particularly true in secondary markets.

Here is a scenario not a lot of you gave much thought to:

I take the t14 sticker price over the t30.

BUT this time lets assume:

I am in the bottom 40% of the class. My classmates worked harder, smarter, i fucked up, etc etc.

Now what?

You cannot assume you will be ABOVE the median going in. SOMEONE has got to be BELOW the median and it might be you.

Now do the thinking from there.

And my point was that, even though it's harder to find jobs in general, you are going to have options nationally if you're going to a T14.



Oh, I see. You're talking about summer jobs. That's a whole different ballgame.

Of course firms don't want people for summer jobs they don't think will work there when they graduate, since summer job programs are so expensive and largely unproductive for firms except as a way to entice students to work there. Unfortunately summer programs are getting slaughtered as cost-saving measures at a lot of firms as they realize how much they cost and how they benefit 2Ls a lot more than they benefit firms.

With summer job programs all dried up, competition is fierce for them and things like local interest are going to become a factor. However, firms that have suspended summer associate programs are still hiring 3Ls, especially since there are so many 3Ls without job offers/commitments lined up yet. If this keeps up it could be the demise of the summer associate model for law firm hiring, as firms don't need the costly programs to recruit grads anymore.

Then you'll likely end up in the bottom half of your class in the T30 also. If you screwed up at one you probably would've screwed up at the other. However, you're not that much better off financially if you went to the T30. Having to take out loans to cover both the remaining half of tuition and your living expenses for 3 years, at the T30 you'll still be over $100K deep in debt. Plus you'll have a T30 degree instead of a T14 degree, so you don't even have a prestigious degree to your name after all that work and debt.

This is actually something I considered and a reason I've been advocating the T14 degree. You're still six figures deep in debt no matter which way you go. If you're not prepared to go into a hole deep enough for a T14 at sticker, you're honestly probably not prepared to attend the T30 at half-tuition either.

For large law firms this is completely untrue. They hire almost exclusively from the 2L class and the 3L job market is virtually non-existent. While some large firms do hire 3Ls, it is a very, very small number of 3Ls, and you can pretty much guarantee you won't get one of those positions if you didn't do a summer associateship during your 2nd summer. Just think about it-- why do you think so many people are freaking out about 2L OCI? If they could easily find jobs in biglaw next year it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but when it means being locked out of biglaw forever and potentially leaving law school working in shitlaw for $45K /year with $200K in debt from attending a t14 is another story (not to mention being locked out of all the firms/agencies that only hire people that worked in biglaw). It's kinda of scary to look back and think of all this, but essentially the 6-8 exams you take your 1st year, and the 2 days of OCI (it's about 4-5, but almost all the firms come on 2 of those days) essentially decide whether you will be paying off your student loans for the next 4-5 years vs. 20-30 years, and a lot of the doors that will be open or closed to you in your life (there are exceptions of course, such as people that do make it big in shitlaw).

That's the way it always was in the past, but are you sure that's the way it still is now? Quite a few firms don't even have summer associate programs right now, they've suspended theirs. There are a lot of 3Ls looking for jobs now and at least some of them are slowly finding work throughout the school year by applying outside of OCI all over the place. Whether or not things will go back to the way they were is an open question, but for now it's clear that things are behaving a lot differently at the moment than they used to.

According to 3Ls at my school, average was 0-1 OCI interview. Not having a summer associteship program this summer definitely does NOT mean hiring 3Ls instead (the reason they aren't having a summer program is because they already over-hired, they don't need to hire more now). The summer associateship program from the standpoint of firms is great because they avoid a lot of risk. They essentially get to try someone out for 10 weeks before they buy them... Think about it, if they think you don't' fit their firm after 10 weeks, then they just don't give you an offer. On the other hand, if they full blown hire you as a 1st year associate, then they are out of a lot more money by the time they fire you (a lot more then just 10 weeks).

Judicial clerkships are always alternative route into biglaw. However, those jobs are going to be unreal in terms of competitiveness this next year because literally everyone is going to apply for them. It's pretty much the back-up plan for literally over 50% of people at t14s that got shut out of OCI, and the other 50% that did get summer associateships because they are afraid of getting no-offered or deferred after the summer (because clerkship applications need to go out well before the end of the summer).

Just wanted to point out that both of you are on the same page.