Chick fila sauce. Sup.

I also like the Polynesian sauce. Wonder if they'll rename it like the girl scouts did.

[/quote]
That was my favorite before cfa came out.

Did we just become best friends?

Your children will always resent you for not securing legacy status for them.

Really, not Chipotle??

OP, I'm in a similar position and it depends on what you're planning right now.

• If you are planning on Big Law in the region of your school AND you want to start out with $150k essentially in the bank, go to CLS.
• Don't listen to posters who try to claim that HYS grads will earn back their loans and then make more than a CCN grad over a lifetime. It just isn't true and there is absolutely no data to support this. This probably applies for the T10 as well; the scholarships are almost always the better purely financial choice.

However, if...

• you say it's just money and some intangible aspect (including location, significant other, climate, program) is more important, go to YHS.
• you realize that even while paying off $150-200k of debt, you will still have a very comfortable salary (about $7k a month) AND there is some intangible about YHS that you want, go to YSH.
• If you are ABSOLUTELY serious about PI (not kind of thinking about it), consider HYS. LIPP/COAP/LRAP have you covered.

Keep in mind regarding LRAP, etc (double check this!):

• Stanford's LRAP does not cover low-paying private sector jobs. H and Y do.
• S and H require you to take a legal job. Y does not. You can completely jump ship on being a lawyer after graduation, and Y doesn't care.

I'd say if you are breaking some chain that would be long enough to basically guarantee your kid admission then yeah they could be a little bitter, but "I could have gone to Harvard but instead you get legacy status at Columbia" probably won't piss any kids off too much haha

I laughed really hard at ALL of this. . That's how much I laughed.

Let's start with the notion that the OP is choosing between Harvard and a "lesser school." It sounds like the "lesser" options are NYU, UChicago, and Columbia. For free. Believe it or not, I think it's very difficult to call any of these truly "lesser" than Harvard. What exactly is the "what if" scenario? If you're in the top quarter of your class at Chicago, Columbia, or NYU where you went for free and get a clerkship with a federal appellate court, you're going to ask yourself "what if?" If you're working at Davis Polk after graduating from one of these places for free, you're going to sit and ask "well what if I went to Harvard?" That's pretty fucking stupid.

Now let's tackle the "intangibles." This poster apparently likes lunch enough to pay $200,000 for it. Take heart, OP, for NYU and Columbia both share facilities with the Princeton Club. Chicago shares with Penn. You won't dine at the Harvard club, no, but you'll dine at the Princeton Club or the Penn Club. After having gone to law school for free at an extremely prestigious institution with a vast and excellent alumni network. If lunch is what this is about, the choice is Harvard Club for 200k or Princeton/Penn Club for free.

The "tangible" benefits are even more laughable. Let's take a look at just the incomplete Wikipedia sample of the alumni networks for these "lesser" schools:

Columbia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Co ... ool_alumni
Chicago - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University ... ool#Alumni
NYU - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NY ... ool_people

It does not appear to me that you are getting yourself into bad company by attending any of these places.

I turned down a major scholarship for my school, but if I were looking at a full ride to CCN I would have decided differently. I think that the more salient question you would be asking yourself down the line would be "what if I didn't spend $200,000 for absolutely no good reason?" Or "what if I could walk away from my firm job at any given time in fantastic financial shape to go do something else?" Those seem to be the kinds of questions that keep people up at night.

I do not regret my decision, but I most definitely would if one of CCN had put serious money on the table. Seeing things from the inside, I know that the gap just isn't all that wide once you hit a certain level. I promise you it's a better idea to go with the scholarship. Your doubts will disappear after you've been in law school for a while and see how your summer firm class shakes out.

Yes, and no.

Because of how a few personal things worked out, I'm less concerned about the $ than I was while deciding and the debt load will not be bad. However, I may have been happier and less stressed without the debt load, and I have no idea how to gauge whether or not my experience/future opportunities was "worth" the cash.

One thing to note is that the cutoffs you see people throwing around (ie - magna/LR at HLS for CoA, top 20% for DOJ honors, etc.) are not nearly as set in stone as folks here would make it seem. I think you have quite a bit of leeway at HLS with regard to grades (within reason) if you have other things going for you. So, the money may buy you an added bit of flexibility that you may not have at other schools (although I have no idea what hiring is like at other schools).

I agree, but my sense is that the same holds true for a lot of people at CCN. I worked at a top firm last summer, but it seemed like there was a lot more variety in terms of grades from all the top schools than you might expect looking at the numbers.

Oh I agree; I have no idea how things shake out at "lesser" schools, and given the razor-thin margin separating the quality of students (if it exists), it wouldn't make a whole lot of sense if cutoffs were really that much higher. One interesting thing is that our wonky grade distribution means that more than the top third at HLS can plausibly claim to be within the top third, etc., and nobody can really tell. That's worth something, but again, probably not 150 grand.

small nit, but I think legacy for Harvard College only counts for parents who attended Harvard College, not one of its gazillion grad/professional schools.

It isn't that hard to go to the Harvard Club (or Yale Club) in NYC. All you need are friends/family members who went there. Though I did go to a friend's Bar Mitzvah there, if you care about that, not sure if you have to be a Harvard Alum to hold a function there. So maybe, yeah, if you want to hold a function at the Harvard Club over all the other venues in NYC, go to Harvard.

Re:Legacy

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/ ... -legacies/

Hmm, I think the whole "Going to HYS will cost you 150k to 200k+" thing is overblown. Are some people graduating with that much debt? Yes definitely, but there are a whole lot of people who are much closer to around 100k.

Using my own example (H, but I'm guessing its similar at Y and S), I got much more financial grant aid then I would have expected based on my family's financial situation. In fact it comes out to be more than half of the 60k I was offered by Chicago.

Further, the Cost of Living amount is much higher than what you actually need. Choosing to live on campus/ or rooming with 2 or 3 people/ buying books on Amazon/ etc. will easily halve the amount they estimate.

Finally, though, there are a lot of opportunities to do interesting work while earning money at H. Research for professors, work for Harvard foundations or think tanks, Resident Assistant Positions, Teaching Fellow positions, Tutoring positions, etc. all can add up and/ or cover your cost of living (or more).

Bottom Line: With working a bit (sometimes to a part-time level, sometimes not + free housing from another position), sensible choices, and a bit of financial aid, I'll probably graduate with around 60k to 80k in loans. Also, while I almost definitely work more than the usual student at HLS, I basically have very little financial support from my parents which is not the case for most.

I think if I had the option of the Hamilton, I would have taken it. Otherwise, no - even as I face graduation and start to think about that big chunk of debt, I'm happy with the choice.

I didn't have any enticing money offers anywhere else (thus the life of being a baby splitter) so it was like "Hmm, full price at Harvard, or full-20K at Columbia...yeah Harvard" because I thought HLS was worth 20K more than CLS and I don't think that's a very controversial position (and they might've ended up being close to equal anyway since NYC's COL is higher, plus I like Boston more than NYC). That being said, I don't really understand why people turn down the Hamilton to go here at sticker, though many probably get decent financial aid here.

Good for you?

Eh just seems like every single post on TLS recently assumes HYS = 200k in loans

First thought - If they were next to each other, even as an HLS grad I would pick Chick-fil-a every time.

On a more serious note, my $ offers pretty much followed a predictable scale - $30-45k in CCN, $60-75k in MPV, and I did get a full tuition offer from a T14. I wound up turning that down for fiance related reasons, and it probably would have been a difficult decision if not for that factor. Harvard helped me out a bit with financial aid so I've not been having to borrow the full amount, though I'm gonna have quite a bit of debt when I graduate. If you factor in cost of living and a little left over from undergrad and the financial aid I got from Harvard, I probably would have had about $80k less debt from the full tuition scholarship.

As far as regret, no, not in the least. The payments are plenty manageable on a biglaw salary, and I've been really happy with everything else. Could I also have gotten a market job and had less debt? It's certainly possible, but it's also not insubstantially more possible that I would have struck out. If you do strike out, suddenly $80k looks like an awfully good deal to snag a big dollar job.

It is my personal opinion that assuming you will do well because you were good enough to get a big dollar scholarship is an absolutely horrible idea. When you figure that the difference between HYS and the T14 is a handful of LSAT questions along with GPA differences that may or may not mean anything, trying to predict you will do better in law school is a dangerous business. (With GPA there are a zillion confounding factors - what major? what school?) Law school is a different ball game, and a lot of the people you beat out in the admissions game with a high undergrad GPA have matured a lot since then.

It partly comes down to personalities. I'm fairly risk averse, and all things considered I had a fairly easy, not horribly stressful ride through 1L and EIP, which has been nice. I didn't have top of the class grades, and it didn't matter. Maybe at the end of my life I'll pull out my account books and say, "Darn, I possibly could have saved some money there." But I expect in fifty years I'll have bigger worries than that.

I received offers from two non-NYC markets where I didn't have ties. Granted, I was a transfer to H so I have no idea how I was viewed by these firms, but I think it's a bit of an overstatement to say that portability is mainly a myth.

Mike: Take the Hamilton. It's okay.

/CCN student.

Any final perspectives before I seal my envelope and drop it in the mailbox?

Take the money. You won't regret it.