Cornell c/o 2015 Applicants (2011-2012 cycle) Forum

[T00L]

FYI to those of you admitted early in the cycle with no scholarship offer:

"@7:00: Scholarships are used by law school admissions offices as recruiting tools. Every school has different renewal criteria. The law school where I work used to offer enormous scholarships (full tuition plus living stipends) that carried renewal standards that typically required people to be in the top 10% of the class. We've relaxed those standards a bit in recent years (and reduced the value of the scholarships accordingly).

Some schools offer scholarships with "good standing renewal" and some schools still have the high value scholarships with very high renewal standards, and some schools are in between.

What I'm hearing is that many schools, early on in the application cycle, made big scholarship offers to their applicants. Now those applicants are getting in off of the wait-lists at higher-ranked schools, so they're leaving their scholarships at the lower-ranked schools behind. Those lower-ranked schools are "recycling" these scholarship offers to new applicants or people on their wait-lists. It is possible that at some of these schools, there were admits in March/April who received no scholarships (because at the time the schools had extended as many offers as they could) and paid seat deposits, and now there are less qualified applicants receiving admission AND scholarship offers, because why would the admissions office go back and give a scholarship to someone who's already paid a seat deposit? (Not saying I agree with this thinking...just trying to explain the thinking.)

As Prof. Campos has pointed out in past entries, scholarships are essentially discounts off of sticker price for students with high LSAT scores. These scholarships are subsidized by the students with low LSAT scores. For the most part, the low LSAT students don't do as well in law school, either, so they end up saddled with debilitating debt and struggling to pass the bar exam and get a job. It is a perverse system."

.... aannnndd?

[kuddlykoala]

just got booted off the waitlist here and at duke. waiting for 3 others but guessing that law school isn't happening for me this year