I'll be withdrawing on Monday, so a spot will open up. No scholarship money though.

Still appreciated:-)

I was in a similar situation before I came to Iowa. Thing is law school will always be here and turning down work experience; along with the chance to get a free MBA is tough to turn down. In fact, your application will be even stronger if you were to apply again in 2-3 years. Talk to Dean Byrd in admissions and he will be straightforward with you with his recommendations. Plus it will be a plus when you start interviewing with law firms to show off your MBA and the relevant work experience. Just my advice but good luck whichever you choose.

At some point you don't need anymore degrees. Unless you have an unyielding urge to practice as an attorney or plan on working where you'll need a JD and an MBA I would go with the free degree and move on. Eventually it's not about what you know, or how many degrees you have, but how you apply what you do already know.

I graduated in 07, so I've already had 5 years of work experience. I figure even if I can't get a good job with a JD right away, I can go back to making $50k at a similar job to what I have been doing. The company I work for does care a lot about degrees, but they are primarily concerned with PHDs. You hit a ceiling pretty early without one. An MBA would help a little, but not that much. I will likely do a joint MBA at Iowa, so at most I'm out 3 years salary. The free tuition offer probably won't happen again, so I'm going to go for it. For me, the pros outweigh the cons.

Just beware of the TTT stip's on Iowa's scholarships.

Third tier schools don't have stips from what I understand.

But, yeah, pay attention to the stips. Top 1/3 isn't as easy as it may appear.

This. But also that grading for some courses seems completely random.

Yeah that's kind of true. Two of my buddies that I would have bet money on being A's in Con Law got median grades.

That is an important point for anyone coming in with full rides. Law school is nothing like other graduate schools or undergraduate programs. You will be surrounding by students that are just as smart if not smarter than you and all grades are curved. When you go into a final it is not about who knows the material better: everyone knows the material. The top grades will be those who can a) frame the better arguments concisely and clearly; b) come up with the more intricate issues; and most importantly c) what the professor is specifically looking for in answer/writing style.

My goal is not to scare everyone, but bring a little bit more clarity to your scholarships. I think the stats are (Tyler you know more about this than I do) 60-70% enter 1L with a scholarship of some sort. By the end of the first year at least 50% will have lost them. Now having said this Iowa does have one of the lowest in state tuitions of the top 30 law schools. It is also easy to get in-state tuition after your first year by getting a RA job with a professor. This makes Iowa Law one of the more affordable law degrees.

To be honest, if I can't stay in the top 3rd maybe law school isn't the right fit for me. I will decide after my first year. I make decent money at my current job, and have some room to grow. It's not something that I'm super passionate about and that's why I'm looking into law. It's also something that I could use if I ever decide I want to take over our family farm.

I am looking for places now. Is there anybody on here who's attending this fall who doesn't have a place lined up yet? I'm looking for one roommate, so if anybody is interested please PM me. I'm 26, married (although wife is staying in Des Moines), and will be focusing on school but still want to have some fun. I'll be emailing some of the people on the university list of people looking for roommates as well.

New post for me on this thread. Just finishing 3rd year UG and will take LSAT in October and apply for 2013. I live in Iowa and I am a scholarship basketball player (D2). Basketball takes up alot of my time so I will have few softs (club, academic fraternity, volunteer, academic awards and that's about it). I am not saving the world in the summer. I am working, working out and prepping for LSAT this summer. I currently have a 3.95 GPA, accounting major. Now to my question. What will I need to score on my LSAT to get accepted and get decent scholarship money? I have done the law school predictor and numbers website but not sure how the scholarships work. Thanks in advance.

If you are an Iowa resident, I would say at minimum to be accepted a 157-158. For a scholarship, I believe if you are above 160 you have a good shot. Again it goes a long way if you are an Iowan resident. I can say this score a 165 or higher and you are golden.

Thanks. I am an Iowa resident and look forward to this process and dread it at the same time. I have not visited the College of Law yet but look forward to touring this summer. I am dreading the LSAT though....

Won't sugar coat it...the LSAT sucks. Take a couple of practice tests to start off, but I would also highly recommend taking a Kaplan test prep course. There are quite a bit of nuances to the exam that Kaplan will show you. I will be in Iowa City this summer so let me know if I can help with anything if you do come to visit.

In full disclosure, I believe the consensus on TLS is that Kaplan is worse than Powerscore/Testmasters

Oh come on, the LSAT wasn't that bad. I'd rather take the LSAT 4 times each semester rather than finals... Haha.

Powerscore is the best if you are studying on your own or can find a Powerscore class you can attend. Kaplan is fine though - I only used one Kaplan prep book and bought old tests to practice with on Amazon. However, if you take a couple tests and are testing below 165 - I'd say look at Powerscore instead.

I mean this to be helpful, but I think there are some red flags in this post. First, the notion that "if [you] can't stay in the top 3rd maybe law school isn't the right fit for [you]." I don't imagine anyone actually in law school supporting the claim that grades have anything to do with how much you will like practicing law. I am sure there are students in the top 10% who will hate practicing law and eventually leave the field and students in the bottom third who will like it and make good careers out of it. Not sure what you're getting at with the fit/grades correlation here.

Second, law school as a backup to a job that is "not something [you] are super passionate about" is a red flag. I couldn't in clear conscience tell anyone to go to law school as some kind of default fallback plan. I think a law student should have some kind of affirmative desire to attend law school and practice law. You're going to spend 40-70 hours a week studying one subject. You're going to have to want to do it at least a little bit or you'll be completely miserable in law school and beyond.

Third, law school as something you could "use" in running the family farm is misguided. Other than a very basic understanding of property law, you won't get much practical info about operating a farm out of law school. Put it this way: all of the relevant information you learn in three years of law school regarding farm ownership, you could learn in a month or two of reading things on the internet/from a few books. Law school doesn't teach a lot of practical knowledge; you mostly learn that on the job after school.

Fourth, a $50k job might not be a legit fallback plan for leaving law school. Even with a scholarship, you may take on significant debt (assuming no other person is supporting you) for living expenses. This will have two effects. It will create "sunk costs" and a psychological barrier to you leaving law school, especially combined with the year minimum that you'll plan to invest. It will also create debt that you have to pay back if you go back to a $50k job. Combine those two, and just know that up and leaving law school isn't going to be an easy choice. It's a lot more likely that you won't quite know what to think and what to do. You might not know much better after a year than you do now, so I'd have a pretty good idea of your goals before you matriculate.

I completely agree with this post. If you're not sure you want to go to law school, and are happy with the career you're in (although not passionate about it) then stay until you're 100% sure you have another path you want to go down.

Grades REALLY don't have anything to do with how you'll do as a lawyer. Even though you may be bottom half, struggle to get a job, and make a low salary when you do find one - The lawyers who are good and like what they do will still have a good career out of it when looking long-term.

I'm married and my wife has a pretty decent job. I doubt I'll have to take out loans for living costs. I can drop out of law school after a year and find another job making 50-60k pretty quick. I've made the choice to attend law school, but I also know that I've got other options if it doesn't work out.

I know grades don't necessarily equate to the caliber of lawyer one will be, but it does correlate to how much I can make out of law school. If I'm in the bottom half of my class, it likely means I will at least start out making significantly less that what I could just using my undergrad degree and experience. Money isn't everything and I need to like what I do, but I think I'll have a hard time liking it if I can't make a comfortable living.

I had a job in Iowa before law school that paid well, toward the high end of your range. The problem was that I had no long-term interest in it. Besides, it's a lot harder in most non-professional fields to make a lot of money. I was in line for a promotion within a year or so to high 60's/low 70's, then it would probably be at least 3-5 years to a position making $85k, then past that the top person in my field for that employer made ~$110k and that was years down the line. Not bad money for Iowa, sure, but the job was easy and unexciting, and the law firm offers I have in Iowa pass up that high end number within a few years.

In other words, starting pay is just one small element of your career and your earnings potential in a given field. But really, this should ultimately come down to whether or not you really want to practice law.

The problem with legal wages are that they are being driven down by the sheer number of lawyers and also by the ability of lawyers and firms to pump out more work thanks to technology. I wouldn't go into law thinking you're going to be just bathing in money. Sure if you work hard you can make six figures. However, if you want to make anything beyond low six you really need to be in business or a highly lucrative small botique litigation firm or a senior partner at a mega firm. The easiest route of all these is probably going the business route but that's just my assessment. I know lawyers and business people who both make seven figures and it is a lot harder to corner the market in law than it is for something in business and the number of lawyers making over 500k / 1mil has really dropped off in my view. The death of the yellow pages, rise of the internet, and law firms on nearly every street corner has a lot to do with this. The work is spread around a lot more these days than 25-15 years ago because the barrier to entry into the market is so low. See TED Entrepreneurship speech from this year.

Can you link the TED talk you're referring to?

The gist of it is that barrier to entry into business of every kind is at a historical low and will continue on that trend. Information is more readily available than ever before so business models built on privilege of information are being deconstructed. See legal profession. 40 years ago a business might have needed to visit a lawyer to answer a legal question, now they can just google for an answer and find it without paying an artificially inflated billable hour.

I can provide a detailed analysis of the business models of big law firms etc if you would like to make sense of all of this for everyone's benefit.

I was wait-listed for Iowa and have not heard anything back yet. I sent in a letter of intent, but am still waiting to hear news. Has anyone gotten in off the wait-list yet?