Vandy vs. Belmont for Nashville career Forum

[objctnyrhnr]

I am not OP.

If people are super concerned about Biglaw - I agree Belmont may not be the way to go. You need to really excel to land that. However, plenty of my classmates have good job prospects. It's not some dead end school.

The sheer hostility towards the school is not warranted.

Based on prior years, 20-40% of your classmates do not have jobs as lawyers. Although Belmont's statistics show an upward trend over the past 4 years, it's not clear whether that's going to stick, especially since we don't know what effect the pandemic will have on hiring.

And when it comes to being "concerned about biglaw," the real concern is debt vs. likely income. The OP was considering Belmont at a full ride, which is the only acceptable cost. Everyone in your class who did not land a job at a large firm will likely be incapable of paying off their debt load unless they had a full ride. Belmont charges almost $50k a year in tuition alone, and it does not offer its graduates any realistic path to paying off that bill. Since about 50% of the class pays sticker, it seems like a much larger number of your classmates will be relying on IBR/PAYE and long-term forgiveness programs than will be going into jobs that allow them to service their debt.

But most importantly, this thread was about comparing Belmont to Vanderbilt, and there is no comparison in outcomes.

Cav said it quite well but I’ll try to add to the point anyway at the risk of redundancy.

Lkoy, this isn’t about a bunch of anonymous posters in an online forum having some opinion about Belmont that could be countered with (“well the professors were really informative and I learned a lot and people had good experiences at the school”). This isn’t UG. That’s not what it’s about.

Whether a school is legitimate, ie not a total trap in the vast majority of scenarios, is purely an objective inquiry. If schools’ tuition correlated directly with their job prospects, it might be different...but they do not.

Students pay like 40-50k a year with no scholly. Let’s even assume a half scholly for the sake of argument. When you look at that kind of debt coming out, you need to compare it to the objective data about possible employment outcomes. The key question is “will this school give me a good shot at servicing my debt, such that i won’t be making a poor financial life decision that I can’t take back.” The answer is no. Unfortunately, biglaw and mayyyyybe a bit of midlaw is the only outcome that can effectively service the kind of debt one takes out for law school. Only 1.2% of Belmont grads land biglaw. That means almost 99% of grads are unlikely to get a worthwhile return on their investment (and if you factor in opportunity cost of no income for 3+ years, the analysis skews even further against the school).

Even if you assume that some people got very significant rides and some people have rich parents and some people are going to try to do PI for 10 years and get it all forgiven and some of these mid law/regional firm outcomes would suffice, you’re still looking at a situation where it doesn’t make sense to go to this school for like 3/4 of the people who decide to go there every single year.

And to be clear this isn’t Belmont specific. The same thing can be said about at least half of the law schools that exist. The numbers are all out there—tuition, interest in loans, and job prospects. All that people need to do is to go look at them.

[pizzagoblin]

Vandy Law alumna here. If you want to work in Nashville, the CLEAR choice is Vandy. And even with a Vandy degree, it'll be relatively competitive to get a job in Nashville. It's such a small market, and so many people want to stay in the city. Most of my classmates who stayed in Nashville were either Nashville natives or they went to a smaller firm.