Helping My Daughter ? [Northeastern, OSU, Villanova, American; Public Interest focus] Forum

[mjl7951]

First time post. Looking for some help. My daughter has worked very hard and has earned some full-tuition offers. Her top two choices appear to be Northeastern and Ohio State. With the Covid-19 crisis, we are not sure when/if we will be able to visit either before a decision must be made. She wants to do some sort of public interest/service law. Any thoughts or advice? Would it be awful to put a deposit at each and wait until things clear up to visit/decide? Villanova & American are also outside possibilities with full tuition scholarships. Thanks in advance!

Moderator note: Edited subject line (edits in [brackets]) to clarify the schools under consideration, which may help drive more responses. ~QContinuum

[cavalier1138]

The best thing you can do for your daughter is encourage her to do this work on her own. But if you insist on being her proxy, it would be helpful to know exactly how much debt she'd be taking on, where she wants to work, and if she has any particular goals within public interest.

[crazywafflez]

Agreed fully with the above poster. Go where you get a full ride, or the cheapest cost in general, in the location you want to practice. These are all basically regional schools. I wouldn't go to American though- DC is expensive and really competitive and American is the bottom of the pile for schools in the area, or darn near it. From what I've heard Northeastern does okay in Boston and the rest of New England. Villanova does fine in PA and has a decent sized market.

I like Ohio better than the other places and it's the best school in the state and has some reach into the Midwest in general.

Go where you want to live and is the cheapest option. These are all fairly comparable schools; and in my opinion American is the worst option and OSU would be the best.

I would make sure your daughter really wants to be an attorney and it is her decision to pursue this career path. It is a long slog, expensive, and the legal market is eh and not terribly portable either.

Best of luck.

[LSATWiz.com]

I disagree with Northeastern's placement in Boston. I think Villanova for Philly and Ohio State for Ohio make sense as these are respected in their home turf. Even with public interest, she's still dependent on locking down an LRAP job for a decade plus and there's no guarantee she'll get one so she probably also wants to keep her debt load low. I also don't think she should be looking at last year's placement stats to make her decision as like other industries, the legal economy is likely to be hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic. I'd caution her to only graduate from a school and with a debt load she'd have been comfortable graduating from during the last recession in 2008.

[nixy]

Northeastern has a lot of grads in local public defenders/DA's offices, and small-scale local government and the like, and I think it's reasonably respected in those contexts. I don't think it's going to get you into a lot of firms, and I haven't looked at the overall numbers so the other options may have better raw numbers, I don't know. I don't think Northeastern is bad for local small-scale public interest in Boston (depending on cost; if it's one of the full tuition options I don't think it's that bad). If public interest = something high profile like the ACLU/UN or the like, Northeastern probably won't get you there (but then none of these schools are likely to).