Top Law Schools

I was accepted to CLS ED and plan to apply for financial aid as usual (fafsa blah blah) - any advice on how to increase chances of receiving scholarship money?

From what I understand, you're pretty boned for merit aid. They know you're not going anywhere else this year, they're going to use that money to snag students with options.

If you wanted merit money you shouldn't have applied ED, that's pretty much out. As for Need Aid, its generally not super helpful even if you're in abject poverty, but it should be unaffected by ED so no change.

Your only real hope is to just continue pestering the financial aid people for some sort of scholarship and hope that you annoy them enough that they give you some money to stop bothering them.

For everyone reading this thread, this is a classic example of why you don't ED unless you're comfortable/happy paying full sticker price. Especially somewhere like Columbia that is known for not having an ED boost

I applied ED at another t-14 and managed to negotiate an increase (they had already offered me aid to begin with). I just said how much I still wanted to attend school x, but that even with their generous scholarship offer I still didn't feel comfortable with the debt load and that I might have to withdraw.

This will likely only work at the end of the cycle, when they want to wrap up who is coming.

TFALAWL wrote:I applied ED at another t-14 and managed to negotiate an increase (they had already offered me aid to begin with). I just said how much I still wanted to attend school x, but that even with their generous scholarship offer I still didn't feel comfortable with the debt load and that I might have to withdraw.

This will likely only work at the end of the cycle, when they want to wrap up who is coming.

Need aid or merit aid?