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DO NOT DO THIS. I almost did and in hindsight it would have been the worst decision of my life. You will get absolutely nothing for financial aid most likely because they have no incentive to try and sway you since you are already committed. The cons are you will pay an absurd amount of money to attend and you lose the opportunity to get massive scholarships elsewhere in the T14 or even T6. I know you are probably dead set on Columbia right now and they may not change, but speaking from personal experience I ended up choosing a school I never thought I would ever consider due to $ and having a positive experience when visiting. I think it is a very poor decision to bind yourself when your opinion may change. Especially, if a peer school ends up offering 100,000 or more in cash your attitude will most certainly change. Columbia is an absolutely outstanding school, but sticker price is rather absurd. The pros would be you have a better chance at getting in (slightly).

parkcity wrote:What are the pros/cons? I am 90% committed as of now but there's very little information I am finding online on the real numbers (financial aid etc.). Would appreciate all help and advice from current students. Thanks so much in advance, guys.

Why are you so committed to Columbia? It's obviously a great school, but if you want to work in NYC you can always apply to NYU, which has slightly easier admission standards, and other T14 schools that place well in New York. If you have the stats to get into Columbia, you would probably get major financial aid from those schools.

This is a truly terrible idea. 300k in debt is ridiculous.

Apply broadly, take the best offer you get.

I go to CLS and even I think this is a terrible idea. CLS is awesome, but it's not worth sticker.

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parkcity wrote:Thanks for all the responses. I used to work as a paralegal at a law firm in midtown and most of my colleagues were Columbia graduates so I've been a fan since then. I also know someone who is a part time professor there and really look up to him. From a lifestyle perspective as well, I think it's just that I want to build connections in the NYC area because I want to work there after I graduate, and I just think the school fits my personality well.

I imagine prestige-whoring figures rather prominently into your calculus as well. That plus the above are possibly factors (though weak ones) that favor giving the nod to Columbia over another school that offers you a roughly equivalent value in terms of employment placement versus debt. But these are absolutely terrible reasons to bind yourself to attending CLS at sticker while potentially sacrificing -- depending upon the GPA that accompanies that 176 -- up to $225K in reduced debt at another T14 for only marginally weaker average placement power. (Edit: Okay, now I see that you're taking the LSAT next month for the first time and have deleted the claimed 176.)

Being a devoted "fan" of any particular law school at this point is irrational. For someone seeking BigLaw, there is no meaningful difference between the academic experiences you would have at any T14. Law school is not about the educational experience. It's really little more than a credentialing mechanism with an obscene sticker price. Knowing a part-time professor receives no weight in a rational economic analysis. Nor does the opportunity to "build connections" for someone targeting BigLaw in NYC, for which "connections" are meaningless for people just coming out of law school. Whatever "connections" you imagine will be useful to you in landing a BigLaw position will be developed during summer work, not during the semester. And then it's still not about connections, but instead about performance. You get no points merely for attending school in NYC. Finally, as someone targeting BigLaw, any T14 will "fit your personality." There is, again, no meaningful difference between the schools on that count.

Turning down $165K at Cornell or $150K at Northwestern (or even very considerably less) for CLS at sticker price would be indescribably idiotic. Fully debt-financing the cost of attendance at CLS means having $320K of non-dischargeable, high-interest debt at the beginning of loan repayment (and paying almost $500K by the end of it). Try to conceptualize what it means to make monthly payments of almost $4K for 10 years to service your debt. Then remember that half of BigLaw associates are weeded out within 3.5 years. This is not Monopoly Money you're dealing with. Irrational fandom has no place here. The only intelligent decision is applying to most or all of the T14, using initial scholarship offers to maximize offers after negotiation, and then rationally weighing employment placement and debt loads.