Top Law Schools

Hello,

I am having a tough time deciding which school would be best to attend as there are pros and cons to each. I have narrowed it down to the following:

University of Colorado, Boulder- Would require me to relocate, although that isn't the big concern. I'm not sure I would want to stay in Colorado following graduation (although staying to gain experience for a short while would be fine). I would ideally like to take the California bar exam and move back to California. My concern is that Colorado is not ranked high enough for this.

Santa Clara University- I'm from the area and although it is a very low ranked school, the connections in the area are great, but would make it hard to branch out of the area.

I am also waiting to hear back from UC Hastings. I was waitlisted for UC Irvine and UC Davis too, but I'm worried I will not hear back from the waitlist until late summer and seat deposit deadlines are coming up.

Thanks for your input!
In terms of tuition, I would not be receiving much assistance from family or other sources and would be relying on financial aid primarily. Also, I am interested in pursuing business or family law, but this is not set in stone.

What are your thoughts on these schools? How would you best make this decision? I know these are not highly ranked schools, which of course is a concern, but I would like to make the best of it anyway.

None of these options are going to be worth the cost. You may want to consider pursuing a different career path for a year or two until you can take another crack at the lsat. That gpa will still be difficult to overcome though.

To give something approaching accurate/helpful info, we'll need more from you:

- Are you getting any scholarship money from any of these schools?
- Total COA (Cost of attendance) including total tuition less scholarship and cost of living expenses
- Your career goals (i.e. why do you want to go to law school).

If you're not getting any scholarship money, my initial inclination is to say 'retake the LSAT, sit out a cycle, and reapply to a bunch of schools.' But then again we need more info.

A 2.5/164 is pretty rough - even if you get a pretty high LSAT you're looking at an uphill battle to getting scholarship money. If you don't get anything I highly suggest you rethink law at all.

zacharus85 wrote:If you're not getting any scholarship money, my initial inclination is to say 'retake the LSAT, sit out a cycle, and reapply to a bunch of schools.' But then again we need more info.

A 2.5/164 is pretty rough - even if you get a pretty high LSAT you're looking at an uphill battle to getting scholarship money. If you don't get anything I highly suggest you rethink law at all.

Yep. It really sucks, OP, but that GPA is going to foreclose pretty much any attractive law school options, even with a substantially better LSAT. The safe rule of thumb is to take out no more debt than what you can expect to make in your first year of practice (and for that we look at the median outcome of the school in question). At these schools the median outcome is either being unemployed/not employed as an attorney, or making 50, maybe 60K. With that GPA, you're not going to get scholarships that would make law school not an extremely risky proposition.

I would strongly advise you to look into career paths that aren't as sensitive to your undergrad GPA. Good luck.