observationalist wrote:paul_m86 wrote:BeenDidThat wrote:Yeah, I'm sure we'll feel really bad that maybe a week's paycheck per year will go to subsidizing our colleagues. Boo fucking hoo.
Oh, so you wouldn't mind if I took a paycheck or two of yours every year? Cool! I will make sure it goes to a charity ... or ... something.
And as noted before, a lot of those top performers are paying less than full price anywho.
At my school, the average scholarship for people getting biglaw
might be $15-$20 year. Which means they are still going to be dealing with insane debt.
OP does raise a good point about the fact that even scholarship recipients are still going to have debt levels that are higher than they should be. If you want to really focus your anger at something worthwhile, consider what amount of your tuition has likely gone towards providing services that directly benefit you and your peers (or if you truly are only self-interested, then just the services that benefit you). Putting aside LRAP then, you essentially received some education, perhaps some training, and a sorting mechanism that signaled your employability for an SA position and perhaps a full-time gig that will allow you to service your debts without suffering economic hardship after graduation. It is really questionable whether all the money you and your colleagues are paying is needed to provide you with that fairly basic set of services.
How much of what you paid is going to subsidize faculty scholarship that provides no direct service and adds no direct value to your education, training, or dreams of prestige and/or financial security? That figure certainly makes up a much higher percentage of what you paid than what LRAP will end up paying out to the handful of your classmates who end up qualifying for the program. If you're really looking for something to get self-righteous about, it might be worth asking the administration to stop allowing tuition dollars to fund scholarship. I've seen some brilliant professors obtaining grants to fund nearly all of their work; a shift to that model would help lower the cost for both admirable people like you and your slacker peers with no sense of direction and a need to validate their job prospects as being what they wanted all along.
I've found your posts very insightful. Thanks for your contributions, especially in regards to how high numbers people with scholarships may be being subsidized by low-numbers people without scholarships. That's definitely another way of looking at it.
The insurance as LRAP point that somebody else made was a good one too.
Also, in regard to the people who think that I'm saying that the most intelligent people get the highest scores: that is obviously not the case. If law school grades do reflect intelligence, it's not in the conventional sense, but more in the sense about how quickly one can adapt to a new system in a stressful environment. I think that, along with hard work, and maybe a little bit of a luck thrown in, does a good job of explaining law school grades.
Also, an interesting question might be to ask how URMs fit into this. They certainly perform worse than average as a group considering they get into their respective schools with lower numbers. I'm wondering if scholarship money and firm diversity hiring makes up for this deficit, or whether URMs might be, in a way, subsidizing non-URMs.
