fnma2jd wrote:kalvano wrote:fnma2jd wrote:kalvano wrote:Your wish is my command. Ask me anything.
Being that you're non traditional and not k-jd. Do you ever wish you did PT, instead of FT, and worked through it or was it worth it for you to take COA loans out? Also, did you get a decent amount in scholarships and did it factor into your decision?
Nope, FT for me. No regrets. An additional year of school would have sucked, and my job wasn't anything I enjoyed or could have done during school.
I got about a 60% scholarship, and sure it factored in. SMU is stupidly expensive, but they do give out a lot of money. I definitely would not have attended at full price.
Obvously results vary but do you feel that, given your job opportunity and scholarships, that the loans are manageable and at a tolerable level?
I only ask because of your previous posts about choosing UT over SMU
I know you didn't direct this question at me, but I want to take a stab at it.
I'm a recent PT grad and about as close as one can get to being the poster child for the PT program. I was a non-trad, worked FT in a professional career, made law review and had a very successful OCI.
I worked through my first three years of law school, but had to quit to work as a Summer Associate for two firms during my last summer.
I think that the scholarships and income I was able to generate made it worth the extra year of school. I can't put an exact price on graduating law school debt-free, but one extra year of labor was a fair trade to me. Obviously, how you evaluate this trade-off depends on personal preference, which is to say that Kalvano's answer to your question is equally valid.
Finally, I don't think UT is a clearly better option once the cost difference gets to be around $75k in additional debt. Obviously, a lot of this depends on your personal tolerance for risk. UT ends up with much better employment outcomes for certain (most?) subsets of students. But those better employment outcomes for UT students don't exist across all subsets. This only means that the additional cost of UT is not warranted for certain subsets of students (the real problem is that it is almost impossible to predict if any particular student is going to be in the subset that should choose SMU). For example, the generic top 10% UT law review member with no interest in litigation who wants to end up in Dallas is going to work for essentially the same firm as her SMU counterpart.
