When to apply early decision? Forum

[maxjg]

Hi everyone,

As I'm writing my law school applications, I'm facing a tough choice: considering applying early decision to Berkeley Law, or avoiding this potentially binding acceptance and taking my chances with regular decision, at Berkeley as well as other t14 schools, including Yale. I graduated from UC Berkeley, and have a 3.86 GPA and 174 LSAT. I'm very interested in several of the top schools, particularly: Berkeley, Colombia, NYU, and HYS -- I feel like I have a chance at all of them ranging from low but still possible (Yale), to fairly high.

But a couple additional issues: the first is that Berkeley guarantees 75K in aid to everyone accepted early decision, which would be huge for avoiding massive loans and the need to pay them off through a few years at big law (which I really don't want to do, I'm interested although not set on non profit of some kind, particularly environmental work).

The other issue is that I recently learned that LSAC calculates your GPA by including ANY college work you've done -- I attended a specialized high school that put me through two years of college work for an A.A. degree as a junior/senior, and my GPA there was substantially lower than at Berkeley. I expect my calculated GPA to drop roughly a whole point, to something like a 3.75. And while I hope/expect that admissions officers will be thorough and read/understand my addendum explaining this GPA (it's not even like I went from bad to good grades over college -- all of my weaker grades literally came when I was 16 and 17 years old), it's obviously a big negative.

With that in mind, I'm scared that if I skip Berkeley ED, I'll end up being rejected from HYS (which I'm not even sure I want that much more than Berkeley), and end up with an offer to Berkeley or somewhere similar, for much less money. On the other hand, applying ED to Berkeley feels a little like selling myself short, and not at least exploring where else I could get in.

Could anyone shed some light/opinions? I'm wondering what my chances are of getting comparable merit aid from Berkeley or somewhere similar as a regular decision admit, and whether I'm just being silly as I'll probably not get into HYS anyway. Thanks in advance!

[Wubbles]

I would not ED to Berkeley, but you should apply to the entire t13 from Yale down. You will likely get into Harvard, and have a decent shot at Y and S. Also big money at other t13s is in play with regular decision. Berkeley is pretty stingy so you might not get a great offer from them, but getting a big scholly to NYU probably wouldn't be the end of the world. Best of luck and congrats on the numbers!