Reason 4.

Reason 4.  The contingent scholarship scam: Like dear Oliver Twist, they’ll make you a pickpocket street urchin.

Schools offer varying degrees of financial assistance through scholarships.  Some of them, please excuse my French, are scams.  Although scholarships come in both benevolent and risky forms, we’ll focus our attentions here on just one insidious stinker, the contingent scholarship.   

The scenario:  A law school offers you $30,000 a year in tuition – but only as long as you maintain a 3.0 grade point average.  Sounds amazing, doesn’t it?  $30,000 x 3 years = $90 grand you don’t have to pay.  I mean, really, they’re offering to pay you $30,000 a year just to get good grades, which you were going to do anyway.  Do they love you or what? 

Unfortunately, the answer is often “or what.” 

I feel a little sad bursting this particular bubble because it’s such a joyous, confirming moment to receive a strong tuition offer from a law school.  But the potential emotional manipulations are egregious enough that this chapter needs to exist.  Grade-contingent tuition offers, in which grades are based on curves, have come under suspicion as a way for certain schools to scam you. 

What law schools are telling you with a contingent offer is this:  If you don’t outperform x% of your class, then we’ll withdraw our scholarship help and you’ll need to a) pay us full-priced tuition until you graduate, or b) transfer to another school, where you’ll probably pay full-priced tuition, or c) drop out of law school. 

These offers hook students in by preying on emotions such as:

·         Optimism and hubris:  “Of course I’ll be in the top 10% of the class!”

·         Naiveté and inexperience: New students don’t realize that almost all of their competitive new classmates comprised the top 5% or 10% of their undergraduate classes.  In other words, the difference between college and law school is the difference between running track in high school (“I’m number one!”) and at the Olympics (“Everyone here is number one”).

·         Trust:  “They wouldn’t award me this money if they didn’t have full, experienced confidence that I could succeed.”

But I’m not foolish like that, you say.  I’m a smart person with an awesome academic track record.  I could pull off three years of top-notch grades. 

Okay, granted, but consider this:  Thanks to the grading curve, your grade depends on everyone else’s performance.  Let’s say that, in your first year of law school, a handful of your classmates previously worked as contracts specialists or commercial negotiators, and that they therefore earn all the available A’s and B’s in your Contracts class.  Thanks to this twist of fate, you get a C, despite excellent exam performance, and your GPA at the end of your first year is 2.97 – just below the school’s 3.0 minimum.  Wham!  Your free tuition is now over, despite your own best efforts, and you’re suddenly attending a school to the tune of $40,000 a year. 

Law school is hard, and bad grades are common during the first semester as students acclimate to a new foreign language of legal terms.  Students can easily forfeit scholarships simply because they mixed up some vocabulary terms in Torts or because they didn’t analyze a particular rule thoroughly enough in Civil Procedure. 

Thus, the question is not how smart you are, but whether you’re sure you’ll get a 3.0 rather than a 2.9.  And the answer to that question depends entirely on others’ performance in relation to your own.  That’s impossible to predict.  Yes, you did great as an undergraduate.  Yes, you’re smart.  Yes, you got an LSAT score that made your friends, folks, and pets proud.  But so did everyone else who got accepted.  And, in particular, so did everyone else who was offered the same contingent scholarship as you. 

(To read a particularly mathy way of looking at the contingent scholarship situation, please feel free to check out the  "Don't Go to Law School: 50 Reasons" ebook.)