Can I get into a law school with these grades? Like, a good law school?

[Lillianxo]

If I have a 3.2 cumulative GPA and 178 on my LSATS (in the 99th percentile), good recommendations and an exceptional admissions essay, can I get into, let's say, NYU School of Law or Columbia Law school or Fordham law school?? How about Pace Law School or Brooklyn Law School?

I'm a broadcast journalism major, I do independent work on the side and have interned. What chances do I have? Please help me. Thank you so much!

I'm a good writer, but my GPA suffered because I was dumb enough to take very hard science classes in hopes or bettering my knowledge, blah blah. I was also working throughout my college career and had family deaths. I can explain that in my essay, too.

I'm thinking about maybe going to Pace Law School and doing incredible then applying to an Ivy League business school for a 2nd masters. How does that sound?

What law schools are realistic given the information that I provided?

[emmm]

You already have a master's degree? Was the GPA for that better? I don't know anything about law school admissions, but aren't they really GPA/LSAT focused? Depending on how each is weighted, perhaps your exceptional LSAT will make up for your somewhat low GPA?

[Usmivka]

Asked the attorneys next door. These are their thoughts, I have no say on the matter:

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer:

Taking challenging classes that hurt your GPA does not count against you as much as taking only easy classes to keep your GPA artifically high. Obviously it would be better if you did well at the challenging classes, but it sounds like you have mitigating circumstances already addressed in an admissions essay. But for a top end law school you will want better than "good" reccomendations. You are also going to need a catch in that exceptional admissions essay (why is this importnat, what are you hoping to get/give). What you do on the side in terms of community work, law related internships, all that good stuff is a very important factor, probably more so than grades.

Edit: Already a masters? This can hurt or help, depending on field and whether you have had a life outside of school. Grad programs can be leary of the professional student.

Edited May 26, 2012 by Usmivka

[Lillianxo]

Usmivka, thank you so much! That gave me hope.

And no, I'm not in grad school yet. I'm still an ungraduate student with two more semesters left. I want to get two masters degree eventually, though!

[wine in coffee cups]

You do realize that law school in NYC followed by an MBA is probably going to leave you roughly $350K in debt? You're only going to be able to pay that off by inventing the next Facebook, in which case you didn't really need either degree.

As for how competitive you would be if you do pursue this wildly impractical dream: check the GPA x LSAT graphs for individual schools on lawschoolnumbers.com.

[pinkrobot]

You do realize that law school in NYC followed by an MBA is probably going to leave you roughly $350K in debt? You're only going to be able to pay that off by inventing the next Facebook, in which case you didn't really need either degree.

As for how competitive you would be if you do pursue this wildly impractical dream: check the GPA x LSAT graphs for individual schools on lawschoolnumbers.com.

Just to chime with the above, you may want to take a look at this article from last year in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.c...?pagewanted=all

Similarly, from a more recent NYT piece (http://www.nytimes.c...-bono-plan.html):

"Recent law school graduates face a growing employment crisis: the Law School Transparency Data Clearinghouse lists 67 schools (out of the 185 that were scored) with full-time legal employment rates below 55 percent. At the same time, law school tuition and student debt have skyrocketed. The average 2011 law graduate from Syracuse owes $132,993, not including any debt incurred for undergraduate education. At Pace, the figure is $139,007; at New York Law School, $146,230.

"After commencement, things get worse. Law graduates often borrow more money for bar preparation, to pay for both living expenses and prep courses, which can cost more than $3,000. Even graduates with good jobs lined up face tight summer budgets; many work in retail or food service to make ends meet, as do many law students."

I don't know anything about the situation for MBAs--except that the degree is becoming ubiquitous and the tuition is staggering.

This is probably none of my business, and for all I know, you're a Rockefeller. But, for what it's worth, and speaking as someone pursuing a degree that has staggeringly low job prospects: the one thing I kept firmly in mind was that if I could not get into a good program with a livable stipend and tuition remission, I would have to put this idea in the "pipe dream" category. I've heard that stipends and tuition remission are not part of the package for most MA degrees, including JDs and MBAs. Proceed with caution?

Edited May 27, 2012 by pinkrobot

[Lillianxo]

Thanks, Pinkrobot! I want to become a broadcast journalist, though. I want to enter a network with a degrees in law etc. because it's valued more than just having a journalism degree.. D:

[Lillianxo]

I'll be much more likely to get some kind of network news job with a masters in either law or business, but obviously my prospects would be much better if I have two masters in both those areas! I'm also hoping to get government grants or apply for financial aid. I'm receiving financial aid right now in college.

[Spore]

Technically, a JD degree is not a masters degree and is a juris doctor degree (technically a doctoral degree).

I would consider the debt from just one of these degrees. You will pay through the nose using loans.

I was told by a Harvard Law grad that unless you can secure a spot in a top 10 law school, it does not make much financial sense to go to law school.

[pinkrobot]

Technically, a JD degree is not a masters degree and is a juris doctor degree (technically a doctoral degree).

(I was wondering about that while typing my post! I was going to look it up, but it slipped my mind and since then I've had that nagging feeling you get when you forget something. So, thanks!)

[wine in coffee cups]

I'll be much more likely to get some kind of network news job with a masters in either law or business, but obviously my prospects would be much better if I have two masters in both those areas! I'm also hoping to get government grants or apply for financial aid. I'm receiving financial aid right now in college.

I hate to be a big B about this but you are frighteningly wrong on just about every point:

• I am not aware of government grants for professional graduate programs. Individual schools might offer limited partial scholarships, though you will have trouble qualifying for those with a 3.2 GPA.
  
• You will most likely qualify for government loans (Stafford, Grad PLUS) but you will probably find yourself needing to take out private loans as well and having a balance of about $350K between law school in NYC and a private business school unless you get serious tuition discounts.
  
• As mentioned above by Spore and pinkrobot, you don't leave law school with a master's. You leave with a JD, the D of which stands for 'doctor'. Know what you're getting into!
  
• The JD is an interesting degree in that receiving it can actually make you less employable in all other fields besides legal work if you don't have serious work experience. I think you might be thinking of this simplistically as BA + JD > BA (okay, well maybe you were mistakenly thinking BA + legal MA > BA) which is not usually true. I would be shocked if a JD were viewed as an meaningful asset in broadcast journalism hiring.
  
• Good (and even most not-good) MBA programs require several years of full-time work experience. You are extremely unlikely to get in with only some internships from undergrad and law school. The JD won't give you an edge over people who have actual experience.
  

If your goal is to work in broadcast journalism, I think your current plan is a really bad idea. The fact that you wouldn't be able to pay off all this debt on a broadcast journalism salary should be a huge red flag, for starters. Talk to alumni from your program who are working in your dream positions and find out how they got there. I'm going to guess it involved many years of working in the field, not taking on staggering amounts of non-dischargeable student loan debt for unrelated professional degrees.

Edited May 27, 2012 by wine in coffee cups

[margarets]

I'll just go ahead and be Debbie Downer here.

There is a massive oversupply of law grads out there. Many of them have blogs describing their experiences. Subprime JD is a good one, and it has links to many others. Look into those before committing yourself to all that debt.

From what I understand, journalism is contracting too. Newspapers are dying and there are only so many TV network jobs to go around - and the networks are losing market share. Hardly anyone under 40 watches TV news anymore. So I don't think the prospects for a network news job are all that great.

Last but not least, MBAs are pretty common these days. It doesn't offer the competitive edge that it used to. I personally know people with over a decade of work experience, who then got an MBA, and they STILL had to hustle for a decent job.

You need to really think through your plans and consider your other options. Especially if you will take on tens of thousands of dollars in debt for those degrees.

[Bones]

If I have a 3.2 cumulative GPA and 178 on my LSATS (in the 99th percentile), good recommendations and an exceptional admissions essay, can I get into, let's say, NYU School of Law or Columbia Law school or Fordham law school?? How about Pace Law School or Brooklyn Law School?

[...]

What law schools are realistic given the information that I provided?

http://www.top-law-schools.com/rankings.html

I wouldn't apply for law schools below the top10. Since 2007, the job market for lawyers is really bad and you don't want to go broke after three expensive years of law school...

Good luck!!

[amlobo]

Ok, as someone who graduated law school three years ago, I'll chime in here.

First, can you get into a "good" law school? Yes. With a 178, law schools will overlook a lower GPA. Higher-ranked programs love boosting their LSAT scores, and a 3.2 will not dissuade a lot of them, especially with a good personal statement and LORs. I had two friends with 2.4 GPAs and 178 LSATs get into a T20 law school... though they had to PAY for it. You could probably even get good scholarships from a more mid-ranked program. I had a 3.4 GPA and a 165 LSAT and got a 3/4 tuition scholarship offer from almost everywhere I applied (all ranked in the 50-80 range)... plus a stipend for law journal that paid my last year in full. Granted, my friends and I went to a T20 private research university for undergrad, so I'm not sure how your GPA compares depending on your undergrad institution.

The bigger question is... SHOULD you go to law school? My advice is NO. Especially straight from undergrad. If you want to be a journalist, BE a journalist. You have a better chance of getting hired as a journalist straight out of undergrad than you probably do 3 years later with an irrelevant degree. If you want a higher degree, get it in the subject that you want to cover. ONLY go to law school if you (a) want to be a lawyer, which doesn't sound to be the case (even then, the job market IS rough), or ( you want to be a legal analyst/correspondent on a major national news network. But, I am assuming that you might have to be a lawyer first to do that. Do not get a JD just to have a higher degree - you will loathe every second of law school if that's how you approach it. If you just want a resume booster, get a part-time MBA while you're working full-time... and then your company can pay for it. Then, if the degree ends up being useless, at least you wasted no real time or money getting it. There are also JD/MBA programs that only take 3 years... but again, I don't think it serves your needs.

My advice is find someone who has the job you want now and ask them what you need to do to get there. As someone who is looking forward to leaving the law, let me caution you to take some time off to decide if 3 years of law school is worth it and will accomplish what you want it to. Best of luck to you.

[amlobo]

My b. turned into a smiley. That should be a b., not sunglasses. Ha.

[collegebum1989]

All of the posts regarding law school are true (I'm not a law student, but I've been doing extensive research on law school forums) and speaking to law students and recent associates. Second, law school is a professional school, which means the volume of applicants is a lot larger than a graduate school. Since graduate school applications are based on specific fields, and are research-oriented, their applications processes are more holistic than professional schools. Secondly, law schools face pressure to publish statistics regarding their incoming class (undergraduate institution, undergraduate GPA, LSAT, etc). Schools try to keep perceptions of their rank and reputation up based on their median, 25% and 75% GPA and LSAT scores. Graduate GPAs and undergraduate majors are not included in these reports so they play a minimal factor in admissions. Which is why a 4.0 history major could conceivably do better than an 3.0 engineering major (no offense to history majors). Likewise, since majority of applicants do not have graduate degrees, it does not give you an admissions edge, since there is no universal basis of comparison between undergraduate and graduate GPA scales.

Second, with a 178 LSAT, you would be considered a "splitter" (low GPA, high LSAT or vice versa). Some top schools favor a higher LSAT than GPA (Northwestern, Georgetown, WashU, Cornell, etc), while others are more GPA-heavy (Berkeley). You should research schools which are known for admitting splitters. Likewise, check out TLS (top-law-forums) since it has all the information you'll need about law school admissions and applications. For previous statistics from applicants to individual schools check out LSN (lawschoolnumbers.com).

Finally, top 10 is an arbitrary number for law school ranks. With respect to law schools, there are top 14 consistent schools, also known as the T14, and the top 6 (Yale, Harvard, Standford, Columbia, Chicago, NYU). These are the elite schools. However, on TLS, the consensus is that a 170+ LSAT will get you into at least one or two T14 schools (assuming a GPA over 3.1, great LORs, and SOP). While it is true that prestige dictates your career options, your class rank also plays a large factor in your job prospects. The Dean of Hofstra Law School said that the Valedictorian from Hofstra Law has the same opportunities of a middle-graduate from Harvard Law.

Finally, if you are going to law school, your intention should only be to a lawyer. This is because you will be in a large amount of debt, and being a lawyer is the most lucrative employment option to pursue after law school to repay this debt. If you intend on getting an MBA, you can skip law school all together if your intention is to not be a lawyer. Actually, getting a JD makes you less employable in other fields besides the legal industry since you are technically more expensive to an employer. The more educated you are, the more debt you accrue, the more an employer is expected to pay you. However, some lawyers do work in BigLaw (which offer the highest salaries) for a certain number of years before settling down in another industry). However, these are the most competitive firms nationally.

Degrees don't necessitate employment. As a lawyer, the only reason you should pursue a masters is if it's in a technical field such as engineering, which will be beneficial for IP/patent work for patent prosecution as a patent attorney. From what I understand, for other fields of law, these graduate degrees help minimally during law school admissions and less so for actual employment after. MBA could mean a higher starting salary after law school, but it's definitely not mandatory.

Best of luck!