Practical Advice

A New York Times report on law school scholarships reveals the real risk many law students may face in attending schools where their scholarships are tied to grade point average requirements.   

As American law schools have “quietly gone on a giveaway binge in the last decade,” with more than one in four law students now receiving a scholarship, many students will inevitably lose those grants, because grading curves at some schools  make it mathematically impossible for all of those who receive scholarships to keep them, the article explains.

At Golden Gate University School of Law, for example, more than 50 percent of students are given merit scholarships, but the curve typically allows only a third of students to achieve the 3.0 GPA required to keep the scholarships. 

 “By the middle of second semester of that first year, everyone saw the system for what it was,” said Alexandra Leumer, a law student at Golden Gate University School of Law who lost her scholarship. “We realized that statistically, because of the curve, there was no way for many of us to keep our scholarships. But at that point, you’re a year in. They’ve got you. You feel stuck.”

University of St. Thomas School of Law Professor Jerry Organ, one of the few scholars to study law school scholarships, attributed this trend of offering too many scholarships to the U.S. News & World Report rankings, which place significant weight in grading schools on students’ undergraduate grade point averages, LSAT scores and bar exam passage rates.

Lower-ranked schools can attract students who have higher GPAs and LSAT scores by offering large numbers of scholarships, and thus boost their rank. And the rankings have a much greater influence on law school selection decisions because law schools, unlike undergraduate institutions, “share far more similarities than they do differences,” the article explains.

Are law schools deceiving students to boost their rankings?

One current student at Golden Gate who declined to be identified had this answer:

I had a friend once who told me that hunting is a sport. I said, ‘Hunting is not a sport.’ He said: ‘Sure it’s a sport. It’s just that the animals don’t know they’re in a game.’ That’s what it feels like to be a law student these days. You have no idea you’re in a game.

Read the full article here. And read reporter David Segal's replies to reader comments here.

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By Cait Clarke, director of federal programs at Equal Justice Works.

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Barely a month into his presidency, Barack Obama signed an Executive Order creating the White House Council on Women and Girls. "I want to be clear that issues like equal pay ... are not just women's issues," affirmed the President in remarks. "Our progress in these areas is an important measure of whether we are truly fulfilling the promise of our democracy for all our people."

Creation of the Council that March morning was reasonably big news, noted in The New York Times ("The White House celebrated women on Wednesday," wrote Rachel Swarns). A spate of congratulatory columns and blogs followed. "Women issues getting traction," proclaimed the headline atop op-ed columnist Nicholas Kristof's piece two days later.

Then, after the last ripples of launch publicity stilled, the Council effectively disappeared from public view. Its next mention in The Times would be 17 months later, this past October, and then only as a brief item in the week's calendar note ("The White House Council on Women and Girls will play host to a women's entrepreneurship conference in Washington featuring Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Obama"). To my count, it hasn't shown up since.

I cite this story not to criticize the Council nor to minimize the praiseworthy work I'm sure it must be doing, but rather to underscore the notion that the mission of "empowering" women may constitute impeccable ideology but it elicits, at best, ephemeral popular support.

The "inconvenient" truth is that, to fully prosper as both a class and -perhaps more importantly - as individuals, women must get better at asserting themselves. Policy and statute are certainly critical to stop flagrant, documentable abuses. Context is important. But women themselves must, in a phrase, become considerably more comfortable about asking for what they want and be adept in getting it.

It was to that end - empowering individual women with skills that couldn't be marginalized - that I set out to write Dare to Ask! The Woman's Guidebook to Successful Negotiating. True, there are good negotiating texts available, but few (maybe none?) directly show women how to negotiate as women!