How much financial aid incoming freshman at a top 10 law school?
Ok, So I am going to be a freshman in college this fall, and I am majoring in Political Science I am pretty sure that I want to practice law. My parents don’t make a ton of money about 90,000 total between them a year and I have two other siblings. Obviously if I want to attend a top 10 law school like Yale or Harvard then I am going to need to take out loans to pay for it all. My question is how much money in federal student aid could I actually get to help pay for roughly a 40-45,000$ a year education. If I use federal grad loans to help pay the difference. Since obviously I won’t be making very much money out of college how much could I get from the government in student aid, 5000$, 10,000$, 20,000$?
There are four ways to pay for law school: loans, out of pocket, scholarships, and need-based aid. Law schools offer you loan/scholarship/need-based aid packages once you’re admitted and have filled out FAFSA and other financial aid forms.
You’ll probably be a dependent on your parents’ taxes when you apply to law school, assuming you apply to law school before you’re 24, so I imagine that your parents’ income–and not yours–is what you’ll be submitting to FAFSA. Even though you don’t consider $90,000/year a lot, and I agree that your parents aren’t rich or anything like that, it’s probably too much to qualify for any need-based grants, which tend to not be very much, anyway. Out of pocket is out of the question for you, of course, since your income and your parents’ income can’t cover living expenses and $45,000/year tuition. As far as scholarships go, Harvard Law and Yale Law never really offer them. Law schools award scholarships to attract students away from other schools. Harvard and Yale, being the two top dogs, don’t need to lure away anyone with money. The prestige is enough.
Now, if money is your concern when applying to law school, and this is all assuming you’ll have the grades and LSAT score, then I would employ this strategy: 1) apply to every top-10 school, maybe the whole top 14, 2) leverage your offers at the top (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia?) to the lower-half of the top ten to get scholarship money, 3) hope to god that you’re offered full rides somewhere in the top 14, like the Hamilton at Columbia, the Levy at UPenn, and the Darrow at UMich, or at least a sizable scholarship. If you have the stats to get into Harvard, then you could be a candidate for one of these full-ride scholarships.
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