OT Law school question

Last year I read an article in the New York Times decrying the practice of awarding "renewable" scholarships to law students which come with conditions that are hard to meet. The schools COUNT on some number of students failing to qualify after the first year. Then the students are invested enough that they can't leave, but are paying more tuition than they counted on.

Any of you who are offered (or swayed by) scholarships, ask hard questions about how many past recipients met the conditions to renew them.

ETA:  I see that MULTIPLE respondents to the OP have mentioned this.  It's a real phenomenon; glad the word is getting out because it strikes me as super slimy.

If we're allowed to link, here is the article in question:  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/business/law-school-grants.html?_r=1

Several of the schools the OP is considering are mentioned.

I'm a U of Mich law grad, out about 9 years. I'll echo a lot of the sentiments about the devaluation of the law profession over the course of the past few years. When I walked in the early 2000s, even with the 2001 recession, there were enough law firms jobs to go around. That's changed pretty radically since, oh, 2007 and has not really come back yet. To some extent, I think that actually cuts towards taking the best scholarship offer available, rather than going to the best prestige school. Less student loan debt means less financial pressure in the future, and, to some extent the deteriorating job market seems to cut across the tiers of law schools (that is, the job market seems pretty crappy whether you're at UCLA or at Loyola Chicago). If you had Yale or Harvard on hold while pondering a financial aid offer from Wayne (an excellent school that only suffers from, as some people have pointed out here, a lack of branding outside of Detroit), I could see putting off Wayne for either. But I don't think that Wisconsin or Iowa are so good that you should incur the full $120,000-$150,000 student loan debt (no disrespect to my fellow Badger or Hawkeye JD holders).

The frustrating thing is that the market could change in three years (it's happened before; there were small luls in the mid 80s and 90s that were followed by hiring booms), but I have a sinking feeling that the profession as a whole has gone through a restructuring which de-emphasizes route tasks done by junior lawyers.

I'll echo the sentiments below about treating law school as a job. More importantly, I would think of it as an investment whose ROI is difficult to gage. Your students loans (and their interest) will be your buy in; what you get out of it will be determined by some many factors, least of which might be your effort. Being the risk-adverse guy that I am, I would invest (bet?) with the least amount of my own money given the variables in play. I can completely respect the argument of prestige (and it has never hurt me to put Michigan Law on my resume), but I wonder if things have changed so much in the profession that the incredibly high tuition is not worth it, at least on your dime.

My two cents...

The consensus seems to be "take the most money from the best school you can in your region," and I'd agree.  The only other thing I wanted to suggest would be to research the faculty in the area you'd like to practice.  I went to a mid-tier school in a big city and really appreciated that the instructors in many electives were practitioners and well respected in the community.  I didn't retain a lot from the core classes, but getting the "hands on" teaching from experienced litigators made a difference when it came time to practice law.  Check out which schools have a clinic or other training in the area you'd like to pursue.     

Good luck with your decision! 

First off, everything said upthread about no jobs, six figures of nondischargable debt, brutally difficult and competitive profession- all true. Do not become a lawyer. But another point - I see talk about treating it like a job, or effort. This is bullshit. You cannot "work" law school. One of the oddest aspects of law school is that the ability to get good grades is, essentially, random, and very poorly correlated with past academic experience. I was a diffident UG student with middling grades, got to LS, and basically could not get lower than an A- unless I tried to fuck up. I worked -1hr a day, got a great job, and am now a happy, successful lawyer. All of my close friends were harder working than me -by multiples. All are as smart as me. All had better pre LS records. It didn't matter. LS exams don't reward hard work. They reward some ineffable knack which you either have or you don't, and if you don't, you're screwed. Some people say that if you really want to be a lawyer, you go anyways. This is wrong. There are some thing you want to really do that you don't do out of consideration for the collateral damage you cause to those around you. You don't go home with the pretty young thing at a bar once you're married. You don't ride a superbike when you have a kid at home. And you don't go to law school and play the lottery, when the odds are you will be nothing more than a burden on your loved ones for years after. I was at a top school, with my tuition paid for by an inheritance, no career and single. Maybe I could justify it. You so affirmatively cannot. Please, please, don't go.

At the moment I am doing document review (work that a junior high school kid could do). I have been doing if for a few years now. I share the work space with grads (classes ranging from '05 to '11) from Harvard, Columbia, Berkeley, Northwestern, USC, UVA, Michigan, Georgetown, George Washington, Washington U (St. Louis), Emory, and other schools in the top 50, in addition to schools from the second, third and fourt tiers. There are people here who did moot court, people who were on journals (including law review), people who were associates at large prestigious firms (and lost their jobs because of lay-offs), people who clerked for federal judges, people who worked for the government. In other words, the job market for attorneys at the moment is VERY VERY bleak.

Unless the ABA starts limiting the number of attorneys being pumped out every year into, what is already, a super saturated market (understatement) the problem of normal full-time employment will continue to compound. For many attorneys, these days, there are a few options: (a) doc review, (b) pitching their own shingle, (c) trying to join the military, FBI, or other gov't agency, in a civilian/non-attorney capacity, but in a position where one could at least be able to utilize some of the skills acquired in law school, (d) get out of law altogether. 

Just to illustrate how difficult it is to land a job, my friend who is an attorney at the DOJ used to review apps for the entry-level honors program. He told me that a few years ago, when he was doing this, they received close to 20,000 applications for 35 spots. Keep in mind that 10-15 years ago, there were more than enough jobs in the fed gov't to absorb new graduates, including at the DOJ. In fact, at some agencies, they had a hard time filling positions. Today, they are turning away people who are more than qualified, from top notch law schools, and with impressive resumes, simply because there are not enough spots. If you don't believe me and some of the other posters, just google "job prospect for attorneys" and you will find articles from the likes of Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, NY Times, etc.

I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer and disuade you from pursuing your dream, if being an attorney is really a dream of yours. If you really want to be a lawyer, have the luxury of rolling the dice (if it does not work out you can try something else without making a substantial change in your life and taking too much of a hit), and get a substantial scholarship, I don't see that much of a problem of taking a risk and seeing if you can make something of it. However, if risk is something you cannot afford, I would consider other options.