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The Almighty Buck

Journal Fiver-rah's Journal: Baffling need-based aid! 6

Journal by Fiver-rah
So my Lessig Challenge stuff will be on http://tjp.qiken.org from here on out.

I'm sure nobody really cares about my law school search, but here's the skinny. So far, I've gotten into Michigan, Duke, Columbia and NYU. And I've jumped through all the financial aid hoops. I'm just waiting to get offers from places. I've discovered that need-based aid for law school is exceptionally confusing.

Witness: Michigan gave me a reasonably generous (for a law school--they do expect you to take out a certain amount in loans, even above the Federally allowed amounts) need-based aid package. It was five figures, which made me happy.

NYU just told me that I didn't qualify for need-based aid. Get this: the Federal government says my EFC is zero. The sum total of aid that I've gotten from my parents in the last eight years, including my undergraduate career, and throughout my master's program, is a couple of plane tickets to visit home. My parents aren't particularly rich, and they're retiring next year.

Apparently, NYU thinks that between my expected contribution of zero dollars, and my parent's minimal retirement income, I can come up with $54,955 per year for their stupid law school, which I didn't really want to go to anyways.

At any rate, it looks like I'm going to Michigan. I'm pretty happy with that result. They have a strong public interest office that helps people get positions in places other than corporate law (blech!). I'm doing a visit weekend.

Wish me luck. I'd hate to sell out before I even start. :)

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Baffling need-based aid! More

Baffling need-based aid!

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  • I thinks it's cool when people decide to go to law school because they find it intriguing rather than those who get their political science degree and head off to law school like their mommy and daddy told them they would when they were 4 years old.

    And I hate how ridiculously high the expected parental contribution is for college, especially for people who aren't getting a cent from their parents (not me, but I'm still not getting that "expected contribution" of $12,000).
    • I've been doing a lot of reading about law schools. I'm actually really shocked at the number of people who make a three-year, $150,000 commitment without doing a shred of research other than what Mommy, Daddy, and US News has told them. Most of them don't know what kind of law they want to practice. They're really directionless. It's shocking. Really shocking.

      No wonder they all go into big law firms--it's the easy route, and they haven't done any research. Big law firms come to you; public interes

  • Geez, shitty weather, without the benefits of skiing or decent beer. Have fun.

  • I'm not sure how it works in the US, but in the UK, students used to get a grant[1] from the government to help cover the cost of going to University. It would cover tuition fees, and a percentage of your living expenses, depending on how rich your parents were. Now my parents were deemed sufficiently well off that my percentage of living costs covered by the government came to a big fat zero. Which would have been fine, only my parents weren't in fact very rich at all, and struggled to give me enough to li
    • I have another friend from the UK who has mentioned this to me before (showing his age, too, I presume). He thinks it's outrageous that people have to pay for education here in the US. The problem with our system is that it favors the rich. By "rich", I mean the people who would drive me crazy as an undergrad, complaining that their trust fund didn't give them enough money to make car payments and insurance payments and to still go shopping at the mall when they needed to. These are the people that wo
      • He thinks it's outrageous that people have to pay for education here in the US.

        I don't think paying for education is such a problem, but I do think there has to be a balance. The UK has gone from a situation where the government paid for everything to one where the student pays for pretty much the whole lot. I think it would have been better to find a compromise somewhere in the middle. In my day, there were freeloaders who went to University for three years just to mess about at taxpayers' expense. They

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