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Thursday, March 21, 2013

3 Steps to Maximize Your Chances of Law School Financial Aid


Your LSAT chalk up and GPA could land you a merit scholarship, so extend thinking early more or less how you’ll chip in for impartiality nurture.

If you plan to apply to  integrity domesticates this fall, I strongly recommend that you begin to consider your pay options now rather than wait until you have completed your applications. more clients come to me demanding to put off thinking about money for as long as possible — which is understandable, presumption the skyrocketing  court of legal education.

 

But it is critically important to carry financial attend to strategy into the application process to maximize your chances of being offered a package that includes a full or near full scholarship. Follow these three steps in the coming months and you could be well on your way to graduating law rail with minimal or no debt.

[Discover which public law schools cost the most.]

1. Select schools strategically: As you consider the schools to which you lead apply, start by selecting target, stretch and safety schools. Identify your merry-go-round choice or choices and try to investigate how much aid they generally offer.

Consider applying to schools known for offering bighearted merit-based scholarships to bookmans who have GPAs and LSAT gobs similar to yours. Add these schools to your list and apply to them, even if you be not terribly enthusiastic about enrolling. Later, if you are offered a large scholarship at one such school but not at your top choice, you whitethorn be able to leverage that offer to negotiate a secure increase to your package and end up attending your first choice with a robust scholarship.

2. Improve your LSAT add together: As you study tirelessly for the LSAT, you probably have one affaire on your mind: getting into your dream school. You desperately want to achieve a high enough score to be accepted, but did you also know that vital stats like your LSAT score and GPA are used, along with the all-important essays and recommendations, to determine merit-based scholarships?

It is clear to think that you just posit to get in and that you pull up stakes worry about finances later, but if you really tumble down for the June or October exams, you may be paid kind of handsomely for your efforts.

To compete with qualified candidates both for admission and scholarships, you may wish to consider taking an LSAT class or hiring an nice common soldier tutor. This will almost certainly prove to be a very wise investment, with re crouchs of 50 times or more; just do your due diligence to command you are working with a true leader in the LSAT prep field.

[Get the answers to vital law school questions.]

3. Consider consulting a law admissions expert: No matter how high or low your GPA or LSAT score is, you also need to focus on the qualitative portion of the applications, the importance of which roughly all students significantly underestimate. While there is a cost associated with hiring a professional admissions counselor, working with someone who knows which qualities specific schools examine in your essays and recommendations could enhance your law school results and the size of your scholarships.

This year, I worked with an applicant who had applied to law schools last year on his own and got into only one top 100 school in the N.Y.-N.J. area with just $15,000 in merit-based scholarships. We helped reshape his school list to include more schools known for giving generous scholarships as well as assisted him in only reworking his essays, resume, applications and recommender choices.

With the same LSAT score and GPA but with this new admissions package, the student was accepted at four top 100 schools in the same region with more than $300,000 in total merit-based scholarships. He also got into a top 50 school that he was outright rejected from the previous year.

[Explore the most expensive private law schools.]

Finally, the school that gave him $15,000 the prior year offered him $80,000. This is another cerebrate to think about financial aid early; honourable admissions counselors work with you throughout the entire application process and yield to help with financial aid negotiations.

In your quest to gain entrance money to your top-choice school, do not forget to consider how you will pay for law school. You do not want to have to turn down an offer or put yourself in debt unnecessarily because you put financial aid on the back burner for legion(predicate) months. Get started early so you can focus on your studies instead of worrying about money during school.

 



Materials taken from US News

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