Student Merit Scholarships

I know there will be a lot of discussion of the article in the New York Times, provocatively titled, "Law Students Lose the Grant Game as Schools Win."  What I want to focus attention on right now is not the difficulty of maintaining the GPA to keep a merit scholarship, but the significance of the observation by Albany Law Dean Thomas F. Guernsey, that "the strangest [thing] is that the bulk of law schools skimp on aid to students who can least afford tuition. The number of need-based scholarships has actually shrunk in the last five years, according to A.B.A. figures, to 18,000 from 20,000 five years ago."  I hope that amdist all the discussion of ways to improve law school we'll talk a little bit about the importance of providing assistance to those in need.  I completely understand -- and appreciate the positive reasons for -- providing merit-based aid.  But I find it troubling that we're taking scholarship money from those with need to in essence buy students with good LSAT scores and UGPAs.  That part of the story received little play in this article -- another article could easily be written about the ways that poorer law students lose out to those with better test scores.

Comments

[Lev Elthafield]

I agree that this is troubling. Even more so when you consider that at lower-tiered law schools often those students (the poorer ones who don't qualify for merit-based scholarships and who pay full-freight tuition) are perhaps the least likely to leverage their JD into a lucrative stream of income.