• Conditional Scholarships

  Any financial aid award, the retention of which is dependent upon the student maintaining a minimum grade point average or class standing, other than that ordinarily required to remain in good academic standing.

• Debt Service

  Measures your ability to manage your monthly payments, i.e. to repay the money you plan to borrow. Debt service is calculated by dividing your monthly payment into your monthly income. A payment of $1,000 and monthly income of $5,000 is a debt service rate of 20%. The amount you devote each month to loan payment impacts your quality of life, although your debt service will decrease over time if your income increases and you make you full loan payment each month.

• Median Discount

  The middle tuition discount received by those who receive tuition discounts. If 60% of the school's enrollment receives a $5,000 discount, then 30% of the school received at least a $5,000 discount. In this scenario, 30% also received between $0 and $5,000 and 40% received no discount. This discount is per year, although discounts are not always guaranteed to renew each year.

• Median Salary (via the federal government)

  The middle amount earned by graduates who borrowed for law school, regardless of the type or number of jobs worked. Earnings data come from the U.S. Department of Education, which obtains data from the Department of the Treasury. The underlying dataset reflects actual earnings in the first full calendar year after graduation, e.g. the earnings were from 2017 for 2016 graduates.

  This measures something different from other salaries that appear on this site. Those salaries come from schools according to NALP's process, which measures the annual salary of a graduate 10 months after graduation (on March 15) and reports only on long-term, full-time jobs. A graduate who started their job on March 1, 2017 would report their starting salary (for example, $60,000) to NALP. If they held the job for the remainder of the calendar year, they would have earned $50,000 from that job in 2017. But if they made $4,000 from part-time work in January and February, they would report $54,000 of income to the IRS.

• Non-Discounted Cost

  This is how much you would owe if you borrowed the full cost of attendance, accounting for interest that accumulates during school.

• Percent Paying Full Price

  The percentage of all enrolled students (not just 1Ls) in a given academic year that receive no tuition discount, whether need-based or not, or with strings or without.

• Percent Receiving Discount

  The percentage of all enrolled students (not just 1Ls) in a given academic year that receives some tuition discount, whether need-based or not, or with strings or without.

• Projected Debt at Repayment

  The projected debt owed by a graduate who borrows to attend the law school. The figure is as of six months following graduation when the first loan payment is due; assumes no interest pre-payments; and accounts for tuition increases based on previous years of change. Interest accumulation calculations are time-sensitive—based on semester disbursement periods—and use a blended rate based on projected interest rates.

  Various parts of this site allow you to factor in assumptions that adjust the maximum amount you may borrow, which is determined by the law school's self-reported cost of attendance. Factors include residency (for state schools), LDS faith (for BYU), tuition discounts, and monetary contributions. Each factor offsets the need to fully debt-finance the cost of attending a law school.

• Star a School to Add to Your List

  To add a law school to your list, you may star it from this page. Add a school to your list when you're interested in attending or tracking their performance. You can do many things with this list and add schools to it from all over this site.

• Target Salary

  Given a target debt service figure, i.e. the percentage of your (pre-tax) salary you hope to devote to monthly student loan payments, how much you must earn to meet that debt service target. Increasing the target debt service decreases the target salary (and vice versa).

• Tuition

  The amount (including fees) you pay a school for their educational services for a defined term, i.e. each quarter, semester, or year. Unless otherwise indicated, tuition prices we list are the sticker price. The sticker price is tuition witout any discount (or scholarship) applied. For public schools, in-state residents usually receive a lower price than non-residents.

• Tuition Discount

  Sometimes referred to as scholarships. The discount is the amount of need-based or non-need-based discount a student receives to attend the law school. These often come with strings attached. When an amount is listed, that amount is the total discount in one year.

For more definitions, view the full glossary.