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Law School Conditional Scholarships
A conditional scholarship is any financial aid award that depends on the student maintaining a minimum grade point average or class standing, other than that ordinarily required to remain in good academic standing.
Fewer schools offer conditional scholarships compared to previous years, likely for a few reasons. First, the ABA forced schools beginning in 2013 to disclose the number of first-year students who received and who lost some or all of the scholarship's value after the first year. Second, prospective law students were increasingly advised that scholarship stipulations are negotiable. Third, conditional scholarships received bad publicity in the press, at academic conferences, and in legal scholarship. The chart below shows the change between 2011 and 2023.
The number of students who lost scholarship value also declined substantially between 2011 and 2023, from 4,017 to 2,069. As a percentage of 1L enrollment, the decline was from 8.4% to 5.5%. Although a decline of only 2.9 points, the change amounts to a 34.5% decline in the total number. However, the number of students losing scholarship value did not decline as much as the percentage of law schools offering conditional scholarships.
Several notable patterns emerge when grouping law schools based on whether they offer conditional scholarships. On the front end, students who attend schools with conditional scholarships have lower LSAT score profiles. The average median LSAT at schools with conditional scholarships is lower than the 25th percentile LSAT at schools without conditional scholarships. On the back end, graduates from schools with conditional scholarships find full-time, long-term legal jobs at a lower rate than their peers at schools that do not offer them. Potentially, both patterns reflect school reputation.
| Schools | 2024 Legal Job Rate | Fall 2024 LSAT | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 25th | 50th | ||
| Conditional scholarships | 75.6% | 152 51.9 percentile | 155 59.7 percentile |
| No conditional scholarships | 83.8% | 156 67.4 percentile | 161 80.4 percentile |
The table below provides school-specific data for the number of new students, the number (and percentage) of those students who received a conditional scholarship, and the percentage of conditional scholarship recipients that had their award either reduced or eliminated. This may understate the actual percentage. Students with conditional scholarships who (a) withdrew from law school voluntarily or (b) took a leave of absence prior to a determination of whether they would have met the renewal condition for their scholarships or (c) had their conditional scholarship reduced or eliminated after the first year are not deemed to have lost their scholarships and are treated as having retained their scholarships.
School-specific conditional scholarship and enrollment data come from the American Bar Association.
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