I never fully understood why students would go to a bottom tier law school and take out 200K in loans, when you very well know the value of a bottom tier law school. I mean, today is not the lack of information age. You can pretty much find out all the data points needed about a school. For instance, bottom tier schools typically don't advertise the graduating salaries or employment data. Just this one data point is an indicator of future earnings potential.
That being said, top law schools or top schools for that matter are within reach for low income individuals as long as they clear the entry criteria.This entry criteria is a whole another debate but Lambda and other schools also have an entry criteria.
There are need based scholarships and I think Stanford/MIT/Berkeley offer free tuition if your parents earn less than 100K per annum or something like that. So opportunity is definitely there but then not everyone can make it to Stanford, yes but that doesn't mean you saddle yourself with a huge debt by going to a lower tier school, knowing that your loan repayment capacity will be very low in the initial years of post graduation employment.
> when you very well know the value of a bottom tier law school. I mean, today is not the lack of information age. You can pretty much find out all the data points needed about a school. For instance, bottom tier schools typically don't advertise the graduating salaries or employment data. Just this one data point is an indicator of future earnings potential.
You're thinking about this from a very different set of life experiences. Not everyone knows to look for things like that. Not everyone even realises that there are different tiers of law schools. If no-one in your neighbourhood has ever met a lawyer socially, why would you?
But people do have an understanding that some schools are better than others. That's why Harvard has prestige and is well known even in those neighborhoods and some random school doesn't.
They might have an understanding that Harvard is something famous. They probably don't know that that translates into earning a whole lot more. I certainly didn't.
That being said, top law schools or top schools for that matter are within reach for low income individuals as long as they clear the entry criteria.This entry criteria is a whole another debate but Lambda and other schools also have an entry criteria.
There are need based scholarships and I think Stanford/MIT/Berkeley offer free tuition if your parents earn less than 100K per annum or something like that. So opportunity is definitely there but then not everyone can make it to Stanford, yes but that doesn't mean you saddle yourself with a huge debt by going to a lower tier school, knowing that your loan repayment capacity will be very low in the initial years of post graduation employment.