How to Negotiate Law School Scholarships

Once you’ve received law school offers — hooray! — it’s time to figure out which school you’re going to commit to. With the hefty price of law school, it comes as no surprise that scholarship awards are a big part of that decision. 

What you may not know is that you have the opportunity to negotiate your scholarships! In our recent Break Into Law School® episode, Sydney and Alice discuss what scholarship negotiations are and the common questions surrounding them. 

Some of the biggest questions from our episode are outlined below, but you can also listen on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast episodes for the full episode!

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Alice: One of the most common questions that I get is ‘what is scholarship negotiation?’

Sydney: That is a great question. Most people up to this point have only dealt with admissions when it comes to college admissions. In college admissions, you don’t really negotiate your scholarships the same way. In college admissions, you might have financial aid appeal letters, which means you are explaining to the school why your finances would qualify you for more money. 

There are two big distinctions between college financial aid and law school financial aid. The biggest is that most law school financial aid is really just merit aid; most law schools do not give need-based aid. There are some exceptions to that, and at schools that do offer need-based aid, typically they don’t engage in scholarship negotiations as much. 

For most law schools, most of the money that they’re giving is merit-based, which means that a school has decided that based on your identity, what you’ve overcome, your GPA, your LSAT score, or something else that you are such a desirable candidate that they want to give you money to come to the school. 

It's sort of enticing. They're trying to get you to say yes. And because of that different dynamic that we have, if you have a school that has given you one set of money and another school that's given you a different set of money then you have the opportunity to be like, “Hey, I really wanna come to your school. School A has given me this, and that's a really good offer for me, but I still really want to come to your school. So I wanted to see if there's anything that you can do in terms of scholarship negotiation.” 

This might seem awkward, weird, or even rude for some of us that are raised in the way that you just say thank you, but it’s actually common practice in law school admissions. It's not rude, it's not weird, and it's not something that you need to have a lot of anxiety over, but it is a part of the process.

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Alice: With that anxiety comes this sort of fright, particularly for students that don't have a great relationship with an admissions officer to start out with. They're really concerned about how we start this conversation. Do I just reach out and say, ‘Hey, I'd like more money.’ Do I call them up? Do I drop by the office with no warning? (Don't do that.) Do you have any advice for our students on how to start this conversation, particularly if they're feeling a little angsty or a little awkward about it? 

Sydney: It’s not going to come as a surprise that my answer is pretty similarly along the lines of how to reach out and form relationships with schools. You participate in the vehicles and the mechanisms by which the law school has provided for you to do such a thing. There are so many different ways that schools have made it for you to participate in scholarship negotiation. 

Now, you don't receive the first offer and immediately say, I want to negotiate my scholarship. One, if you don't have any other offers that's real silly. And two, that's not really in good spirit. We're not negotiating simply because I'm supposed to negotiate my scholarship. You actually want to be genuine. You actually want to say, “I really do like this school, but maybe it's financially out of reach for me still, and so I'm going to negotiate or see if I can get more scholarship money.” 

We're still in the relationship-building process. This is not an adversarial or even transactional process. It is still about you as a student. It’s still about the school and the relationship and the fit. Does this school make financial sense? Does this offer allow me to go to law school in a way that is not going to cause undue stress or burden on my finances? 

When you have received maybe half of your offers and you can look to see what the financial aid or scholarship package offers are at different schools, then you can start to say, “I think I do wanna try to talk to this particular school about getting the same offer maybe as this other particular school, because that would make going to this particular school significantly more financially feasible.” 

There are a few different ways to do that. If the school does not have a form, then you can send an email. Now, hopefully, you were listening the entire year when we were talking about forming relations with admissions, because here's where it can come in handy. When you have this position or this situation in which you wanna negotiate, you can reach out to the admissions officer that you've been speaking to the whole time because you've been forming such a strong relationship, and they will hopefully point you in the right direction.

If you do not have any relationships with admissions, it can be overcome; you can start to form a relationship right now. There's no time like the present and just start to explain your situation. They admitted you. They like you. They want you to come to the school.

You wanna start out with, “Hey, I really would love to talk to someone about my scholarship package. I'm so grateful. However, it's still a little bit financially out of reach, and I would love to talk to someone about the options for a reconsideration of my scholarship award, especially in light of these other awards from these other schools.”

But a lot of schools will also have forms. If a school has a particular form in a way that they want you to do scholarship negotiations or scholarship appeals as they're sometimes called, follow that. That's always good when you can follow instructions. 

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Alice: What is the information that a student should make sure that they are providing if we're just sending that email?

Sydney: You want to have those scholarship award letters ready, perhaps ready to attach. It's gotta be an actual letter. It's gotta have the actual dollar amount on it, and it's gotta be really offered to you, and that's something that you wanna take in consideration. 

You also want to let them know if there are other factors. For example, let's say you really, really need to come back to California for family reasons or health reasons or anything like that. The schools that you're most considering are schools that fit those personal needs. Maybe you've got higher-ranked offers or even higher scholarship offers from east coast schools, but you really would like this California school to reconsider because you really need to move back home. 

Those are some circumstances that would be helpful to include in such a letter because what they're trying to do is look at yield. Yield is the percentage of students that they offer to that say yes to them. They are thinking as you're going through this scholarship negotiation, “If we give this person more money, are they really going to come?” 

The more that you can convince them that you’re really going to go to their school if they can make the money work, then you want to make sure that you have the information that shows them that you're genuine about it. 

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Hopefully, this glimpse into our podcast episode, How to Negotiate Law School Scholarships, was helpful for you! Find the full episode on Spotify, Audible, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.