The costs associated with applying to law school can quickly add up.
You’ll need to pay $180 to take the LSAT or $205 for the GRE. Registering for the Credential Assembly Service — which is responsible for processing your transcripts, letters of recommendation and LSAT scores — will cost you $185. You will also need to pay $35 for each CAS law school report, which is required by most schools.
That means applying to one law school will likely cost you a minimum of $400.
These expenses do not include the individual fees admissions committees charge to review your applications. Application fees vary by school. For example, Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law charges $60, the University of California–Los Angeles School of Law charges $75 and Yale Law School charges $85.
Application fee waivers can help alleviate the toll. In fact, the Law School Admission Council created a fee waiver program “to assure that no person is denied access to law school because of the absolute inability to pay,” per the LSAC website. To qualify for a fee waiver, however, you must demonstrate “extreme need.”
While securing a fee waiver from LSAC is very difficult and only covers a small portion of the overall cost of a legal education, universities have joined the effort to make law school more affordable. Here are three potential ways to obtain an application fee waiver directly from law schools.
[Learn how to go to law school for free.]
1. Unsolicited: Law schools invite select candidates to consider applying to their schools. If you have made your information available on LSAC’s Candidate Referral Service or signed up for a school’s mailing list, you may receive an invitation.
In addition, a reader of this blog who has no current plans to take the LSAT recently said that he was invited to apply to Georgetown based on his GRE score. Applicants with competitive test scores and/or undergraduate GPAs are more likely to receive unsolicited fee waivers, particularly from higher-ranked programs.
To increase your chances of receiving an unsolicited fee waiver, Duke Law School advises prospective students to “be sure that your CRS account is active, your intended enrollment year is set correctly, and that you have either a self-reported or LSAC-calculated GPA.”
In terms of timing, LSAT test-takers may see a flood of invitations to apply for free after scores are released. Later in the cycle, more selective schools may reach out if you haven’t yet submitted and your test scores indicate you would be competitive for their application pool.
[Pick a cost-efficient law school.]
Applicants are often suspicious of these unsolicited fee waivers and question whether schools are genuinely interested in them specifically or just “trolling” for submissions. Some even seem offended to have received a mass email or generic invitation.
But a fee waiver is not a cause for offense. Admissions committees do not want to go through the effort of reviewing an application of someone who is applying solely because the application fee was waived and are unlikely to extend an invitation to someone unqualified.
If you receive an unsolicited fee waiver, apply only to schools you would actually consider attending. Use a fee waiver as an opportunity to research a program and see if it is a good fit. If so, then be grateful that you can forego the additional expense. If not, then there’s no reason to submit an application for consideration.
2. Solicited: If you haven’t received a fee waiver from a school you are seriously considering, you can request one either in person during a law school forum or online.
When making a request, be respectful. You do not want to hurt your chances of admission by approaching an admissions committee with an entitled attitude. Include your name, relevant test scores and GPAs, and your LSAC account number. It doesn’t hurt to briefly mention why you are excited by that particular school.
Be aware that some programs do not process application fee requests. Check websites for guidance. Columbia Law School, for example, explicitly states that it “does not process requests for fee waivers” unless applicants are currently enrolled undergraduate students at Columbia.
[Read about law schools that shell out deep tuition discounts to students.]
3. Automatic: To encourage applicants to submit earlier in the cycle, some programs offer automatic fee waivers. For example, the University of Southern California Gould School of Law waives the application fee for applicants who apply by the Feb. 1 priority deadline even if applications are incomplete when submitted.
Some schools, like the University of Notre Dame Law School, offer fee waivers if you apply directly to the program rather than through the LSAC application.
Participants in certain organizations or scholarships like the U.S. military, Teach for America, Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, the Fulbright Program and Rhodes Scholarship may also receive automatic fee waivers from certain schools, such as the University of Chicago Law School, the University of Texas–Austin School of Law and the University of California–Berkeley School of Law.
Before you apply anywhere, research your options and see if you can reduce some of the costs associated with your journey to law school.
For more information on strategizing your law school applications, contact me at lawadmissionslowdown@usnews.com.
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