UC Hastings ($105k) vs Notre Dame ($30k) Forum

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theurbanzone

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UC Hastings ($105k) vs Notre Dame ($30k)

Post by theurbanzone » Sun Mar 04, 2018 5:54 pm

I am deciding between Notre Dame and UC Hastings. I am from California and am open to working on either coasts (or in Chicago). The $85,000 difference in scholarship offer is stark, but given San Francisco's high cost of living, I'm approximating the difference to be closer to $60-70k (if cost of living is taken into consideration).

Is Notre Dame's higher rank worth the $60-70k in difference? Notre Dame's big law numbers are not exciting but Hastings is at below 15% each year. I am older and have a strong big law network (personal and professional relationships) in San Francisco (met through years of work and extra curricular activities at Cal). From an employment perspective, I know it would be a bit hard to come back to California, but I don't think it's impossible. Also, I don't want to go into my 1L year thinking of transferring, but would doing well at Notre Dame put me in a better position to transfer to a T-5/10?

I wanted to think this through and would appreciate your thoughts. Thanks!

CALaw717

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Re: UC Hastings ($105k) vs Notre Dame ($30k)

Post by CALaw717 » Thu Mar 08, 2018 6:10 pm

theurbanzone wrote:I am deciding between Notre Dame and UC Hastings. I am from California and am open to working on either coasts (or in Chicago). The $85,000 difference in scholarship offer is stark, but given San Francisco's high cost of living, I'm approximating the difference to be closer to $60-70k (if cost of living is taken into consideration).

Is Notre Dame's higher rank worth the $60-70k in difference? Notre Dame's big law numbers are not exciting but Hastings is at below 15% each year. I am older and have a strong big law network (personal and professional relationships) in San Francisco (met through years of work and extra curricular activities at Cal). From an employment perspective, I know it would be a bit hard to come back to California, but I don't think it's impossible. Also, I don't want to go into my 1L year thinking of transferring, but would doing well at Notre Dame put me in a better position to transfer to a T-5/10?

I wanted to think this through and would appreciate your thoughts. Thanks!
With that scholarship, in-state tuition at Hastings would just be $9k/year. That's really cheap! I'm a Hastings student. Feel free to PM me. I'd attend Hastings and our big law numbers for the class of 2016 (2017 not yet published) was actually 19.6%. The ABA considers firms of 100+ attorneys as big law. I can't open up the file here right now, but Notre Dame probably isn't enough above 20% to warrant paying such a premium especially when their tuition is $10k/year more than Hastings to combine with the $85k difference in scholarship. http://employmentsummary.abaquestionnaire.org/

Now we're talking about a $115k attendance price difference. If you live in The Tower subsidized housing you can rent an efficiency studio for about $1,300/month including utilities. Not bad for SF. Especially considering you'd want to practice in CA, I'd attend Hastings for $9k/year. There are opportunities to transfer to top 10 schools although only to the top 8% of our class. One year recently we sent 20 transfers of a class of about 300 just to Berkeley, although now those students would get a scholarship bump so if your grades are good enough to get you into Berkeley as a transfer, you may see the $35k scholarship offer go up to a full tuition scholarship offer for 2L and 3L year. Even for a very smart person, you can't count on being in the top 8% at Hastings. One final thought - if your numbers are good enough to get you into Notre Dame with some scholarship, did you apply to UC Irvine? They have decent big law placement and would be a much better school to go to with a goal of CA big law than Notre Dame. Their in-state tuition is also $10k/year less than Notre Dame and you can probably get at least a $10k/year tuition scholarship there as well if you got into ND with $10k/year.

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