Its midway through first semester of my very last year of law school. Allow me to warn (well, in this case its really just me venting....and disguising it as warning future law students) about the costs associated with law school.
No one tells you that when you budget for 3 years of law school, you really need to be budgeting for 4.
What do I mean by that?
Well your last year of law school, you start to realize how much money you've spent on textbooks the last two and a half years (90% of which are conveniently "outdated" and new versions have been printed) . I hate to say that I've probably spent $4,000-$5,000 on books. ($2,000 of which was my first semester...prior to learning to buy used books online, and NOT buying every recommended book).
And the worst part of this point in time during your law school education, is realization how much bar review courses are.
Lets talk about that a minute.
2-3 months after graduation, I get to take this dreaded multi-day test which will determine whether or not Nebraska feels I've learned anything during my last 3 years, and whether I am deemed competent enough to become someone's lawyers.
I'm not one to hope that the test would be longer than a couple of days, but lets be honest....that test isn't even as long as one semester of my finals....how in the world are they able to judge my ability to be lawyer in that amount of time.
Enough with that.
So there is the bar exam, which will be $600 (or something like that...I refuse to look up the cost). So I pay $600 to sit through this test....but for the 6 weeks prior to that test, I spend $3,000 to listen to an online lecture every day for that 6 weeks. That online lecture will hypothetically allow me to cram in 6 weeks everything I should have learned the last 3 years of law school.
The point of all this is to vent about all the extra cost that comes with law school.
Yes, I signed up for this...and I should have read the "small print" (well, or at least researched a prior law student's rantings similar to this).
So hopefully this will help prepare those of you looking into financing law school. I'm not trying to talk you out of it...but I do encourage you to suck up to your sickly distant cousins and uncles, in hopes they will leave you a small fortune in their will which will help you pay for those extra expenses not outlined in any law school orientation manual.
2 comments:
oooo girl I feel ya. Wait till they send your first schedule of loan payments---$2000 a month? yikes. have you tried looking at other bar review courses? I found that Kaplan was about $1000 cheaper for my state, but they don't have every state yet.
A good lawyer would have probably told you to read the fine print. Looks like you did learn something in Law school.
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