Yes — for a large share of Fordham Law's graduating class, and the pack's placement numbers make the pipeline concrete rather than aspirational. Of the 420 graduates in the reporting class, 188 (44.8%) went to firms of 501 or more attorneys, the size category that defines "Big Law." Add the 24 graduates (5.7%) who landed at firms of 251-500 attorneys, and just over half the class — around 212 graduates — started at a firm large enough to be considered elite or near-elite by market size alone.
Big Law is the largest single outcome, but it isn't the only one. The pack's firm-size distribution shows 21 graduates at firms of 101-250 attorneys, 13 at firms of 51-100, 12 at firms of 26-50, 5 at firms of 11-25, and 17 at firms of 1-10 — a real, if smaller, tail of graduates at boutique and small-firm practices. Twenty-eight graduates (6.7%) went into government and 22 (5.2%) into public interest work, while another 22 moved into business and industry roles. Twenty-seven graduates secured clerkships: 13 federal and 14 state or local — a meaningful credential-building path for students aiming at litigation-heavy Big Law practices later, since many large firms recruit clerks a cycle or two out of school. Across all these categories, 90% of graduates were employed in full-time, long-term, bar-passage-required or J.D.-advantage positions, and the pack identifies New York as the largest employment market for the class.
It matters more than almost any other fact in this section. Fordham Law sits in Manhattan's Lincoln Square, inside a purpose-built law school building (designed by Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, opened in 2014 with Justice Sonia Sotomayor presiding over the ribbon-cutting) that puts students within a short commute of the same Midtown and Downtown towers where the city's largest firms are headquartered. New York's Big Law market is the deepest in the country, and a New York-based J.D. program gets structural advantages that a school located elsewhere cannot easily replicate: on-campus interview programs staffed by firms that already recruit locally, judges and partners teaching as adjuncts, and a alumni base concentrated in the same city where most students want to practice. The pack's alumni list reflects that concentration at the top of the profession — Kim Koopersmith ('84) chairs Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, one of the country's largest firms, and multiple Fordham-trained judges, including Loretta Preska, Vincent Briccetti, and Cathy Seibel, sit on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, a court whose docket and clerkships are closely tied to the same Big Law firms hiring Fordham 3Ls.
Not based on Fordham's reported numbers. The school's first-time bar pass rate was 90.8%, well above the state average of 86.78% for the same administration, and the ultimate pass rate within two years reached 96.39%. For a Big Law-bound graduate, that first-time pass rate matters directly: most large firms condition a permanent offer on passing the bar on the first attempt, and Fordham's rate sitting nearly four points above the state average suggests the bar is not a major bottleneck for students who have already secured an offer.
A 44.8% Big Law placement rate is the single most important fact for anyone choosing Fordham specifically to chase a large-firm career — it means close to half the class, not a small elite subset, ends up at a 501+ attorney firm. But it also means more than half the class does not, landing instead in mid-size and small firms, government, business, industry, or public-interest roles, so applicants should treat Fordham as a strong New York Big Law feeder rather than an automatic one.
Fordham's enrolled class sits on an LSAT band of 165 (25th percentile), 168 (median), and 170 (75th percentile), paired with a GPA band of 3.60/3.79/3.88 — those six numbers are the clearest planning anchors a prospective applicant has, and they should be read as reference points against the school's own class, not as a probability of admission. Fordham received 8,811 applications and extended 1,429 offers for a reported acceptance rate of 16.22%, filling a class of 444 students (374 full-time, 70 part-time).
A 168 LSAT places an applicant at the exact midpoint of Fordham's enrolled class — half the class scored higher, half lower. A 170 sits at the 75th percentile, meaning only about a quarter of enrolled students scored higher; a 165 sits at the 25th percentile, meaning three-quarters scored higher. The same logic applies to GPA: a 3.79 is the class midpoint, while a 3.88 places a candidate in the top quarter and a 3.60 in the bottom quarter on that metric. Because Fordham reports both bands, an applicant whose LSAT is above the 75th percentile but whose GPA is below the 25th (or vice versa) is presenting a mixed file relative to the class, which is useful to know but says nothing on its own about outcome.
Money tracks numbers closely at Fordham. Of the enrolled class, 87% received some form of grant, with a median full-time grant of $35,000 a year — a substantial offset against the school's cost of attendance. Among grant recipients, the pack shows 52% received awards covering less than half of tuition, 35% received awards covering half to full tuition, and notably 0% received a full-tuition scholarship. That last figure is worth sitting with: even an applicant scoring above Fordham's 75th percentile on both LSAT and GPA should not expect a full ride, since the school's reported data shows no full-tuition awards in this cycle. The practical takeaway is that Fordham's grant distribution is concentrated in smaller awards, with the school's own numbers showing more recipients in the less-than-half-tuition band than in the half-to-full-tuition band, and no full-tuition awards reported in this cycle. Applicants comparing multiple offers should read Fordham's number against the general mechanics of scholarship negotiation (see our scholarship negotiation guide) rather than assuming any specific school-to-school match.
It changes the scale of competition but not the relevant benchmark. With 8,811 applications chasing 444 seats, Fordham's pool is large by any measure, but the 16.22% acceptance rate describes the whole applicant pool, not any individual applicant's chances — this guide does not translate that rate into odds for a given LSAT/GPA combination, because Fordham does not publish admission rates broken out by score band. What the pack does support is the shape of the class Fordham actually enrolled: a tightly clustered LSAT band of 165-170 and GPA band of 3.60-3.88, with the bulk of financial aid flowing toward files at or above the median. Applicants deciding whether and where their numbers fit should treat those two bands — not the overall acceptance rate — as the operative reference points, and pair them with general guidance on how LSAT prep timelines and application cycles typically work (see our LSAT study and application timeline guides) when planning a cycle around Fordham specifically.
Illustrative: 3-year borrowing at the 2026-27 federal rate (8.07%) over 10 years; your figures depend on your offer and salary.
Fordham J.D. graduates posted a 90.8% first-time bar passage rate, compared with an 86.78% average across all takers of the same test in the reporting cycle — a gap of about four percentage points. Looked at over a longer horizon, the school's ultimate two-year passage rate climbs to 96.39%, meaning the overwhelming majority of graduates who don't clear the bar on the first attempt do so on a second try.
The pack does not spell out a mechanism for the gap, and it would be a mistake to invent one. What the data does show is context that plausibly supports strong bar outcomes without proving causation: Fordham runs 271 available law clinic seats (268 filled) and 1,378 filled simulation-course seats, meaning a large share of the class is doing applied, practice-based work well before graduation rather than encountering practical skills for the first time in a bar-prep course. The school also reports 308 filled field placements, another channel through which students spend time in live legal work.
Geography is part of the story too, even if it isn't a causal explanation the pack can confirm: Fordham sits in Manhattan's Lincoln Square, and New York is listed as its largest employment destination for graduates. Students studying for the New York bar are doing so while embedded in New York practice, surrounded by New York-focused coursework, journals, and clinics, though the pack does not quantify any effect this may have.
A four-point spread over the relevant jurisdiction's average is a meaningful, quotable data point, but treat both numbers as a single cycle's snapshot rather than a permanent trend line — bar administration, question format, and jurisdictional pass-rate averages do shift from year to year. Prospective applicants should also remember that New York, like many UBE jurisdictions, is moving toward the NCBE's NextGen bar exam later in the decade; anyone using this comparison to plan four years out should verify the current-cycle passage numbers and format rules directly with the New York Board of Law Examiners before treating this gap as fixed.
Fordham's evening program is not a consolation option — it's the school's own stated point of pride, marketed as the #1-ranked evening J.D. program in New York City and #3 nationally, with the school separately noting it holds the highest-ranked part-time law program in New York state and was ranked 2nd nationally for part-time study in a 2021 U.S. News edition. For a working professional weighing a law degree against a full-time career, that's a rare instance of a part-time track carrying its own national reputation rather than functioning as an afterthought to the day division.
Structurally, the part-time division is a real fraction of the class: 70 of the 444 total J.D. seats in the entering class are part-time, against 374 full-time seats. Part-time tuition is billed at $58,560 annually, compared with $78,078 for full-time — a lower per-year sticker price that reflects a lighter annual credit load stretched over more years, not a discount on the total degree.
The data available does not break out LSAT/GPA medians, bar passage, or employment outcomes separately for the part-time division; those published figures in this pack are school-wide. So a prospective evening-division applicant can point to Fordham's evening-specific ranking and to the raw size of the part-time cohort, but cannot yet point to part-time-specific bar or employment numbers because the pack doesn't disaggregate them. If that breakdown matters to your decision, it's worth asking the admissions office directly whether part-time and full-time outcomes are tracked separately.
What is verifiable is that the school treats the evening J.D. as integrated into the same institution, not a separate credential: the same journals, clinics (up to scheduling constraints), and centers listed elsewhere in Fordham's offerings are part of the same Lincoln Square campus the evening students attend. For someone balancing employment or family obligations against a law degree in one of the country's largest legal markets, Fordham's evening division is a structurally serious option with its own national ranking — not a lesser or informal version of the day program.
Lincoln Square Legal Services is Fordham's in-house clinic law firm — a structure that puts students inside an actual practicing legal office attached to the law school, rather than a simulated classroom exercise. Alongside it, the Federal Habeas Clinic, led by Clinical Associate Professor Adam Murphy, gives students direct experience on federal habeas litigation, a specialized and high-stakes area of practice not every law school offers as a standing clinical option.
These two named clinics sit within a much larger applied-learning footprint: Fordham reports 271 available law clinic seats with 268 filled, 308 filled field placements, and 1,378 filled simulation-course seats, plus 33 co-curricular offerings. Taken together, that's a very large volume of hands-on legal work embedded across the student body, not a boutique offering available to only a handful of students each year.
Beyond the clinics, Fordham operates six named centers and institutes: the Leitner Center for International Law and Justice, the Public Interest Resource Center (PIRC), the Feerick Center for Social Justice, the Center on Race, Law and Justice, the Fashion Law Institute, and the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics. Each maps to a defined faculty leadership and subject focus rather than existing as a name-only label: the Stein Center is directed by Professor Bruce A. Green, and the Fashion Law Institute connects to the school's own listed Fashion Law concentration — one of the more distinctive niche offerings among its ten named concentrations, which also include Banking, Corporate, & Finance Law, International Dispute Resolution, and Competition Law.
PIRC in particular carries an external credential worth noting: the pack records that it won the ABA's 2008 Pro Bono Publico Award, making Fordham only the second university-affiliated recipient in the award's history — a marker of sustained institutional investment in public-interest infrastructure, not a one-off achievement.
For a student choosing a concentration or trying to line up in-school experience with a target practice area, Fordham's structure means named centers, named clinics, and named concentrations are aligned rather than scattered: someone interested in international law has the Leitner Center and an International Law & Justice concentration to draw on; someone interested in fashion or IP-adjacent work has the Fashion Law Institute alongside the IP & Information Technology Law concentration. The pack doesn't provide placement or employment outcomes tied specifically to any one clinic or center, so applicants should treat this as evidence of institutional depth and infrastructure rather than a guarantee of a particular job outcome.
Fordham Law's Jesuit motto, 'In the Service of Others,' traces back to the school's founding in 1905; Paul Fuller became its first dean in 1907, and the institution has treated access as part of its identity from the start. Originally housed in New York's downtown Financial District before relocating to the current Lincoln Center campus, Fordham has a documented history of admitting students excluded from other law schools because of religion, gender, race, or class. That history has a concrete date: on September 12, 1918, the Fordham Law faculty voted to admit women, and eight women enrolled that fall alongside 312 men — a milestone the school marked with a centennial observance in 2018.
The mission shows up in present-day institutions, not just archival footnotes. The Public Interest Resource Center (PIRC) won the ABA's Pro Bono Publico Award in 2008, making Fordham only the second university ever to receive it. The Feerick Center for Social Justice and the in-house Lincoln Square Legal Services clinic extend that public-service commitment into live casework for students. When Fordham marked its Centennial in 2005-06, the school raised $20 million and created six new academic chairs — an investment cycle that coincided with the planning of the current Pei Cobb Freed & Partners-designed law building, which broke ground in 2011 and opened in 2014 with a dedication ceremony featuring then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and a ribbon-cutting led by Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
For an applicant weighing a Jesuit, access-oriented history against Fordham's very competitive current admissions numbers, the throughline is that the school's public-interest infrastructure — PIRC, the Feerick Center, and the in-house clinic — is longstanding, not a recent marketing addition.
What Fordham's most prominent alumni share is a JD from a single New York City institution and, disproportionately, careers spent in that same city's courts, city hall, and executive suites. The federal bench alone reads like a roster of the Southern District of New York and the Second Circuit: Chief Judge Irving Kaufman ('31) and Judge Denny Chin ('78) both sat on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, while Loretta Preska ('73) and Cathy Seibel ('85) became SDNY judges and Vincent Briccetti ('80) joined the SDNY bench as well. Chin has also returned to Fordham as a visiting/adjunct professor, putting a sitting federal appellate judge in the classroom.
That judiciary pipeline isn't just historical: Fordham's most recent graduating class reported 13 federal clerkships and 14 state and local clerkships, a meaningful concentration for a class of 420 graduates.
Outside the courts, Fordham alumni have held New York City's mayoralty (Vincent Impellitteri, '24) and the New York governorship (Malcolm Wilson, '36), plus U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell ('38) and members of Congress including Jerrold Nadler ('78), Geraldine Ferraro ('60), and Thomas Suozzi. In the private sector, the same public-facing pattern extends to corporate leadership — Kevin Burke ('77) rose to chairman, president, and CEO of Consolidated Edison, and Kim Koopersmith ('84) chairs Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, a firm in the 501+ attorney category Fordham places nearly half its graduating class into. The common denominator is less a specific industry than a durable, generations-deep footprint in New York's legal, civic, and business institutions.
Fordham's most recently reported entering class carried a median LSAT of 168 and a median GPA of 3.79, with a 25th-75th LSAT range of 165-170 and a 25th-75th GPA range of 3.6-3.88. Treat those numbers as planning anchors, not predictions: a 165 sits at Fordham's 25th percentile, a 168 is squarely at the median, and a 170 places a file at the 75th percentile on the LSAT axis — useful context for where an application lands relative to the rest of the pool, not a statement about odds of admission.
On the LSAT itself. As of the 2025-26 cycle, the test consists of two scored Logical Reasoning sections and one scored Reading Comprehension section, with Logic Games removed from the format since August 2024; a separate, unscored Argumentative Writing sample is submitted online. Because law schools consider an applicant's highest score, and because Fordham's 165-170 range leaves real room to move a file from the 25th to the 75th percentile, focused prep with official practice material over several months is the standard approach for closing that gap — see our LSAT prep guide for the mechanics. (Verify current test format and timing details, as these are periodically updated.)
On GPA and the full file. With a 25th-75th GPA band of 3.6-3.88, Fordham's file review clearly has room for both a strong-but-not-perfect GPA paired with a high LSAT and the reverse; there is no single formula, but an applicant well below the 3.6 floor should expect the rest of the file — LSAT, narrative, work experience — to carry more weight.
On scholarships and cost. Fordham reports that 87% of the entering class receives grant aid, with a median grant of $35,000 for full-time students. Against Fordham's full-time tuition of roughly $78,078 plus estimated living costs pushing full cost of attendance to about $116,602, a median grant covers a meaningful slice of tuition but not most of the total cost. The aid is also concentrated in smaller awards: 52% of grant recipients get less than half-tuition scholarships, 35% get half-to-full-tuition awards, and no reported recipients receive full-tuition awards. Scholarship negotiation conversations (see our scholarship negotiation guide) tend to matter most for applicants assessing where their numbers sit relative to Fordham's published medians, though the pack does not break out grant bands by LSAT or GPA. Because federal Grad PLUS loans are being eliminated for new borrowers and direct unsubsidized loans are capped, applicants should also model the gap between grant aid and total cost of attendance before enrolling — our loans and PSLF guide and worth-it framework walk through that math in detail.
For the cycle feeding a Fall 2027 start, Fordham opens JD applications on September 15, 2026, sets an Early Action deadline of October 15, 2026 with decisions released by December 15, 2026, and holds a Regular Decision deadline of March 15, 2027; the application fee is $75. (Confirm these dates on Fordham's admissions site before applying, since deadlines can shift year to year.)
Fordham's Early Action deadline lets an applicant get a decision months earlier than the regular deadline, which matters most for candidates who already have a complete, polished file (LSAT score, transcripts, letters, personal statement) well before the October deadline. Applicants still finishing a retake, waiting on a fall-semester GPA bump, or refining their personal statement often do better filing later and stronger rather than early and rushed.
Because law school admissions at most schools function on a rolling basis within these windows, filing earlier in a given round is generally advantageous even when a hard deadline is months away — later applicants are competing for a shrinking share of seats and scholarship funds in the same class. For a full walkthrough of how to sequence LSAT prep, recommendation letters, and essays around deadlines like Fordham's, see our general law school application timeline guide.
It means the sticker price is not the real starting point for most admitted students: 87% of Fordham Law's full-time students receive some grant aid, and the median grant among recipients is $35,000 a year. Against Fordham's full-time tuition and fees of roughly $79,248 and a total estimated cost of attendance near $116,602 (tuition, fees, and living expenses), a median grant knocks the tuition bill down meaningfully — though even with that median award, a student is still looking at something in the neighborhood of $80,000 or more per year once fees and living costs are added back in. That's the real planning number, not the headline sticker price.
But "median grant" hides a wide spread, and Fordham's own distribution shows why the spread matters. Of students who receive aid, 52% get awards covering less than half of tuition, while 35% get half-to-full tuition covered. Notably, 0% of students report a full-tuition award — so at Fordham, a truly free ride is not part of the realistic scholarship landscape, even for the strongest applicants. This matters when you're benchmarking offers: if you're comparing a Fordham package against a full-tuition offer elsewhere, understand you're comparing apples to a fruit that doesn't grow on Fordham's tree.
Where you land in that distribution tracks closely with where your numbers sit against Fordham's admitted profile. The school's 25th/50th/75th LSAT percentiles are 165/168/170, with GPA at 3.60/3.79/3.88. As a general rule at merit-aid-driven schools, an applicant whose LSAT and GPA sit at or above the 75th percentile (170+/3.88+) is a more credible candidate for the upper half of that grant distribution, while a candidate at or below the 25th percentile (165/3.60) sits in the range associated with the smaller-grant or no-grant pool. This is a positioning statement, not a probability — Fordham does not publish grant amounts by LSAT band, so treat your own numbers against these medians as your best planning anchor, not a guarantee.
One more piece worth naming honestly: many law schools issue "conditional" scholarships that shrink or disappear if a student's first-year GPA falls below a set curve threshold, effectively re-admitting only the top of the class to the discount. Fordham's own reporting on this point shows no students recorded as having had scholarships reduced in the last three reporting cycles — a pattern that is either a sign Fordham doesn't run an aggressive conditional-scholarship structure or reflects incomplete public reporting; the data pack does not make the distinction clear enough to say definitively which. Before you sign an enrollment deposit anywhere, get the exact conditional terms in writing and ask directly whether your specific offer has a GPA trigger attached — a scholarship that vanishes after 1L year changes the whole cost calculus. For the general mechanics of comparing and negotiating aid packages across schools, see the scholarship negotiation guide at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation.
The honest answer is: it depends heavily on which Fordham outcome you're buying, and the data pack gives you real numbers to run that math yourself rather than take on faith. At a full cost of attendance near $116,602 a year, three years at Fordham without any grant aid approaches $350,000 in total cost — a number that only makes straightforward financial sense against a reasonably high probability of a large starting salary, a lower net price via scholarship, or a strong pull toward public-service loan forgiveness.
On the strength-of-outcome side, Fordham's numbers are genuinely solid for a New York City law school outside the very top of the rankings (U.S. News 2026-27 has it at #42). 90% of graduates landed in jobs requiring bar passage or a JD advantage, 44.8% went into firms of 501+ attorneys, and the school's own first-time bar pass rate of 90.8% comfortably outpaced the state average of 86.78%, with a two-year ultimate pass rate of 96.39%. New York is Fordham's largest employment market by a wide margin, which is exactly the market that feeds that Big Law placement rate. For an applicant whose target outcome is a large NYC firm, a 44.8% Big Law placement rate is a meaningfully strong signal — roughly two in five graduates land there, which is a very different starting point than a school where that number is in the single digits.
For the applicant who scores at or above Fordham's medians (168 LSAT/3.79 GPA), a $35,000 median grant lowers the effective price relative to Fordham's full cost of attendance, and a Big Law salary is one factor to weigh against the resulting six-figure debt. Whether this path is "worth it" depends on performing competitively enough in the 1L curve to be recruited for that market, a judgment call each applicant needs to make for themselves.
For the applicant targeting government or public-interest work, the calculus is tighter. Only 6.7% of Fordham's 2024 graduates went into government roles and 5.2% into public interest — meaningful outcomes, but a much smaller share of the class than Big Law. Federal loan changes effective July 2026 cap Direct Unsubsidized borrowing at $50,000 a year and $200,000 aggregate, which will not cover Fordham's full cost of attendance for most students without scholarship help, savings, or private loans. PSLF still forgives remaining federal loans tax-free after 120 qualifying payments in public-service work, but only if the borrower actively enrolls in the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) rather than defaulting into the standard plan, which earns no PSLF credit. An applicant planning a public-interest career should model their Fordham debt load against a public-interest salary and RAP/PSLF specifically — not against the Big Law figures — before assuming the degree pays for itself. See /law-school-loans-and-pslf for how those mechanics work in detail.
For the applicant near Fordham's 25th percentile (165 LSAT/3.60 GPA) paying close to full sticker price, the honest verdict is the most cautious one: without a strong grant, and without a clear plan for either Big Law recruiting or a PSLF-qualifying public-service track, $116,602 a year is a serious bet that should be weighed against other admits with better aid, and against the general worth-it framework at /is-law-school-worth-it. Fordham's employment and bar numbers are real strengths — but they are strengths that reward specific outcomes (NYC Big Law, or a public-service track paired with RAP/PSLF), not a guarantee that attaches to the degree itself.