Roger Williams, founded in 1993 in Bristol, is the sole ABA-accredited law school in Rhode Island, and that geographic monopoly shapes almost everything about the practical, in-state character of the degree. If you want a JD earned inside Rhode Island, tied to Rhode Island's courts, agencies, and bar leaders, RWU is the only option.
That shows up directly in outcomes data: RWU's own reporting lists "Rhode Island" as the largest single employment destination for its graduates, and the school places a meaningful share of each class into state and local judicial clerkships — 23 clerkships out of 169 total graduates in the most recent reporting year, a notable concentration for a class this size. Government work (13 graduates, 7.7%) and public interest positions (19 graduates, 11.2%) round out a placement pattern that leans heavily on relationships built inside Rhode Island's relatively compact legal community, where a single law school's alumni network can carry outsized weight in hiring.
The curriculum reflects the state's economy as much as its bench. Rhode Island's coastline and maritime industry are baked into RWU's academic identity: the school runs a Marine and Environmental Law Track and a separate Maritime Law concentration, houses the Marine Affairs Institute and the Rhode Island Sea Grant Legal Program, and publishes the Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce. A joint JD/Master of Marine Affairs is offered with the University of Rhode Island — a partnership that only makes sense because RWU is the state's only law school working alongside URI's oceanography and policy programs. Students interested in coastal resilience, fisheries regulation, or ocean policy have a genuine niche pipeline here that a generic regional law school wouldn't build.
RWU emphasizes accessible faculty (Princeton Review ranks it #13 nationally for faculty accessibility and quality of teaching) and hands-on lawyering skills.
The flip side of being a one-state monopoly is market size. Rhode Island is a small state, and the in-state legal job market is correspondingly small: RWU's firm-size distribution shows the overwhelming majority of employed graduates land at firms of 1-25 attorneys (57 of the reporting class), not at large regional or national firms. A student who wants a big-city, big-firm career from day one is not the target user of this monopoly — the value proposition is strongest for someone who wants to practice in or near Rhode Island, values direct access to that state's courts and clinics, or is drawn to the school's specific maritime and environmental niche. For everyone else, being the only law school in the state is a fact worth weighing against whether Rhode Island itself, and its adjoining Massachusetts/Connecticut markets, is where you actually intend to build a career.
RWU's most recently reported first-time bar passage rate is 65.19%, compared to a state average of 77.46% — a roughly 12-point gap that any applicant should look at directly rather than around. The honest starting point is where RWU's admitted class sits academically: the school's LSAT range runs 147 (25th percentile) to 154 (75th percentile), with a median of 150, and GPA runs 3.02 to 3.73, median 3.43. Those numbers sit below the typical LSAT/GPA profile of applicants at bar-passage-strong schools, and LSAT and undergraduate GPA are the strongest known predictors of bar outcomes across legal education generally — so a portion of the first-time gap is attributable to the entering academic profile RWU works with, not solely to what happens after enrollment.
The data pack also shows that a meaningful share of each entering class experiences a change in scholarship status tied to academic performance: in 2024-25, 12 of 89 entering scholarship students (13.5%) had their awards reduced after year one; in 2023-24 it was 13 of 94 (13.8%); in 2022-23, 17 of 134 (12.7%). Conditional scholarships tied to GPA benchmarks are common across law schools and are disclosed by ABA rule, but the consistent low-teens reduction rate at RWU is a useful signal: a real slice of each class is being told, formally, that their first-year academic performance fell below the benchmark the school set — the same academic risk factors that tend to correlate with bar-exam difficulty later.
Context also matters on the other side of the comparison. The pack separately notes that Rhode Island's own first-time bar passage rate for all test-takers in 2023 was reported at 57.89% — a very different number from the 77.46% state average cited alongside RWU's 65.19% figure. These two Rhode Island statistics almost certainly come from different measurement periods or different denominators (e.g., a single-year state cohort versus a multi-jurisdiction ABA compilation of all test-takers from RWU's graduating class, who may have tested in several UBE states), and the pack does not reconcile them. Applicants should treat the 65% vs. 77% comparison as directionally real but should verify both figures against RWU's most current ABA 509 disclosure and Rhode Island's official bar examiner reports before treating either number as fixed.
The more encouraging number in the pack is RWU's two-year ultimate bar passage rate: 76.16%. That means roughly three-quarters of graduates who don't pass on the first attempt do pass within two years, closing most of the gap with the reported state average over time. First-time pass rates measure a single high-stakes test on a single date; ultimate pass rates measure whether a graduate becomes licensed at all, which is the number that determines whether the degree converts into a practicing law career. A 65% first-time rate paired with a 76% two-year rate tells a specific story: RWU graduates who struggle on the first attempt disproportionately pass on a retake rather than never passing — which is a different, less alarming pattern than a school where first-time and ultimate rates stay far apart.
This also connects to employment outcomes. RWU reports that 76.3% of graduates are employed in full-time, long-term positions that either require bar passage or are JD-advantage roles — a figure that depends on eventual licensure more than a single sitting. Because the UBE is used in many Northeast jurisdictions (verify Rhode Island's current bar structure and any state-specific components, as these rules do shift), a graduate who initially tests in Rhode Island can often carry a passing UBE score to other UBE states, which gives a delayed pass some portability rather than confining a graduate strictly to one state's market.
For an applicant reading these numbers as planning anchors rather than a probability statement: a file that sits above RWU's 75th percentile LSAT (154) and GPA (3.73) bands is a different academic starting point than one at the 25th percentile (147 LSAT / 3.02 GPA), and the bar-passage data suggests that starting point is not irrelevant to eventual outcomes. The clinics, the 50-hour pro bono requirement, and the mandatory bar-adjacent coursework are real supports RWU has built into the JD, but the school does not publicly report a structured bar-prep curriculum or bar-support program in this data pack, so applicants concerned about this gap should ask the school directly what academic and bar-preparation support is provided beyond the required curriculum.
RWU Law's most recent entering class reports an LSAT range of 147 at the 25th percentile, 150 at the median, and 154 at the 75th percentile — so a 150 places you squarely in the middle of the class, a 154 puts you above three-quarters of your classmates, and a 147 sits at the bottom quarter of the admitted range rather than outside it. GPA tracks a similarly wide band: 3.02 at the 25th percentile, 3.43 at the median, and 3.73 at the 75th percentile, meaning the school is evaluating a broad mix of academic records rather than clustering around one narrow profile.
That width matters for how you should read your own numbers. RWU received 1,003 applications for its most recent cycle and extended 615 offers, an overall acceptance rate of about 61.3%, then enrolled a class of 189 full-time students (RWU does not enroll part-time students). An acceptance rate in that range signals a program that is evaluating applicants individually rather than filtering primarily on a hard numeric cutoff — which is consistent with a 25th-75th LSAT spread of seven full points. Your file is being read, not just scored.
Where you land in that 147-154 band should function as a planning anchor, not a prediction. If your LSAT is at or above 154, you're in the top quarter of the reported range — a point worth pairing with the cost section below rather than treating in isolation. If you're at 150, you're at the reported median, meaning roughly half the class tested higher and half lower. If you're at 147, you're at the 25th percentile — inside the range RWU is actively admitting from, but on the end of it where GPA, work experience, a personal statement, or another part of the file is doing more of the work.
RWU is the only law school in Rhode Island, which shapes who applies: a meaningful share of the pool is likely drawn by in-state or regional access rather than national rankings, since RWU is ranked No. 171 in the 2026-27 U.S. News rankings. That context doesn't change your numeric positioning.
One practical implication: because the spread is wide in both directions, a jump of even a few LSAT points can move you across a full quartile at this school. Someone retaking the test and moving from 148 to 151, for instance, moves from below-median to above-median territory in RWU's own reported range — a shift worth understanding before you finalize a submission strategy or decide whether to sit for the LSAT again. For mechanics of scoring and retake timing, see the shared guide on how to study for the LSAT.
RWU's own published estimate puts full-time cost of attendance at $74,706 for a year, and roughly one in eight entering scholarship recipients had that award reduced after their first year in the most recent reporting cycle. Those two numbers — the sticker price and the retention risk — are the two facts every applicant weighing RWU needs to hold at once, because the second one can turn the first one into a much bigger bill mid-degree.
What $74,706 actually is. RWU's full-time tuition is $47,400 per year, with $1,690 in mandatory fees, and the school estimates $25,616 in off-campus living costs for a total of $74,706. RWU describes itself as the best-priced ABA-accredited private law school in the Northeast, and on tuition alone that framing is plausible for the region — but the all-in estimate still runs to roughly $224,000 over three years before any interest accrues, which is the number that belongs in your planning math, not the tuition line by itself.
How scholarships actually land. RWU reports that 65% of students receive some grant aid, with a median first-year grant of $28,000 — more than half of tuition before fees. Within that 65%, the distribution is uneven: 24% of students receive an award covering less than half of tuition, 38% receive an award covering between half and the full tuition amount, and only 3% receive a full-tuition award. In practice, this means most aided students are landing in the partial-to-substantial range rather than at either extreme — a $28,000 median grant against $47,400 tuition covers a meaningful majority of the tuition line, but it still leaves the bulk of the $25,616 living-cost estimate, plus the remaining tuition and fees, to be financed some other way.
The scholarship cliff, in RWU's own numbers. Conditional scholarships — awards that require maintaining a set GPA to keep the full amount — are common at law schools, and RWU discloses its retention data directly. In the 2024-25 cycle, 89 students entered with conditional scholarships and 12 had their award reduced, a 13.5% reduction rate. That's consistent with the two prior years: 13 of 94 entering students (13.8%) in 2023-24, and 17 of 134 entering students (12.7%) in 2022-23. Read together, the pattern is stable — a bit above one in eight conditional-scholarship recipients loses some or all of that award after the notoriously curve-driven 1L year, three years running.
That consistency is actually useful information: it means the risk isn't a one-year anomaly, and it isn't trivial either. If you're offered a conditional award, the honest way to plan is to build a budget assuming you keep it, and a separate, worse-case budget assuming you land in the bottom slice of the class and lose part of it — because roughly one in eight of your future scholarship classmates will find themselves in exactly that position after finals.
What this means for your decision. A student admitted at or above RWU's 75th percentile LSAT (154) is the profile most likely to be offered a larger, more durable award, which changes the effective price of attendance substantially relative to the $74,706 sticker figure. A student closer to the 25th percentile (147) should assume the sticker figure, or something close to it, is the realistic planning number, and should scrutinize any conditional GPA requirement attached to an offer letter before counting on it for three full years. Either way, the gap between the best-case (median grant, no reduction) and worst-case (partial grant, reduced after year one) outcomes at RWU is large enough in dollar terms that it deserves its own line in your decision, separate from the headline scholarship offer. For a general framework on reading and negotiating a scholarship letter before you commit, see the shared guide on law school scholarship negotiation; for how federal loan limits and repayment plans interact with a bill this size, see the shared guide on law school loans and PSLF.
Illustrative: 3-year borrowing at the 2026-27 federal rate (8.07%) over 10 years; your figures depend on your offer and salary.
Most Roger Williams graduates practice in Rhode Island at small firms, not at national BigLaw firms — of the 169 graduates in the reporting class, just one (0.6%) landed at a firm of 501+ attorneys, the conventional definition of BigLaw. That single placement sits inside a firm-size distribution dominated by small practice: 45 graduates went to firms of 1-10 attorneys, another 12 to firms of 11-25, and only a handful climbed into the mid-size or large-firm brackets (2 at 26-50, 4 at 51-100, 3 at 101-250, 2 at 251-500). One graduate reported solo practice. In other words, the realistic outcome at RWU is a small or mid-size firm, and an applicant who has BigLaw as a specific goal should treat that as a long-shot outcome here rather than a plausible default path.
Outside private firms, the employment picture leans toward the public sector and government-adjacent work. Thirteen graduates (7.7%) went into government jobs, 19 (11.2%) into public interest positions, and 23 secured state or local clerkships — a notably larger number than the zero federal clerkships reported for this class. Twenty-five graduates entered business and industry roles. Taken together, government, public interest, and clerkship placements account for a meaningful share of the class, which lines up with RWU's own positioning around public-interest and social-justice-oriented legal education (the school reports a national top-11 ranking for the percentage of graduates entering public interest law, per U.S. News 2025, and a top-11 spot on National Jurist's 2026 social justice list).
Geographically, the largest reported concentration of employed graduates is within Rhode Island itself — consistent with RWU's position as the only law school in the state and its evident role as a feeder for the local Rhode Island bar and legal market, rather than a national placement pipeline. For applicants, this means outcomes should be evaluated against a regional New England market, not against national firm recruiting.
On the headline ABA employment metric, 76.3% of the class was employed in a full-time, long-term, bar-passage-required or JD-advantage position — a figure that captures most, but not all, of the graduating class, with the remainder presumably in part-time, short-term, non-JD-required, or unemployed/unknown categories not broken out further in the available data.
Bar passage is the other half of the outcomes picture, and it's a genuine soft spot: RWU's first-time bar passage rate was 65.19%, compared with a 77.46% state average for the same test administration — a roughly 12-point gap. The two-year ultimate pass rate, which captures repeat takers, rises to 76.16%, meaning a meaningful number of graduates need more than one attempt to pass. Applicants should read that as a signal to invest seriously in bar preparation and to ask the school directly about the support resources available for repeat takers, since a bar card is the prerequisite for every one of the employment outcomes above.
Yes, in the sense that RWU has built actual institutional infrastructure around maritime and marine law, not just a single elective — but the employment data doesn't isolate outcomes for students who pursue this track, so it should be treated as a genuine specialty offering rather than a guaranteed career pipeline. The school offers a dedicated Maritime Law concentration and a separate Marine and Environmental Law Track, a joint JD/Master of Marine Affairs degree run with the University of Rhode Island, and its own student-edited Journal of Maritime Law and Commerce — a specialty publication that few law schools of RWU's size maintain.
The infrastructure runs deeper than course offerings. RWU houses a Marine Affairs Institute and participates in the Rhode Island Sea Grant Legal Program, both of which connect coursework to ongoing marine-policy research and practice. On the experiential side, the Coastal Resilience Law and Policy Summer Clinic gives students a hands-on setting to work on coastal and marine legal issues rather than studying them only in the classroom. preLaw Magazine has separately recognized RWU as a Top School for Environmental Law, a related but distinct recognition that reinforces the school's environmental-and-coastal law identity.
Geography is arguably the strongest argument for the program's credibility: RWU sits in Bristol, Rhode Island, a small coastal state built around maritime commerce, fisheries, and coastal real estate, and it is the state's only law school. That location gives the marine law curriculum a natural proximity to the industries, regulators, and coastal-resilience issues it teaches about, in a way that a landlocked school's maritime elective could not replicate.
What the data pack does not show is a separate employment breakout for maritime-law graduates — the ABA employment figures report firm size, sector, and geography for the class as a whole, not by concentration. So an applicant drawn specifically to this niche should treat RWU's maritime program as a well-resourced academic and clinical specialty with a real institutional footprint (a dedicated journal, institute, joint degree, and clinic), while independently verifying with the school what proportion of concentration graduates actually go on to maritime-focused practice, since that outcome-level detail sits outside what's publicly reported here.
It means RWU builds public-interest and access-to-justice training directly into the JD curriculum rather than leaving it to electives. Every 2L must complete a mandatory 3-credit course called "Race and the Foundations of American Law," and every student must log 50 hours of pro bono experiential work before graduation — both are degree requirements, not optional add-ons.
The race-and-law course sits inside a broader institutional structure: RWU runs an Institute for Race and the Law and a Feinstein Center for Pro Bono & Experiential Education, both of which coordinate the school's public-interest programming and connect students to placements that count toward the 50-hour requirement. This is a school that has chosen to make questions of race, access, and legal representation a shared, required part of every student's legal education, rather than a specialization a subset of students opts into.
The outcomes data backs up that this isn't just branding. RWU reports that 11.2% of its graduates go into public interest work and another 7.7% go into government, and the school points to a U.S. News 2025 ranking of #11 nationally for the percentage of graduates entering public interest law careers, plus a #11 spot on National Jurist's 2026 list of law schools for social justice. Combined, roughly one in five graduates from a recent class went into government or public-interest employment — a meaningfully large share for a school of RWU's size (169 JD graduates in the reporting year).
For an applicant, the practical upshot is twofold. First, if your motivation for law school includes public-interest, government, or access-to-justice work, RWU's curriculum, culture, and job outcomes are structurally aligned with that goal in a way that isn't true at every school. Second, even if you're aiming at private practice, you will graduate having completed real hours of supervised pro bono work and a required course confronting how race has shaped American legal doctrine — that's simply part of the RWU JD, and worth knowing going in.
RWU states that it guarantees every qualified student a substantial, hands-on clinical experience — meaning clinical work isn't a competitive add-on reserved for a lucky few but a built-in feature of the JD. The school lists eight named clinics: the Business Start-Up Clinic, Criminal Defense Clinic, Immigration Clinic, Veterans Disability Appeals Field Clinic, Coastal Resilience Law and Policy Summer Clinic, Housing Policy Clinic, Prisoners' Rights Clinic, and Business Law Clinic.
The numbers give a sense of scale relative to the school's size: RWU reports 100 clinic slots available with 76 filled, alongside 116 filled field placements and 486 filled simulation-course seats — against a total JD enrollment of 486 students. In other words, across clinics, field placements, and simulation courses combined, the volume of experiential seats (678 filled slots) exceeds the total JD enrollment of 486, which is consistent with a structural guarantee rather than a scarce, oversubscribed offering.
For applicants weighing practical training, this matters most if you want courtroom, client-facing, or transactional reps before you graduate — immigration, criminal defense, housing, veterans' benefits, and small-business/transactional work are all represented in-house.
Roger Williams School of Law is young by law-school standards: it was established in 1993 as the first graduate degree program of Roger Williams College, earned ABA accreditation in 1997, and joined AALS in 2006. It remains the only law school in Rhode Island, a fact that shapes both its regional identity and its job market — the school's largest reported employment category for graduates is Rhode Island itself.
The school's name carries a specific history. It was originally named for trustee Ralph Papitto, but in July 2007 Papitto made a racist statement at a board meeting; student protests followed, and Papitto asked that his name be removed from the school. He resigned as chairman, was named Chairman Emeritus, and was succeeded by Richard Bready. That episode is part of the school's institutional memory and helps explain why race and equity became formalized in the curriculum — including the school's current required course, "Race and the Foundations of American Law," and its Institute for Race and the Law.
If your LSAT and GPA sit near RWU's medians — an LSAT of 150 and a GPA of 3.43 — the strategic question isn't just "will I get in," it's "what will my number do to my price." RWU's own reporting shows 65% of students receive grants, with a median grant of $28,000 against total annual costs, and roughly 24% of students receiving less than half-tuition scholarships and 38% receiving half-to-full awards. Because RWU (like most schools) awards merit money largely off LSAT and GPA relative to its own 25th/50th/75th bands — 147/150/154 on the LSAT and 3.02/3.43/3.73 on GPA — moving a few points above the 150/3.43 medians is realistically a scholarship lever, not just an admission one. A 154 LSAT would put you at RWU's 75th percentile, a position schools generally reward more generously than one at or below median.
That leverage cuts both ways, though: RWU's conditional-scholarship data shows that in the 2024-25 entering class, 12 of 89 students on conditional scholarships (about 13.5%) had their awards reduced, with similar rates in prior years. That means a meaningful minority of conditionally-scholarshiped students lose part of their aid after 1L year, typically for not maintaining a required GPA. Before you accept a conditional scholarship anywhere, including RWU, read the retention GPA threshold carefully and ask what percentage of students historically keep the full award — our general playbook for negotiating and stress-testing scholarship offers is at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation.
On the LSAT side itself: the test has been Logical-Reasoning-and-Reading-Comprehension only since August 2024 (Logic Games are gone), and most applicants who move their score meaningfully do so through sustained, official-material-based prep over several months rather than a single retake. Because RWU's 25th percentile (147) and 75th percentile (154) span a full seven points, even a modest, well-prepared score increase can shift you across a full percentile band and, correspondingly, across a scholarship tier. If you're earlier in the process, our LSAT prep guide (/how-to-study-for-the-lsat) and application-timeline guide (/law-school-application-timeline) walk through how to sequence a retake against RWU's own admissions cycle.
Finally, remember the financing backdrop has changed: as of the 2025-26 cycle, federal Grad PLUS loans are gone for new borrowers, and federal borrowing for law students is capped, so the gap between your scholarship offer and RWU's total cost of attendance is money you'll likely have to cover through savings or private loans. That makes the size and durability of a merit award — not just the sticker tuition number — the figure worth negotiating hardest. See /law-school-loans-and-pslf and /is-law-school-worth-it for the fuller financing and ROI mechanics.
Apply as early in the cycle as your file allows. Roger Williams received 1,003 applications for its most recent entering class of 189 and admitted 61.32% of applicants, a figure you can compare against the school's published LSAT and GPA medians below.
Because the school's LSAT range runs 147 at the 25th percentile to 154 at the 75th, with a 150 median, and its GPA range runs 3.02 to 3.73 with a 3.43 median, use those figures as planning anchors, not as a probability gauge — a score at or above 154 and a GPA at or above 3.73 put you at the top of the school's own reported range, while numbers near the 25th percentile mean the rest of the file (statement, letters, résumé) has to do more work. Roger Williams also accepts the GRE, GMAT, and MCAT alongside the LSAT, so applicants with a strong graduate-admissions score from another field aren't locked into a fresh LSAT sitting if they already have one.
For the mechanics of building a timeline — when to sit for the LSAT, how to sequence letters of recommendation, and how far in advance to draft a personal statement — see the shared application-timeline and LSAT-prep guides. The one Roger Williams-specific wrinkle worth flagging: the data pack here only confirms a June 1 deadline for the separate Master of Studies in Law (MSL) program, not the JD deadline, so confirm the current JD deadline directly with admissions before you build your calendar.
Most Roger Williams students get some money off sticker, but the size of the discount varies enormously — and that spread is exactly where negotiation matters. Sixty-five percent of students receive a grant, the median grant among funded students is $28,000, and the aid is distributed unevenly: 24% of students get less than half tuition covered, 38% land between half and full tuition, and only 3% receive a full ride. Against a full-time tuition and fee bill of roughly $49,090 and an estimated total cost of attendance near $74,706, a median $28,000 grant still leaves a meaningful gap that has to be filled with federal loans, savings, or private borrowing.
The negotiation lever available to you is your own numbers relative to the school's medians. If your LSAT sits at or above the 154 75th-percentile mark, or your GPA is near or above the 3.73 75th-percentile, you are the kind of applicant a school uses scholarship money to recruit and retain — because bringing in students above its medians helps the school's own reported numbers. If you have a competing offer from a peer school with a stronger scholarship, sending that offer to Roger Williams' financial aid office and asking for a reconsideration is a normal, expected part of the process, not an imposition. The general mechanics of how to frame that ask — timing, tone, what documentation to include — are covered in the shared scholarship-negotiation guide; nothing about that process is specific to Rhode Island.
What is specific to Roger Williams, and worth building into any negotiation, is the retention risk on conditional scholarships. Recent entering classes show a meaningful share of students losing part of their scholarship after 1L year: 13.5% of the 2024-25 entering class (12 of 89 students), 13.8% of the 2023-24 class (13 of 94), and 12.7% of the 2022-23 class (17 of 134) had their scholarships reduced. That is a real, recurring rate — roughly one in eight to one in seven scholarship recipients — not a hypothetical worst case. Before you accept a conditional award, ask the financial aid office in writing exactly what GPA or class-rank benchmark keeps the scholarship intact, because the curve at any law school makes that benchmark harder to clear than undergraduate grading did. A large sticker-price scholarship that carries a stiff GPA condition is worth less, in expected value, than a smaller unconditional one — factor that into any comparison across offers.
On the borrowing side, remember that as of the 2025-26 cycle, federal Direct Unsubsidized loans are capped and Grad PLUS is gone for new borrowers, so a gap between Roger Williams' cost of attendance and your grant plus federal loan eligibility may have to be closed with private debt at a less favorable rate — another reason to push scholarship negotiation as far as your file supports before you enroll. Verify current federal borrowing figures directly, since the caps and rates are set by statute and can change; see the shared loans-and-PSLF guide for the mechanics.
It depends almost entirely on what you want a law degree to do for you, because Roger Williams' own numbers point toward a specific kind of outcome, not the Big Law trajectory some applicants assume every school is chasing. Of the school's most recent graduating class of 169, roughly 76.3% were employed in full-time, long-term jobs that were either bar-required or JD-advantage — a reasonable outcome, but one worth sitting with alongside the honest reality that a meaningful share of the class was not in that category nine to ten months out.
Where those employed graduates land matters more here than at most schools. Only 0.6% — a single graduate — went to a firm of 501 or more attorneys, the Big Law tier where salaries cluster around the high six figures. The bulk of the employed class went to small firms: 45 graduates to firms of 1-10 attorneys and 12 more to firms of 11-25, dwarfing every other category. Add 13 graduates in government (7.7%), 19 in public interest (11.2%), and 23 state or local clerkships, and a clear picture emerges: Roger Williams is training lawyers for small-firm practice, public service, and the Rhode Island legal market specifically — the pack lists Rhode Island as the school's largest employment destination outright. If your goal is a $215,000 Big Law salary and the loan payoff that comes with it, this is not the data that supports that plan; if your goal is practicing law in Rhode Island, in a small firm, in government, or in public interest work, the outcomes align with the mission.
That mission is not incidental. Roger Williams guarantees every qualified student a substantial hands-on clinical placement, runs eight named clinics from criminal defense to immigration to housing policy, requires a 50-hour pro bono experiential component to graduate, and was ranked #11 nationally by U.S. News for the share of graduates entering public interest law and #11 on National Jurist's 2026 social-justice list. For an applicant who already knows they want to do legal-services, government, or small-firm work, that curriculum and placement infrastructure is a genuine asset that shows up directly in the outcomes data — 11.2% in public interest is a real, above-average signal, not marketing.
The bar exam is the honest caution flag. First-time bar passage for Roger Williams graduates was 65.19%, against a state average of 77.46% — a gap of roughly 12 points that any applicant should take seriously. The two-year ultimate pass rate rises to 76.16%, meaning most students who don't pass on the first attempt do pass eventually, but that first-attempt gap has real consequences: it can delay your start date, your first paycheck, and in some employment settings your job offer itself. If you enroll here, plan on treating bar preparation as a serious, resourced project from 1L year onward, not an afterthought crammed into the summer after graduation.
On cost, Roger Williams markets itself as the best-priced ABA-accredited private law school in the Northeast, and with tuition and fees near $49,090 and a total estimated cost of attendance near $74,706, it is genuinely cheaper than most private peers in the region — before any scholarship. With 65% of students receiving a grant and a median grant of $28,000, many students bring the net price down meaningfully further, though only 3% get a full ride and roughly one in eight scholarship recipients see their award reduced after 1L grades. Under the federal loan rules now in effect, a Direct Unsubsidized loan won't necessarily cover the full gap between grant aid and cost of attendance, and with Grad PLUS eliminated for new borrowers, any shortfall has to come from savings or private debt — so the real cost of enrolling depends heavily on the specific aid letter you get, not the sticker price.
Put together: Roger Williams is worth serious consideration if you are committed to practicing in Rhode Island or a similar small-firm/public-service market, you value guaranteed clinical training and a pro-bono-centered culture, and your aid letter brings the net cost down enough that a lower first-year bar pass rate and a small-firm-dominated outcomes profile still pencil out against your debt. It is a harder case if your primary goal is a large-firm salary track — the 0.6% Big Law placement figure and the modest overall employment rate mean that outcome is the exception here, not the plan. For anyone weighing federal loan strategy or PSLF against a government or public-interest career path — a path a meaningful share of RWU graduates actually take — the shared loans-and-PSLF guide walks through the mechanics; for the broader cost-versus-outcome framework applied across schools, see the shared worth-it guide.