If you are choosing a law school because of what it is known for, Saint Louis University's answer is unambiguous: health law. U.S. News & World Report ranked SLU's Health Care Law program 2nd best in the country in its 2025 specialty rankings — a position that sits in sharp contrast to the school's overall U.S. News rank of 91 for 2026-27. That gap is the whole story of SLU: a generalist ranking that undersells a program most law schools cannot come close to matching in depth.
The program is not a single popular class. SLU built an entire institutional architecture around health law. The Center for Health Law Studies anchors the subject as a standing academic center, not a side project of one or two professors. Students who want to go deeper than the standard concentration can enroll in the LL.M. in Health Law, a dedicated graduate degree in the subject. For students who want the subject matter married to a clinical or administrative credential, SLU offers a J.D./Master of Health Administration and a J.D./Master of Public Health, plus — at the far end of the spectrum for students who want to combine law with bioethics scholarship — a J.D./Ph.D. in Health Care Ethics. That last combination, a doctoral-level pairing of law and health care ethics, is unusual for a school of SLU's size and signals that the health law identity runs through the university's Jesuit mission (Saint Louis University is a Jesuit institution) rather than existing as a marketing label bolted onto a generalist curriculum.
Students who want to specialize formally can also declare a Health Law concentration, one of only four concentrations SLU offers (alongside Employment Law, Intellectual Property Law, and International and Comparative Law) — meaning health law is not competing with a dozen other tracks for institutional attention. The scholarly output of the program has its own outlet, too: the Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy is a standing, subject-specific law journal, distinct from the school's flagship Saint Louis University Law Journal, giving students a dedicated venue for health law scholarship, note-writing, and journal leadership experience that a generalist-only journal roster would not provide.
What this means for an applicant. If your career interest is health law — hospital and health-system counsel, life sciences and pharmaceutical regulatory work, bioethics, health policy, or compliance — SLU is not simply a law school that happens to teach the subject. Its specialty ranking of 2nd nationally in health care law is the kind of credential that can matter more to a health-law-focused employer than a school's overall U.S. News position, particularly for graduates who plan to build a career inside a health system's legal department, a health care-focused firm, or a regulatory agency. The dual-degree options (J.D./MHA, J.D./MPH, J.D./Ph.D. in Health Care Ethics) let a student walk out with a credential that speaks directly to health administration or public health employers, not just a J.D. with a health law notation on the transcript.
What the pack does not show. The data available does not break out placement outcomes, employer names, or salary figures specifically for health law graduates — SLU's overall employment data (discussed elsewhere in this guide) is reported for the graduating class as a whole, not filtered by concentration or specialty. An applicant weighing SLU specifically for its health law strength should treat the #2 specialty ranking as a strong signal of institutional investment and curricular depth, not as a guarantee of a particular outcome, and should independently verify how current the ranking is before relying on it, since specialty rankings are re-run annually and can move.
The practical takeaway: SLU's overall rank tells you where it sits among generalist law schools; its health law rank tells you where it sits among schools built to train health lawyers. For an applicant with that specific goal, the second number is the one that should carry more weight.
Saint Louis University's law school was founded in 1843 by Richard Aylett Buckner, making it the first law school established west of the Mississippi River — a distinction that predates most of American legal education. The original school did not survive intact: it closed after Buckner's death in 1847 and stayed dark for over sixty years before SLU re-established the law program in 1908 in the Midtown neighborhood. That relaunch year matters for another reason — SLU admitted its first female law students in 1908, putting coeducation into the school's identity from its second founding onward.
The school has been continuously ABA-approved since 1924 and is a member of the Association of American Law Schools, so the century-plus of operating history has translated into stable institutional accreditation rather than a stop-and-start reputation. The most recent chapter in that history is physical: in August 2013, the law school moved from Midtown into Scott Hall, a 12-story building at 100 North Tucker Boulevard in Downtown St. Louis. Scott Hall includes a working courtroom that occasionally hosts real Eighth Circuit and Eastern District of Missouri appellate arguments — meaning students in the building can watch live federal appellate advocacy rather than only simulate it.
For an applicant, the 1843-to-2013 arc is less about nostalgia than about what it produced: a downtown St. Louis location inside the city's legal and judicial corridor, a long enough alumni pipeline to have placed graduates on federal benches across multiple circuits and districts over more than a century, and an accreditation and governance history (AALS membership, unbroken ABA approval since 1924) that gives the institution's age some practical weight rather than leaving it as trivia.
Saint Louis University's law school admitted roughly 56% of applicants in the reporting cycle covered here — 531 offers out of 941 applications — and enrolled a class of 222 students (199 full-time, 23 part-time). An acceptance rate in that range is moderately selective rather than a lottery, but the number that should actually shape how you read your own file is SLU's LSAT and GPA distribution, not the topline admit rate.
SLU's entering class posted an LSAT split of 154 at the 25th percentile, 157 at the median, and 161 at the 75th percentile. GPA ran 3.37 (25th), 3.61 (median), and 3.83 (75th). The right way to use these numbers is as planning anchors, not predictors: a 157 LSAT places you at SLU's median, meaning half of enrolled students scored above that number and half below; a 161 puts you at the 75th percentile, among the stronger-scoring quarter of the incoming class; a 154 sits at the 25th percentile, meaning roughly a quarter of the class scored below it. The same logic applies to GPA — a 3.61 is squarely at the class median, while a 3.83 sits among the higher-GPA quarter of admitted students. None of this describes an individual applicant's probability of admission; SLU (like every school) evaluates a full file, and a number relative to a median tells you where you'd sit in the class, not whether you'll be offered a seat.
Why the numbers matter for cost, not just admission. SLU reports that 97% of its students receive some form of grant aid, with a median full-time grant of $25,000. The distribution of those awards is informative: 57% of grant recipients get aid covering less than half of tuition, 39% get aid in the half-to-full-tuition range, and 0% receive a full-tuition award. With annual full-time tuition at $55,260 (plus $930 in fees) and an estimated full cost of attendance around $82,302, a scholarship in the half-to-full-tuition band is a materially different financial outcome than one under half tuition — and where an applicant's LSAT and GPA fall relative to SLU's 157/3.61 medians is typically the biggest lever a school has for setting which band an admitted student lands in. SLU does not publish a table linking specific score bands to specific award amounts, so this pack cannot state exact scholarship-by-LSAT figures. For a general walkthrough of how to evaluate and negotiate an award letter once you have one in hand, see the scholarship negotiation guide.
Reading your own numbers against SLU's. If your LSAT and GPA sit at or above SLU's median (157 / 3.61), you're in the range where the bulk of the entering class landed. If you're above the 75th percentile marks (161 / 3.83), you're positioned among the strongest quarter of SLU's admitted pool on paper. If you're below the 25th percentile figures (154 / 3.37), that doesn't foreclose anything — a meaningful share of any entering class sits below its own 25th percentile line by definition — but it does mean the rest of your file (writing, letters, work experience, addenda) is carrying more relative weight, and that a first or retaken LSAT score prepared with official material is generally the single highest-leverage input you control before you apply. General LSAT preparation mechanics are covered in the LSAT study guide linked elsewhere in this series; the numbers above are SLU's specific benchmarks to prepare against.
Full-time tuition at SLU Law is $55,260 a year, plus $930 in mandatory fees — a base cost of $56,190 before you spend a dollar on rent or food. Add SLU's own estimate of $26,112 for off-campus living, and the school's published full-time cost of attendance comes to $82,302 for a single year, which over three years puts the sticker price for the degree well north of $240,000 before any aid.
But almost nobody at SLU pays that sticker price. The school reports that 97% of students receive some form of grant aid, and the median full-time scholarship award is $25,000 a year — enough to knock tuition down to roughly $30,260 before fees and living costs. That 97% figure is the headline: at SLU, going in without any scholarship offer at all is the exception, not the rule.
The distribution isn't flat, and it matters more than the average. SLU's own breakdown shows 57% of grant recipients get less than half-tuition, 39% land in the half-tuition-to-full-tuition band, and 0% receive a full-tuition award. In plain terms: a meaningful scholarship is the norm, but a full ride is not something SLU currently awards to anyone in its incoming class. If you're negotiating aid or comparing offers, that 39% band (roughly $27,600-plus a year, i.e., half tuition or more) is the realistic ceiling to aim for, not a full waiver.
SLU's data on conditional-scholarship retention — whether students who start with a scholarship keep it through graduation, or see it reduced for falling below a GPA cutoff — is not clearly reported in the school's public compilations for the last three cycles. Before you sign a scholarship agreement, ask the admissions office directly what GPA or class-rank benchmark you must hold to keep your award every year; don't assume it's guaranteed for all three years just because the first-year letter looks generous.
A prospective student near SLU's median LSAT (157) and median GPA (3.61) should treat the published $25,000 median grant as a realistic planning anchor, not a promise — actual offers vary with your specific numbers relative to the school's 25th/50th/75th LSAT band of 154/157/161 and GPA band of 3.37/3.61/3.83. Either way, run the net number — tuition minus your actual grant letter, plus SLU's $26,112 living estimate — before comparing SLU to any other offer. For the mechanics of reading and negotiating a scholarship letter itself, see the shared scholarship-negotiation guide.
SLU Law places the large majority of its graduates in jobs that require bar passage or make direct use of a J.D. — 93.5% of the 169 graduates landed in that category — but the more useful question is what kind of jobs those are, and the data shows a market anchored firmly in Missouri and the surrounding region rather than national Big Law.
Yes, but as one path among several rather than the dominant one. Of the 169 graduates, 25 (14.8%) went to firms of 501 or more attorneys — the size category that defines "Big Law" nationally. That's a real and reportable outcome, not a rounding error, and it means a meaningful slice of each class does land at the largest firms. But it's a minority path: the single largest concentration of SLU graduates who go into private practice lands in much smaller firms. Twenty-nine graduates (the largest single firm-size bucket) went to firms of 1–10 attorneys, another 24 went to firms of 11–25, and firms in the 26–50, 51–100, and 101–250 ranges absorbed roughly a dozen graduates apiece. Only 6 graduates went to firms sized 251–500. Add it up and small and mid-sized firms — the kind that dominate regional and local practice in St. Louis, Kansas City, and the Metro East — employ substantially more SLU graduates than the elite large-firm tier does.
Government employers absorbed 14 graduates (8.3%), public interest organizations took 7 (4.1%), and business/industry roles accounted for 19 graduates. Clerkships are modest in number: the data pack shows 0 federal clerkships and 3 state/local clerkships in this cohort — worth knowing if a judicial clerkship is a specific goal, since it suggests SLU's clerkship pipeline runs mainly through state and local courts rather than the federal bench in a typical year.
The data pack identifies Missouri as SLU's largest employment type — meaning geography, not any single employer or practice area, is the dominant story in SLU's outcomes. This lines up with everything else in the profile: a Jesuit law school in downtown St. Louis, founded in 1843 as the first law school west of the Mississippi, with a courtroom in its own building that occasionally hosts Eighth Circuit and Eastern District of Missouri proceedings, and an alumni bench that includes multiple sitting and former federal judges in the Eastern District of Missouri and the Southern and Central Districts of Illinois. If your goal is practicing law in Missouri or the broader Illinois/Missouri corridor, SLU's placement data and its judicial alumni network both point the same direction. If your target is a national Big Law market outside the Midwest, the 14.8% large-firm placement rate is the number to weigh against schools with a heavier concentration in that category.
SLU's first-time bar passage rate is 89.09%, compared to a state average of 85.6% — meaning SLU graduates pass on their first attempt at a rate roughly 3.5 points above the statewide pool of test-takers. The two-year ultimate pass rate is 88.33%, a strong signal that the small remaining group who don't pass on the first attempt largely clear the bar on a second try. For a school whose graduates go on to practice heavily within Missouri's courts, a bar passage rate ahead of the state average is a directly relevant data point, not just a nationally comparable statistic.
SLU's practical-training numbers are substantial relative to a class this size: 83 of 85 available clinic seats were filled, 115 students filled field placements, and 775 enrollments were logged in simulation courses, on top of 16 co-curricular offerings. Given that so many graduates end up in small and mid-sized Missouri firms and government roles — settings where new lawyers are often given real responsibility quickly — that volume of hands-on clinical and field placement training is a plausible fit for the market SLU's graduates actually enter, even though the data pack doesn't allow a claim that clinic participation causes any specific placement outcome.
SLU's Health Law program is ranked 2nd in the country by U.S. News (2025), and the school runs both a J.D./Master of Health Administration and an LL.M. in Health Law alongside its Center for Health Law Studies. The pack doesn't break out how many of the 19 business/industry placements or other outcomes are health-law-specific, so treat the ranking as a signal of program strength and specialization rather than a guarantee of placement in that field.
Taken together, SLU's employment data describes a law school whose real value proposition is strongest for someone who wants to practice in Missouri or the immediate region, values a bar passage rate above the state average, and is comfortable with an employment mix weighted toward small and mid-sized firms and public-sector work — with a genuine but secondary Big Law pipeline for the roughly 15% of each class that lands there.
Saint Louis University's first-time bar passage rate is 89.09%, roughly three and a half points above the 85.6% average posted by all test-takers in the same jurisdiction. Its two-year ultimate pass rate — capturing graduates who needed a second attempt — comes in at 88.33%, only a fraction below the first-time number, which suggests most SLU takers who don't pass on the first try clear the bar shortly after rather than stalling out entirely.
Those numbers sit against a graduating class of 169 J.D.s, and SLU's own employment reporting shows Missouri as the single largest destination for its graduates. That matters for reading the bar statistic: a school whose class is heavily anchored to one state's bar exam has both more control over exam-specific preparation (Missouri's format, local practice norms) and more exposure if that state's cut score or pass rate moves. For an applicant thinking about where to practice, an above-average first-time pass rate in the state where most of the class actually sits for the exam is a more meaningful data point than a national comparison would be.
The school doesn't publish a breakdown of pass rates by contributing factor — academic support participation, GPA band, or timing of when graduates sat for the exam — so it's not possible to say from this data alone why SLU outperforms the state average. What can be said directly: on the two headline bar metrics regulators and rankings track, SLU clears the state benchmark and holds its passage rate steady across a second attempt cycle. Applicants weighing SLU against other regional Missouri or Illinois options should treat this as one of the more verifiable, apples-to-apples numbers in the school's outcomes picture, since bar pass rates are reported to the ABA under standardized rules rather than self-selected by the school.
Illustrative: 3-year borrowing at the 2026-27 federal rate (8.07%) over 10 years; your figures depend on your offer and salary.
Yes — SLU runs a large, heavily-used experiential program: 85 clinic seats with 83 filled, 115 filled field placements, and 775 enrollments in simulation courses, on top of 16 co-curricular offerings. Put together, that's a student body that moves through supervised practice at a scale well beyond a token clinical requirement.
The clinic roster itself is specific rather than generic: the Children's Permanency Clinic, Civil Advocacy Clinic, Criminal Defense Clinic, Entrepreneurship & Community Development Clinic, and Human Rights at Home Litigation Clinic each put students on real client matters rather than simulated files. Because Missouri's Student Practice Rule lets certified law students appear in court on clinic cases, SLU students in these programs can argue motions, examine witnesses, or represent clients directly under supervision — not just draft memos behind the scenes. That's a concrete, state-specific credential most other experiential formats can't offer: courtroom appearances before graduation.
The scale of that work adds up. SLU reports that its professors and students collectively provide more than 36,000 hours of free legal service annually, valued at over $4 million. That figure functions as both a public-service statistic and a rough proxy for how much live-client work runs through the building in a given year — useful context for an applicant trying to judge whether "experiential learning" at a given school means a handful of boutique seats or a genuinely load-bearing part of the curriculum.
Geography plays into this too. SLU's law school has occupied Scott Hall, a 12-story building in downtown St. Louis, since August 2013, and the building includes a working courtroom that has occasionally hosted actual Eighth Circuit and Eastern District of Missouri appellate arguments. Being physically inside the downtown legal corridor — steps from the state and federal courthouses — is part of what makes the field-placement and clinic numbers plausible at this volume; students aren't shuttled across a city to reach practice sites.
What the pack doesn't tell us is the acceptance rate into specific clinics, faculty-to-student ratios within them, or how the 775 simulation enrollments break down by course. An applicant deciding between SLU and a peer school on experiential strength should ask directly during admitted-student events which specific clinic seats are competitive and which are guaranteed, since that detail isn't part of SLU's public reporting.
Yes — SLU's law school, founded in 1843 as the first law school west of the Mississippi River, has produced a long and unusually concentrated line of federal judges across Missouri and Illinois, several of whom also returned to teach at the school. This is one of the more distinctive, verifiable threads in SLU's history, separate from any current-year employment statistic.
On the Eastern District of Missouri bench alone, SLU alumni include Chief Judge Stephen Robert Clark Sr. (Class of 1991), along with judges Henry Edward Autrey (1977), Donald Julius Stohr (1958), Edward Louis Filippine (1957), and Clyde Sylvester Cahill Jr. (1951). The Southern District of Illinois shows a similar pattern, with alumni judges Stephen Patrick McGlynn (1987), Michael Joseph Reagan (1980), Paul E. Riley (1967), William Donald Stiehl (1949), and Omer Poos (1924). The Central District of Illinois adds Chief Judge Sara Lynn Darrow (1997), Michael Patrick McCuskey (1975), and Michael Martin Mihm (1967). Beyond the Missouri-Illinois corridor, SLU alumni have sat on the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals (Theodore McMillian, 1949), the Eastern District of Michigan, the District of South Dakota, and the Western District of Arkansas.
The faculty side reinforces this pipeline rather than running separate from it. George W. Draper III and Michael A. Wolff, both former chief justices of the Missouri Supreme Court, have taught at SLU — Draper as an adjunct professor of trial advocacy and Wolff as professor emeritus and dean emeritus. Jean Constance Hamilton taught at the school before her service as a federal judge on the Eastern District of Missouri, and Michael Joseph Reagan taught there as well before his own appointment to the Southern District of Illinois bench. Students in Scott Hall's courtroom, which has occasionally hosted live Eighth Circuit and Eastern District of Missouri appellate arguments, are training in the same regional court system many of these alumni and faculty have sat on.
That said, prospective students should weigh this historical bench pipeline against the school's most recent reported clerkship placements for a single graduating class, which show 0 federal clerkships and 3 state/local clerkships. That single-year snapshot is not a contradiction of the historical record — judicial careers are typically built over decades, not immediately after graduation — but it does mean an applicant should not read the long list of alumni judges as a current guarantee of federal clerkship placement straight out of SLU. The two data points describe different things: one is a multi-generational alumni legacy, the other is one recent class's early-career placement.
Saint Louis University School of Law traces its roots to 1843, making it the oldest law school west of the Mississippi River, and it has operated continuously under ABA approval since 1924. Since August 2013, the school has been housed in Scott Hall, a 12-story building at 100 North Tucker Boulevard in Downtown St. Louis, which includes a working courtroom that has occasionally hosted actual sittings of the Eighth Circuit and the Eastern District of Missouri.
As a Jesuit institution within Saint Louis University, the law school frames legal training around service, and that shows up in its clinical output rather than just in mission statements: SLU reports that its professors and students collectively provide more than 36,000 hours of free legal service annually, valued at over $4 million. Students can put that training into real courtrooms early, since Missouri's Student Practice Rule allows clinic students to appear on cases as part of programs like the Civil Advocacy Clinic, Criminal Defense Clinic, Children's Permanency Clinic, Entrepreneurship & Community Development Clinic, and Human Rights at Home Litigation Clinic.
Beyond the clinics, students can build a Jesuit-inflected international law experience through study-abroad programs in Madrid, Berlin, Orléans, Paris, Bochum, and Cork, and can join one of more than 30 student organizations on campus. For applicants weighing whether the mission is more than marketing language, the clinic hours, courtroom access, and pro bono totals are the concrete, checkable evidence.
The single most useful number to know before you apply to SLU Law is where your LSAT and GPA fall against its published 25th/50th/75th percentiles: an LSAT of 154/157/161 and a GPA of 3.37/3.61/3.83. Under current ABA reporting rules, those six numbers are the planning anchors admissions committees are themselves held to — a 157 LSAT and 3.61 GPA sit exactly at SLU's reported medians, a 161 and 3.83 put you at its 75th percentile, and a 154 and 3.37 mark the 25th percentile. None of that predicts an individual outcome, but it tells you honestly which side of the class you'd be positioned on if admitted.
Because the LSAT has been reshaped since August 2024 — now two scored Logical Reasoning sections and one scored Reading Comprehension section, with Logic Games gone and an unscored Argumentative Writing sample submitted separately — a retake or a first-time score under the new format is not directly comparable to older score reports circulating online. Schools consider your highest score, so a disciplined months-long prep cycle using official practice material is still the standard route to movement; see the shared LSAT-prep guide for the mechanics (/how-to-study-for-the-lsat).
For SLU specifically, the LSAT-GPA relationship matters most through the scholarship lens, not an admissions-odds lens. SLU reports that 97% of its students receive some grant aid, with a median full-time grant near $25,000 against tuition of $55,260 (plus fees), and the reported aid bands show more students clustered in awards covering less than half of tuition (57%) than in the half-to-full range (39%), with no students reported in the full-tuition band. SLU does not publish a table linking specific LSAT/GPA score bands to specific scholarship award amounts, so this pack cannot state which score ranges correspond to which award bands. If you're negotiating an offer, knowing exactly which side of these percentiles you sit on is the leverage point — see the scholarship-negotiation guide for how to use a competing offer or a score update (/law-school-scholarship-negotiation).
Many ABA-accredited law schools run rolling admissions, so applying earlier in the cycle generally means your file is read against a less-filled class and a fuller scholarship budget — a general dynamic worth knowing even though SLU's specific deadline, fee, and admissions-cycle structure are not listed in current published data and shouldn't be assumed; check the school's admissions page directly for the current cycle's dates. For general cycle sequencing — when to take the LSAT, when to request letters, when decisions typically start going out — the shared application-timeline guide walks through the standard rolling calendar (/law-school-application-timeline).
One concrete, verifiable fact about SLU's own testing policy: its reported data lists the LSAT as the accepted test, without a GRE alternative appearing in that same reporting. That's a meaningful data point if you were planning to apply on a GRE score alone, since some peer schools do accept it — confirm SLU's current test policy before finalizing your testing plan, since test-acceptance policies can change between cycles.
On substance, a standard J.D. file — personal statement, resume, letters of recommendation, transcripts, and LSAT score — is the baseline expectation everywhere, and nothing in SLU's published data suggests an unusual add-on requirement (no separate supplemental essay list or interview requirement appears in the pack). Given SLU's Jesuit mission and its emphasis on clinical service and public-interest hours, a personal statement that connects your own experience to service, community lawyering, or the kind of hands-on clinic work SLU highlights (over 36,000 pro bono hours annually) is likely to resonate with a mission-driven readership, though this is an inference about fit rather than a documented scoring rubric.
Finally, remember that your LSAT and GPA numbers matter twice in this process: once for the admission decision itself, and again for the scholarship offer that comes with it. Because federal borrowing for a J.D. now tops out at capped Direct Unsubsidized loan limits with no Grad PLUS backstop for new borrowers starting July 2026, the size of the grant SLU offers against its $55,260 tuition (plus about $930 in fees) and roughly $82,302 estimated full cost of attendance is not a minor detail — it is a direct driver of how much private debt, if any, you'd need to fill the gap. Read the loan and repayment mechanics before you compare offers (/law-school-loans-and-pslf), and treat the overall worth-it math as a school-specific calculation rather than a generic one (/is-law-school-worth-it).
Almost everyone at Saint Louis University Law gets a discount off sticker price, but very few get it for free — and the sticker itself now runs well past what a federal loan alone can cover. Saint Louis University reports full-time tuition of $55,260 plus $930 in fees, and estimates total cost of attendance (tuition, fees, and off-campus living) at roughly $82,302 for a single year. Multiply that across three years and you're looking at something in the neighborhood of $245,000 in total cost of attendance before any scholarship is applied — a number that only holds if tuition and living costs stay flat, which they rarely do.
That COA figure matters because of what changed in federal lending as of July 1, 2026: Grad PLUS loans are gone for new borrowers, and the Direct Unsubsidized Loan that remains is capped at $50,000 per year (with a $200,000 aggregate cap for graduate/professional study). SLU's own estimated annual cost of roughly $82,300 exceeds that $50,000 federal annual cap by more than $30,000. In practice, that gap has to be closed with scholarship money, savings, or private loans — private loans that carry their own underwriting, rates, and none of the federal safety net (income-driven repayment, PSLF eligibility). Before assuming loans will simply cover the bill, run the shortfall math for your own budget; see our loans and PSLF explainer for the mechanics.
Where SLU's own numbers change this picture. Ninety-seven percent of the entering class received some grant — merit aid here is closer to the default than the exception. But the size of that aid varies a lot: the median (50th percentile) scholarship for full-time students is $25,000 a year, which covers under half of the $55,260 tuition figure. Looking at the distribution, 57% of grant recipients got less than half of tuition covered, 39% landed between half and full tuition, and — notably — 0% received a full-tuition award in the reporting year. If you're picturing SLU as a 'full-ride' school for strong applicants, the school's own disclosed bands say that isn't currently how the money is distributed; the realistic best case for most admitted students with strong numbers is a half-to-full-tuition grant, not a free ride.
Merit money at any law school is driven by where your LSAT and GPA land relative to the school's own medians, and SLU's entering class sits at a 157 LSAT (25th/75th: 154/161) and a 3.61 GPA (25th/75th: 3.37/3.83). An applicant presenting at or above the 161 LSAT / 3.83 GPA mark is arguing from the school's own 75th-percentile numbers when discussing an offer, which is the leverage point scholarship negotiation actually runs on — see our scholarship negotiation guide for how to use competing offers and above-median numbers in that conversation.
Conditional scholarships — read your letter carefully. Many law schools attach GPA-retention conditions to first-year merit scholarships, meaning a student who falls below a stated law-school GPA after 1L year loses part or all of the award. SLU's own ABA-required disclosure of how many entering scholarship recipients had their awards reduced or eliminated in recent cycles does not show reportable figures in the data available here, so we can't tell you SLU's specific retention/attrition rate on conditional scholarships — treat that as a question to ask admissions and financial aid directly, and get the exact GPA floor and renewal terms in writing before you decide a scholarship offer is 'safe' for three years.
The bottom line: at SLU, plan around a median grant that covers less than half of tuition, a federal loan system that no longer stretches to cover the full $82,000-plus annual cost, and a scholarship structure where full rides are not the norm — then treat any individual offer letter, and its renewal conditions, as the real number that matters, not the sticker price.
Whether an SLU JD is worth its cost depends heavily on what you want out of it: a Missouri-anchored legal career, a niche in health law, or a shot at a large national firm. On the numbers SLU itself reports, 93.5% of graduates were employed in full-time, long-term, bar-required or JD-advantage jobs, and the school's largest single employment category is the state of Missouri — a strong signal that SLU functions primarily as a regional-market law school rather than a national placement engine, and that's the lens worth judging it through rather than against a T14 benchmark.
The BigLaw question, honestly answered. Of SLU's most recent graduating class of 169, 25 graduates (14.8%) went to firms of 501+ attorneys — the size category that anchors the salary distribution's upper peak described in national employment data. The rest of the class is spread across smaller firms (29 graduates at firms of 1-10 attorneys, 24 at 11-25, and meaningful clusters up through the 251-500 range), plus 14 graduates in government (8.3%) and 7 in public interest (4.1%). That distribution tells you something concrete: a meaningful minority of each class lands at the biggest, highest-paying firms, while the larger share builds careers at small and mid-size firms, in government, or in business roles — a pattern far more typical of a regional law school than an anomaly specific to SLU. If your goal is a high-probability path to a 501+-attorney firm, weigh that 14.8% figure directly against SLU's roughly $82,300 estimated annual cost of attendance; if your goal is a Missouri or Metro-St.-Louis-based practice, government service, or a health-law-adjacent career, the calculus looks different.
Where SLU actually punches above its U.S. News rank. SLU sits at #91 in the 2026-27 U.S. News overall rankings — solidly outside the top tier — but its health law program is ranked 2nd in the country by the same publication, backed by the Center for Health Law Studies, an LL.M. in Health Law, and joint-degree options (JD/MHA, JD/MPH) that don't exist at most schools this size. If health law, health policy, or a hospital/insurer-adjacent legal career is the goal, SLU's overall rank understates its relevant strength; if you have no interest in that specialty, the #91 overall rank is a more honest proxy for general brand value in a national legal-hiring market.
Bar passage as a quality signal. SLU's first-time bar passage rate was 89.09%, compared to a state average of 85.6% — meaning graduates outperformed the broader pool of test-takers in the jurisdiction, and the two-year ultimate pass rate reached 88.33%. That's a genuinely reassuring data point regardless of your target market: whatever else is true about placement outcomes, SLU's JD is producing bar-passage results above the local baseline, which matters because state licensure, not law-school prestige, is the hard gate to practicing law at all.
Running your own worth-it math. The generic version of this calculation — debt taken on, likely starting salary, and loan payment under standard versus income-driven repayment — is covered in depth on our worth-it framework page. What SLU's own numbers add to that framework: a median scholarship covering less than half of tuition for most aided students, a total estimated annual cost near $82,300, an employment outcome heavily weighted toward Missouri and toward small/mid-size firms rather than BigLaw, and a genuine, rankings-verified niche advantage in health law. If your post-JD plan is regional practice, government service (where the 8.3% government placement and PSLF's decade-long forgiveness track could eventually apply), or a health-law specialty, those are the terms on which an SLU degree is worth evaluating — not against a national BigLaw hiring curve it was never built to dominate.