St. Mary's University School of Law is a private, Catholic (Society of Mary/Marianist) law school in San Antonio, Texas — the only Catholic law school in the state. It traces its roots to 1927, when the San Antonio Bar Association founded the San Antonio School of Law and ran classes out of the Bexar County Courthouse; St. Mary's University took over administrative control on October 1, 1934, officially establishing the School of Law under its current name.
The school's stated identity leans on the Marianist tradition of "hospitality, openness, and family spirit," and that mission shows up in who it enrolls and how it prices itself. St. Mary's reports that 81% of its students are scholarship recipients, and its tuition runs about $12,000 below the average for private law schools nationally — full-time tuition is $44,910 a year plus $1,400 in fees, with an estimated total cost of attendance around $70,188.
St. Mary's is not a large school. Total J.D. enrollment sits around 800 students, with roughly 282 students in the most recently reported entering class (254 full-time, 28 part-time). That part-time option matters: St. Mary's also runs a fully online, 11-term part-time J.D. program capped at about 25 students — the first fully ABA-accredited online J.D. program in the country — aimed squarely at working adults and career-changers who cannot relocate to San Antonio or attend during business hours.
Academically, the school organizes itself around practice-ready training rather than a wide menu of theoretical concentrations. Its named concentrations are Cybersecurity, Employment and Human Resources Law, and Territorial Law, and it runs seven in-house clinics — Civil Justice, Immigration and Human Rights, Criminal Justice, Consumer Protection, Family Law, Microenterprise and Community Development, and Real Estate. Students also have access to the Center for Terrorism Law, the Center for International Legal Studies, the Institute on World Legal Programs in Innsbruck, Austria, and the Institute on Chinese Law and Business, along with study-abroad options in Austria and China and a Legal and Cultural Spring Break program in Mexico. The school publishes three journals: the St. Mary's Law Journal, the St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics, and The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice.
St. Mary's advocacy program has earned outside recognition — the ABA's 2025 competition rankings placed it No. 4 nationally — and the school points to its Sarita Kenedy East Law Library, the largest legal information center in San Antonio with more than 400,000 volumes, as a research resource for the region's bench and bar. More than 500 St. Mary's graduates have gone on to hold elected or judicial office, and the school counts a network of more than 9,500 alumni.
Put together, this is a regionally rooted, mission-driven school built for students who want to practice law in Texas — particularly South Texas — often as first-generation or working professionals who need a lower price point, a part-time or online path, or both, and who value a practical, clinic-heavy curriculum over a national-ranking brand. It is not positioned as a pipeline into national Big Law; it is positioned as a pipeline into the Texas bar, the Texas bench, and Texas communities.
A 153 LSAT and a 3.49 GPA put you almost exactly at St. Mary's median on both numbers. The school's most recently reported entering class has an LSAT range of 151 (25th percentile) to 156 (75th percentile), with 153 as the median, and a GPA range of 3.14 to 3.69, with 3.49 as the median. In other words, this applicant profile sits at the statistical center of the class St. Mary's actually enrolled — neither below its typical range nor above it.
That position matters for how to think about the file, though it says nothing about the likelihood of an offer, which St. Mary's — like every school — evaluates through a fuller file review that this guide cannot predict. What the medians do tell you is where a score sits as a planning anchor for scholarship conversations and for comparison against other schools you're considering. St. Mary's reported 2,906 applications and 755 offers in its most recent cycle, an acceptance rate of about 26%, admitting a class of 282 students (254 full-time, 28 part-time).
St. Mary's reports that 81% of students receive some grant aid, with a median full-time grant of $12,500. Of students who receive aid, the largest band — 72% — receives an award covering less than half of tuition; 9% receive an award between half and full tuition; and the pack shows 0% receiving a full-tuition award. For an applicant sitting at the median LSAT and median GPA, the realistic scholarship conversation is centered on that less-than-half-tuition band rather than the smaller half-to-full band, since award size at most schools scales with how far a file sits above the school's own medians — and a dead-median file is, by definition, not above them.
Because 153 is the exact median, a modest LSAT increase has outsized leverage here compared to a school where your score is already at the 75th percentile. Moving from 153 toward 156 (the 75th percentile) would shift this file from the center of the class into its upper quartile on that metric, which is generally the range associated with the stronger scholarship bands at schools that award aid by index. The reverse is also true: a score drifting toward 151 (the 25th percentile) moves the file into the bottom quarter on LSAT, a zone many schools treat more cautiously in both admission and aid decisions. For a sense of how many additional points a typical LSAT retake produces and how to prepare for one, see the LSAT prep guide (/how-to-study-for-the-lsat).
The GPA range (3.14–3.69, median 3.49) is wide enough that a 3.49 places this applicant in the middle of a fairly broad academic-index band, alongside candidates whose undergraduate records varied considerably. Because St. Mary's, like most schools, weighs LSAT and GPA together rather than in isolation, a median GPA paired with a median LSAT is a genuinely representative combination for this class — not an outlier in either direction.
A 153/3.49 applicant to St. Mary's is looking at a file that mirrors the school's own class medians almost exactly. That's a useful anchor for comparing this school against others on your list, and for approaching scholarship negotiation with realistic expectations: at the median, you are a plausible candidate for the more common, partial-tuition award band, not automatically for the smaller full-or-near-full-tuition band. If scholarship maximization is a priority, review how index-based aid offers are typically structured and negotiated at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation before you compare offers across schools.
Illustrative: 3-year borrowing at the 2026-27 federal rate (8.07%) over 10 years; your figures depend on your offer and salary.
St. Mary's is built to place lawyers inside Texas, not to compete nationally for the largest firms — and the outcomes data reflects exactly that design. Of the 232 graduates in the reporting class, 84.9% landed in full-time, long-term positions that are either bar-passage-required or classified as JD-advantage roles within ten months of graduation, and the school's own reporting identifies Texas as the single largest destination for its graduates.
The firm-size breakdown tells the real story of what a St. Mary's J.D. buys you. Among graduates who went into private practice, the single biggest cluster — 70 graduates — landed at small firms of 1-10 attorneys, with another 9 going solo. Move up the ladder and the numbers thin out fast: 17 graduates at firms of 11-25 attorneys, 16 at firms of 26-50, 17 at firms of 51-100, and just 7 at firms sized 101-250. At the very top, only 2 graduates reported landing at firms of 251-500 attorneys, and just 5 graduates — 2.2% of the class — reported jobs at the 501+ attorney "Big Law" tier that anchors the $215,000 first-year salary peak in national reporting. If your goal walking in is a guaranteed shot at that tier, St. Mary's data says plainly that it is a rare outcome here, not a typical one.
What St. Mary's does deliver at real scale is a government and public-sector pipeline. Forty-one graduates (17.7% of the class) went into government work, making it the second-largest single category after private practice and a meaningfully larger outcome than Big Law for this school. Public interest placements were smaller — 4 graduates, or 1.7% — and business/industry roles accounted for another 11 graduates. Judicial clerkships, often a signal of strong academic performance translating into placement, went to 10 graduates total: 8 federal clerkships and 2 state or local clerkships, a respectable showing for a school of this size and one worth asking current students about directly if a clerkship is part of your plan.
St. Mary's also leans on a genuinely large alumni network as part of its employment story: more than 9,500 alumni, and the school reports that over 500 of them have gone on to hold elected or judicial office. In a regional legal market like San Antonio and South Texas, where hiring often runs through personal and institutional relationships built over decades, that alumni density is arguably a more useful asset for a typical St. Mary's graduate than a national brand name would be — particularly for anyone aiming at Texas government, the judiciary, or a long-term small-to-midsize firm career in the state.
One caution for applicants doing their own math: St. Mary's promotional materials cite a separate figure — 91% of graduates employed within 10 months — that is not clearly reconciled against the 84.9% bar-passage-required-or-JD-advantage figure used above; the two numbers may be measuring different populations (all employment types vs. bar-required/JD-advantage employment specifically) or different graduating cohorts. Treat the 84.9% figure as the more conservative, ABA-standard-aligned metric, and ask the school directly which year and definition the 91% figure reflects before relying on it.
Yes, and by the school's most recent reported cycle, St. Mary's first-time bar passage rate ran ahead of the Texas state average. St. Mary's reports an 84.62% first-time pass rate against a Texas state average of 82.58% for the same testing cycle — roughly a two-point edge over the statewide pool of test-takers, most of whom come from other Texas law schools taking the same exam.
The ultimate pass rate, which measures graduates who eventually clear the bar within two years of graduation rather than only on the first attempt, comes in at 86.67% for the cohort St. Mary's reports this figure for. That two-year window matters for prospective students: a first-time miss is not necessarily a dead end at St. Mary's, and the school's own data shows a meaningful share of graduates who don't pass on the first sitting go on to pass within the following year or two.
It's worth flagging that the pack also contains an older, separately-sourced data point describing a 73.47% overall first-time passage rate for 2023 test-takers and a 91.71% ultimate pass rate for the class of 2021 — figures that don't line up cleanly with the 84.62%/86.67% numbers above, most likely because they come from a different reporting cycle or a different definition of the test-taker pool. Bar passage rates are also inherently time-sensitive: they move year to year with the makeup of each graduating class, changes to the exam itself, and each state's grading, and the profession is also transitioning toward the NCBE's NextGen bar exam in many jurisdictions later this decade. Anyone weighing St. Mary's against a bar-passage benchmark should pull the school's current ABA 509 disclosure and the Texas Board of Law Examiners' latest school-by-school report rather than relying on any single year's number, including the ones cited here.
For context on how bar mechanics work more broadly — the UBE's portability, the separate MPRE ethics requirement, and Texas's own state-specific components — see the shared explainer on the bar exam; those mechanics apply to St. Mary's graduates the same way they apply everywhere, but the pass-rate numbers above are St. Mary's own.
St. Mary's operates the first fully online J.D. program accredited by the ABA, a part-time track that runs on an 11-term calendar and caps enrollment at 25 students per cohort. That structure signals a deliberately small, closely managed program rather than a mass-market online degree — St. Mary's is trying to preserve the supervision and bar-readiness of its in-person curriculum while removing the requirement to relocate to San Antonio or attend class in real time.
The tuition math is different from the full-time track. Part-time tuition runs $29,862 a year against $44,910 for full-time students, and the school's part-time division overall enrolls about 28 students, a small enough slice of the class that the online J.D. is clearly a niche pathway rather than the school's core offering. Because it is a part-time, multi-term structure, the online J.D. will typically take longer to finish than the traditional three-year, full-time day program.
Who should consider this path? Anyone for whom moving to San Antonio isn't realistic — because of a job, family obligations, military service, or geography — and who is comfortable with a slower, more spread-out pace toward the same ABA-accredited J.D. It is not a fit for someone chasing the fastest route to a bar card or wanting the full residential clinic-and-organization experience described elsewhere on this page; a fully online student's access to the seven live clinics, moot courtroom, and 30-plus student organizations will necessarily look different than a full-time, on-campus student's. The pack does not report separate bar-passage or employment outcomes specifically for online-J.D. graduates, so applicants weighing this track should ask the admissions office directly how those graduates have fared.
Yes, if hands-on client work and competition are what you want from law school — St. Mary's runs seven named clinics and its Law Advocacy Program was ranked No. 4 in the nation in the ABA's 2025 Competition Rankings. That combination gives students both a formal skills pipeline (clinics with real clients) and a competitive one (trial and appellate advocacy teams measured against every other law school in the country).
The seven clinics are the Civil Justice Clinic, Immigration and Human Rights Clinic, Criminal Justice Clinic, Consumer Protection Clinic, Family Law Clinic, Microenterprise and Community Development Clinic, and Real Estate Clinic — a spread that covers immigration, family law, small-business counseling, real property, and criminal defense/prosecution work rather than concentrating in just one practice area. Beyond the clinics, the school reports 65 field placements filled and 1,090 simulation-course enrollments, plus 41 co-curricular offerings, suggesting the applied-skills curriculum extends well past the seven clinic seats into externships and simulated practice courses across the J.D. program.
The advocacy ranking is backed by physical infrastructure: a 300-seat moot courtroom that underwent a $1 million renovation in 2006 and has hosted sitting panels from the Texas Supreme Court, the Texas Courts of Appeals, and the Fifth Circuit for mock proceedings.
For an applicant deciding whether to build a career around this infrastructure, the honest framing is that St. Mary's clinics and advocacy program are strengths relative to the school's overall national profile: they are specific, verifiable, and well-resourced, even if the school's broader rankings and employment outcomes (discussed elsewhere on this page) are more modest. If your goal is courtroom-ready litigation or transactional skills before graduation, rather than a name-brand résumé line, this is where St. Mary's spends its differentiation.
They give St. Mary's students access to niche, faculty-driven specialties that a school this size wouldn't otherwise have: a national security law center, a European study-abroad institute, and a China-focused legal program. The Center for Terrorism Law, directed by Professor Jeffrey Addicott, is a distinct research and programming center rather than a standard elective — it signals a specific national-security/international-law identity that shows up in course offerings and faculty scholarship rather than in a general curriculum.
The Institute on World Legal Programs places students in Innsbruck, Austria, for a study-abroad term, and the school separately runs an Institute on Chinese Law and Business along with study-abroad programming in China. Rounding out the international offerings, St. Mary's also runs a Legal and Cultural Spring Break program in Mexico and holds membership in the International Association of Law Schools and the International Academy of Comparative Law. Two additional centers — the Center for International Legal Studies and the Center for Legal and Social Justice — extend the international and public-interest programming further, though the pack does not detail their specific course offerings or staffing.
For an applicant, the practical value of these centers depends on your goals: if you want a concentration or resume credential in national security law, international/comparative law, or China-related practice, St. Mary's has built specific institutional infrastructure — named centers, a directing faculty member, and standing exchange programs — rather than leaving those interests to be pursued through one-off electives.
It means a St. Mary's J.D. plugs into a sizable, politically and judicially connected alumni base concentrated in Texas. The school reports more than 9,500 living alumni, and more than 500 of them have served in elected or judicial positions — a meaningful density of bench-and-bar influence for a single law school's graduate base.
For a prospective student, that translates most directly into mentorship, clerkship, and networking access within Texas courts and government, where the school's own employment data show its largest single placement category is Texas government and where graduates report federal and state/local clerkships. A network this size and this embedded in elected and judicial roles is a genuine asset if your career goal runs through Texas public service, the judiciary, or elected office — less directly relevant if your target is a national Big Law market, where St. Mary's placement numbers (covered elsewhere on this page) are modest.
The pack does not name specific notable alumni, so applicants should verify individual examples directly with the school's alumni relations office rather than relying on the aggregate figures alone.
At St. Mary's, the numbers that matter are its published 25th/50th/75th percentiles: LSAT of 151/153/156 and undergraduate GPA of 3.14/3.49/3.69 for the entering class reflected in the most recent ABA compilation. Those six numbers are the honest starting point for self-assessment — not a prediction of your outcome, but a way to see where your own file sits relative to the middle 50% of people the school actually enrolled.
Because the LSAT (in its current two-Logical-Reasoning, one-Reading-Comprehension format since August 2024) is a skills test that responds to structured practice with official material, a scaled-up study plan over several months is usually the highest-leverage move available to an applicant sitting below St. Mary's median. Moving from, say, a 151 to a 156 shifts you from the school's 25th percentile to its 75th percentile — a jump that matters both for how your file reads on paper and, at many schools, for how a scholarship committee treats your application. For mechanics of a study plan, see the shared guide at /how-to-study-for-the-lsat.
GPA works differently: it's fixed by the time you apply, so its role is comparative rather than something to 'fix' before applying. A 3.49 sits at St. Mary's median; a 3.69 or higher places you at its 75th percentile, and a 3.14 is at the 25th. If your GPA is below the median, a strong, well-above-median LSAT is generally the most direct way to offset that on paper, and vice versa — this is the basic logic every admissions index and most scholarship matrices use, though St. Mary's own internal weighting isn't published in the data available here.
What should change your calculus at St. Mary's specifically is the aid picture that sits behind the numbers. The school reports that 81% of students receive some grant aid, but the distribution is heavily skewed toward partial awards: about 72% of students receiving aid get less than half-tuition, roughly 9% get half-to-full tuition, and none are reported in the full-tuition band. That means a scholarship at St. Mary's is far more likely to be a several-thousand-dollar discount than a free ride, and the reported median grant among full-time students is $12,500 against tuition and fees north of $46,000 — a meaningful offset, but well short of covering the gap. If your numbers land above the 75th percentile (156 LSAT / 3.69 GPA or better), that's the strongest position from which to ask whether a better offer is available, and to compare offers across schools using the negotiation playbook at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation. If your numbers land below the median, expect a smaller discount and budget accordingly rather than assuming the published 81%-receiving-grants figure means most students get large awards — the band data says otherwise.
One more point worth internalizing before you test or retest: a school's median LSAT and GPA are anchors for comparison, not thresholds you must clear to be admitted, and they say nothing about your individual chances. Treat them as inputs to a financial and academic-fit decision, not as a green or red light.
Applying to St. Mary's follows the standard path for ABA-accredited law schools: you apply through LSAC, which centralizes your LSAT score(s), transcripts via the Credential Assembly Service (CAS), letters of recommendation, and personal statement into one file the school reviews. The data available for this guide does not include St. Mary's specific application fee or stated deadline, so treat any figure you find elsewhere as something to verify directly with the admissions office before you rely on it — deadlines and fees change cycle to cycle and aren't reliably static.
A few structural facts are worth knowing going in. St. Mary's data pack lists the LSAT as the test it accepts — there's no indication here of a GRE or other alternative-test pathway, so plan your testing timeline around the LSAT specifically; see /how-to-study-for-the-lsat for how to build that runway. In the most recently reported cycle, St. Mary's received 2,906 applications and extended offers to about 26% of that pool (755 offers), ultimately enrolling a class of 282 — 254 full-time and 28 part-time. That part-time/full-time split matters at the application stage itself: you typically choose a division when you apply, and it affects your course load, tuition rate (part-time tuition is billed separately and lower per year than full-time), and time to degree.
Because most law schools, St. Mary's very likely among them, admit on a rolling basis — reviewing files roughly in the order complete applications arrive rather than waiting for one hard deadline — applying earlier in the cycle (files complete in fall rather than spring) generally gives you a fuller set of seats and scholarship dollars still on the table, even though it doesn't change whether your particular file gets a favorable read. If you're weighing when to sit for the LSAT relative to when you plan to submit, understand that a February or March score in a given cycle may arrive after a meaningful share of seats and aid have already been offered elsewhere. The general mechanics of building an application timeline — when to request letters, when CAS reports finalize, how much buffer to leave before a target submission date — are covered in /law-school-application-timeline; that logic applies at St. Mary's exactly as it does anywhere else, just calibrated to St. Mary's rolling-admissions norm and its multi-track (full-time/part-time) structure.
One practical note specific to how St. Mary's structures its offerings: alongside the standard on-campus J.D., the school has run an ABA-accredited part-time online J.D. track (capped at a small cohort). If a non-traditional or distance format is relevant to you, that's a separate application decision to make explicit early, since it affects which seats and which aid pools you're competing for. Beyond that structural detail, the file itself — personal statement, recommenders, addenda for anything unusual in your record — follows the same general best practices as any ABA school application, and there's no evidence in the available data that St. Mary's requires anything unusual beyond the standard LSAC-routed file.
Most St. Mary's students get some grant money, but the honest headline is that it's usually a partial discount, not a free ride: 81% of students receive grant aid, yet about 72% of aided students get less than half-tuition, roughly 9% get half-to-full tuition, and the pack reports 0% in the full-tuition band. The reported median grant for full-time students is $12,500 a year — a real reduction against full-time tuition and fees of roughly $46,300, but not one that closes the gap to St. Mary's estimated full-time cost of attendance of about $70,188, which folds in living expenses (an off-campus budget of roughly $23,878 is part of that estimate).
That gap matters more starting with loans disbursed for the 2026-27 academic year, when Grad PLUS loans disappear for new borrowers and federal Direct Unsubsidized loans for law students are capped at $50,000 per year and $200,000 in aggregate. Run the arithmetic against St. Mary's own cost of attendance: a roughly $70,000 annual budget exceeds the $50,000 federal annual cap by about $20,000, and three years of that cost would approach or exceed the $200,000 aggregate cap on its own. In practice, that shortfall has to be covered by scholarships, savings, or private loans — and private loans typically lack the fixed rates and borrower protections (including PSLF eligibility) that come with federal loans. This is general federal policy, not a St. Mary's-specific number, but it's the backdrop against which any scholarship offer from St. Mary's should be read; verify current caps and rates before you borrow, since these figures are time-sensitive. Broader mechanics of federal loans and PSLF are covered at /law-school-loans-and-pslf.
On conditional scholarships — awards that require you to maintain a minimum GPA or class rank to keep the money — the data available for this guide does not show a usable retention rate for St. Mary's: the entering and reduced-scholarship figures reported for the 2022-23, 2023-24, and 2024-25 cohorts are blank or zero across the board. That's not the same as a clean bill of health; it may simply mean the reporting fields were unpopulated in the source ABA compilation. Because a conditional scholarship that many students lose after year one is effectively a bet on your 1L class rank rather than a guaranteed discount, this is a question worth asking St. Mary's financial aid office directly before you enroll: is your offer conditional on a GPA or rank threshold, and if so, what share of similarly-situated students have historically kept it? Don't assume either a good or bad answer from the absence of data here.
Given that the full-tuition band is reported at 0%, an applicant hoping to negotiate toward a full-ride at St. Mary's should treat that as an uphill and historically rare outcome at this school specifically, whatever techniques might work elsewhere. A more realistic goal, especially for an applicant above the school's LSAT/GPA medians, is negotiating a better partial award or asking a competing offer to be matched — the general approach for that conversation is at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation. Whatever the offer, run it against the full cost of attendance, not just the tuition sticker, and think through whether the degree pencils out for your situation using the framework at /is-law-school-worth-it — a question that hinges heavily on debt taken on relative to the job outcome you're actually likely to land, not on the sticker price alone.
The honest answer is: it depends on whether you're measuring against a national Big Law track or a regional Texas legal career — and for most St. Mary's students, the second frame is the fair one. St. Mary's places the bulk of its graduates into small and mid-size Texas practice rather than large national firms, with only 2.2% of the reporting class landing at firms of 501+ attorneys and 70 graduates landing at firms of 1-10 lawyers. If your worth-it math assumes a $215,000 Big Law salary paying down debt quickly, that's not the realistic path for the vast majority of this class. If instead you're picturing solo, small-firm, or government practice in San Antonio or elsewhere in Texas — where 17.7% of the class went into government work and clerkships (8 federal, 2 state/local) are part of the outcome mix — the calculus looks different and more favorable.
Start with the cost side. Full-time cost of attendance runs about $70,188 for a year, against annual tuition and fees near $46,310 and estimated off-campus living costs of $23,878. Multiply the full COA by three years and you're looking at roughly $210,000 in sticker cost before any aid — but 81% of students receive some grant, with a median grant around $12,500 for full-time students. That said, the aid is modest relative to sticker: 72% of grant recipients get less than half tuition covered, 9% get half-to-full, and no one in the reported band received a full-tuition award. In practice, that means most students should plan around paying a large majority of the sticker price, not counting on a scholarship to erase it — a point worth pressing hard in any negotiation (see our scholarship-negotiation playbook for how to leverage a median or above-median LSAT/GPA into a better offer before you enroll).
On the financing mechanics: as of the 2026-27 cycle, federal Direct Unsubsidized loans are capped at $50,000 per year and $200,000 aggregate for professional-degree students, and Grad PLUS loans have been eliminated for new borrowers (verify current figures before you borrow, since these rules are newly in effect). At roughly $70,000 a year in cost, a student without significant scholarship support could bump into that annual federal cap and need savings or private loans to close the gap — a real planning issue at a school where full-tuition awards aren't part of the picture. If you're weighing eventual forgiveness, remember the default federal repayment plan earns zero PSLF credit; a graduate heading into a government or nonprofit job — a path 17.7%-plus of this class takes — would need to actively opt into the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan to keep the PSLF clock running toward the ten-year forgiveness point. Our loans-and-PSLF page walks through that election in detail.
On the return side, the numbers that matter aren't prestige metrics but placement and licensure. Roughly 84.9% of the reporting graduating class landed in jobs requiring bar passage or classified as JD-advantage within ten months, and the school's first-time bar pass rate of 84.62% ran above the state average of 82.58%, with an ultimate pass rate near 86.67% within two years. Those are the numbers that actually predict whether the degree converts into a license and a job — more relevant here than a U.S. News rank sitting around 150, which reflects reputation and selectivity inputs more than your personal outcome.
Put together, St. Mary's is a rational bet primarily for someone committed to practicing in San Antonio or Texas more broadly, comfortable with a small-firm or government-track career rather than a Big Law one, and clear-eyed that grant aid will likely cover less than half of tuition. It's a much shakier bet if you're borrowing near the full $210,000 sticker cost while hoping for a national firm salary to justify it. Run your own numbers against the general framework on our is-law-school-worth-it page, but anchor every input — cost, aid, and placement — to the figures above rather than to law school outcomes generally.