The University of Baltimore School of Law is one of only two ABA-accredited law schools in the state of Maryland, sharing that status with the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. That duopoly matters more than a ranking number: if you want to practice in Maryland, UB is training you inside the same state bar, the same courts, and largely the same employer pool you'll compete in as a graduate — and its own reporting confirms Maryland is the single largest destination for its graduates.
That regional orientation shows up throughout the school's structure. UB enrolls 248 students across full-time and part-time divisions (186 full-time, 62 part-time).
The alumni list reinforces the same pattern. UB Law's notable graduates run heavily toward Maryland public life: a former U.S. Vice President and Maryland governor (Spiro Agnew), a former Maryland governor and mayor of Baltimore (William Donald Schaefer), a former Maryland Attorney General (J. Joseph Curran Jr.), multiple Maryland state senators and delegates, and numerous sitting and former state and appellate judges. Recent graduates land 52 state and local clerkships against just one federal clerkship in the school's most recent reporting — a strong signal that UB's placement strength runs through the Maryland judiciary and state government rather than the federal system.
Curricular offerings track the same regional logic. Concentrations in Real Estate Practice, Family Law, Estate Planning, and Public and Governmental Service map directly onto the kinds of practice areas that dominate mid-sized Maryland firms and government offices, and clinics like the Bronfein Family Law Clinic, the Community Development Clinic, and the Saul Ewing Civil Advocacy Clinic put students directly into Baltimore's courts and communities during law school.
Being one of two options in the state also means applicants weighing UB against Maryland Carey are really choosing between two different postures on the same market: both feed Maryland's bench, bar, and government, but UB's part-time division and its concentration menu are built for students who already know they want to practice locally and may need a flexible schedule to get there. If your target is Baltimore's courts, city or county government, or a mid-sized regional firm, that in-state duopoly works in your favor — you're training in the market you intend to enter. If your target is a national or Big Law career, the calculus is different, and worth weighing against what UB's own outcomes data shows about where its graduates actually land.
UB also carries some distinctive infrastructure beyond the regional focus: the school is housed in the LEED-Platinum John and Frances Angelos Law Center, opened in 2013, and it runs the Center for International and Comparative Law, founded in 1994, along with membership in the European-American Consortium for Legal Education. Those add an international-law and comparative-law dimension — including an LL.M. in U.S. Law (LOTUS) — that sits alongside, rather than replaces, the school's core identity as a feeder into Maryland's legal system.
UB Law's most recently reported entering class shows an LSAT range of 152 at the 25th percentile, 155 at the median, and 158 at the 75th percentile, paired with a GPA range of 3.12/3.45/3.70. Those six numbers are the honest starting point for sizing up where you'd sit in the class — not a prediction of what happens to your application, but a planning anchor for how your numbers compare to the middle two quartiles of students UB actually enrolled.
If your score sits at or above 158, you're at or above where three-quarters of UB's entering class scored — a position schools generally treat as strong on the numbers axis. A 155 puts you squarely at the reported median, the single most common reference point in a scholarship or admissions conversation. A 152 sits at the 25th percentile, meaning a quarter of the entering class scored below that number and three-quarters scored at or above it. None of that describes your odds of admission; it describes where you'd land inside a class UB has already enrolled. The same logic applies to GPA: a 3.45 is the reported median, 3.12 the 25th percentile, and 3.70 the 75th percentile. Because LSAT and GPA are usually read together as an index rather than in isolation, an applicant strong on one axis and softer on the other doesn't map cleanly onto a single number — that's a case where the general mechanics of how the LSAT is built and scored, and how to prepare for it, are worth a separate read (see /how-to-study-for-the-lsat) rather than something UB's own reporting can settle for you.
UB received 1,299 applications and extended 643 offers, a 49.5% offer rate, for its most recently reported cycle. That figure describes the applicant pool as a whole, not any individual's chances — but it does tell you this is a school that extends offers to roughly half of everyone who applies, which is a meaningfully more open process than schools that admit in the single digits or teens. That openness is part of why UB functions as a genuine access point into the Maryland bar for applicants whose numbers sit below the medians at more numerically selective programs.
Full-time tuition is $33,944 a year plus $2,474 in fees, and UB estimates a full-time cost of attendance around $61,442 once living costs (estimated at $25,024 for an off-campus budget) are added in. Part-time tuition runs lower, at $25,290 a year, reflecting the slower pace built for working students — though a part-time student takes longer to finish and should budget across more years rather than comparing the annual sticker price directly to the full-time number.
Scholarship money is real and fairly widely distributed here: 67% of students receive a grant, and the reported median grant for full-time students is $15,000 a year — a discount of roughly 44% off full-time tuition alone at the median. Looking at how that aid breaks down by size, 45% of students receive a scholarship worth less than half of tuition, 22% receive one covering half to all of tuition, and just 1% receive a full-tuition award. In practical terms, most UB scholarship offers are partial, and a $15,000 median grant is a meaningful but not full offset against a total cost of attendance north of $60,000.
UB's own reporting on conditional scholarships shows that a real share of scholarship recipients lose part of their award after the first year: 15.7% of the 2024-25 entering cohort (20 of 127 scholarship holders) had their award reduced, following 17.1% in 2023-24 (26 of 152) and 13.9% in 2022-23 (20 of 144). That's a multi-year pattern, not a one-off, and it means an incoming student holding a conditional scholarship faces roughly a one-in-six to one-in-seven chance, based on recent classes, of seeing that award shrink after 1L grades come in. Any applicant comparing scholarship offers should ask UB directly what GPA or class-rank floor a given offer requires to renew, since the size of the initial grant tells only part of the story — the retention condition is what determines whether you're still paying that discounted rate in year two. The general mechanics of how to negotiate and stress-test a scholarship offer against a school's published medians are covered at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation, and the same conditional-renewal question is worth running through the financing framework at /law-school-loans-and-pslf before you commit.
Put together, UB's numbers describe a school where the median admitted profile (155/3.45) sits in a moderately selective, non-numbers-obsessed process, where most students get some scholarship help, and where that help comes with a renewal condition that a meaningful share of each recent class has not fully kept.
If you enter the University of Baltimore School of Law with a merit scholarship, there is a documented chance you will lose part of it before you graduate. Across the three most recent entering classes UB reports publicly, the share of conditionally-scholarshipped students who had their award reduced ranged from 13.9% to 17.1% — 20 of 144 entering students in 2022-23, 26 of 152 in 2023-24, and 20 of 127 in 2024-25. In plain terms, roughly one in every six to seven scholarship recipients in a given class did not keep the award they started with.
This matters because most UB students are on some form of grant to begin with: 67% of students receive grant aid, but the shape of that aid is heavily skewed toward partial awards. Forty-five percent of students receive scholarships covering less than half of tuition, another 22% receive half-to-full awards, and only 1% receive a full-tuition scholarship. The median first-year grant is $15,000 — against annual full-time tuition and fees of roughly $36,400 and a total estimated cost of attendance near $61,400. Even a student who keeps their scholarship in full is still financing a large share of law school through loans or savings; a student who loses part of it mid-degree faces a real, sudden increase in what they owe.
What this means practically: a conditional scholarship at UB is not free money locked in for three years — it is contingent on hitting an academic benchmark (typically a minimum law school GPA) after 1L, in a curve where, by definition, a meaningful share of any class will land below the median. Before you commit to an offer, ask the admissions or financial aid office for the exact GPA retention threshold attached to your specific award, and run the numbers on what your annual cost looks like if the scholarship is reduced or eliminated. For students for whom the scholarship is the deciding factor in whether UB is affordable at all, the retention data above is the single most important number in the offer letter — more important than the headline award amount. Applicants for whom cost is a genuine constraint should treat the conditional terms as a real risk to budget around, not fine print to skim. For a general walkthrough of how to evaluate and negotiate a conditional scholarship offer before you sign, see /law-school-scholarship-negotiation.
Illustrative: 3-year borrowing at the 2026-27 federal rate (8.07%) over 10 years; your figures depend on your offer and salary.
University of Baltimore graduates pass the bar on their first attempt at a lower rate than the Maryland state average — 70.53% for UB against a 73.99% state average, a gap of roughly 3.5 percentage points. That gap narrows substantially over time: UB's own reported two-year ultimate pass rate is 78.36%, meaning a meaningful number of graduates who don't clear the bar on the first sitting do pass on a later attempt. The honest read of these two numbers together is that UB's bar outcomes are not catastrophic, but they are not strong either — first-time passage lags the state, and a real share of the class needs more than one attempt to get there.
What's likely driving the gap. The data pack doesn't give UB's own explanation, so the following is inference from the numbers UB does report, not a claim from the school. UB's entering-class LSAT profile is modest by national standards: a 25th percentile of 152, median of 155, and 75th percentile of 158, with a GPA band of 3.12/3.45/3.70. Because LSAT score is one of the more consistent predictors of bar performance across the profession generally, a class centered in the low-to-mid 150s will, as a statistical matter, include more students who find the bar's multiple-choice and essay format challenging than a class centered ten points higher. This is a feature of who UB admits, not evidence of a broken program — but it is the most parsimonious explanation for why first-time passage sits below the state average even as UB invests heavily in experiential preparation (149 of 150 available clinic seats filled, 158 field placements filled, and 326 seats filled in simulation courses in the most recent reporting year).
Why this matters for your decision, not just your resume. Bar passage isn't an abstract statistic at UB — it's a gate that determines whether the job outcomes UB reports are available to you at all. Of UB's 204 graduates in the reporting cohort, 82.4% ended up in jobs that were full-time, long-term, and either bar-passage-required or J.D.-advantage. The single largest employment outcome category is Maryland-based practice, and the firm-size data shows why: 45 employed graduates went into firms of 1-10 attorneys, with another sizable share in the 11-25 and 26-50 range — small and mid-size Maryland firms where passing the bar on schedule, without a costly delay to your start date or your bar-prep budget, is directly tied to your ability to start earning as a licensed attorney. Only about 2% of the class (4 graduates) landed at firms of 501+ attorneys, so UB is not a pipeline where a slow bar-passage timeline is cushioned by a guaranteed Big Law start date and salary; for the large majority of the class headed into Maryland-market firms, government (8.3%), or public interest (6.4%) roles, timely bar passage is the practical bottleneck between graduation and paid legal work.
What to do with this if you're applying. Two things follow directly from the pack's numbers. First, if your own LSAT and GPA land near or below UB's medians (155 / 3.45), treat bar preparation as something to plan for proactively from 1L onward — not a 2L or 3L afterthought — given that UB's own first-time outcomes sit below the state's overall average. Second, weigh the two-year ultimate rate of 78.36% honestly: it suggests that a UB J.D. is very likely to eventually translate into a license, but a meaningful share of graduates absorb the cost, delay, and stress of a second attempt to get there, which has real implications for when you can start repaying loans and drawing a full attorney salary. For general mechanics of how the bar exam works, how UBE portability functions across states, and how the NCBE's NextGen transition may affect the exam you'll eventually sit for, see the shared explainer rather than assuming this year's format will be identical to when you graduate.
Most University of Baltimore JD graduates build careers in Maryland's courthouses, agencies, and small-to-midsize firms rather than at national BigLaw firms — a pattern the school's own placement data confirms plainly. Of the 204 graduates in the reporting class, only 4 (2.0%) landed at firms of 501 or more attorneys, the category typically associated with the $215,000 BigLaw salary band. The employment data instead show a law school built around Maryland's legal and governmental infrastructure, with the largest single employment type reported simply as "Maryland" itself.
Look at the firm-size breakdown and the small-firm and solo-practice tilt is unmistakable: among graduates who reported working at law firms, 45 went to shops of 10 or fewer attorneys, compared with 11 at firms of 11-25, 8 at firms of 26-50, and single digits at every bracket above that (3 at 51-100, 4 at 101-250, 3 at 251-500). Two graduates went solo. In other words, for every UB graduate who lands at a giant firm, roughly ten land at a small one — a ratio that should shape how applicants think about the network and training model this school offers.
Government and public-interest employers absorb a meaningful share of each class. Seventeen graduates (8.3%) took government jobs and thirteen (6.4%) went into public-interest positions, together accounting for close to 15% of the class — well above what a firm-size breakdown alone would suggest. Sixteen more graduates (roughly 8%) moved into business and industry roles. This mix tracks with UB's long institutional relationship to Maryland public service: the school's alumni rolls include a U.S. Vice President and Maryland governor (Spiro Agnew), a Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor and comptroller (William Donald Schaefer), a former Maryland Attorney General and Lieutenant Governor (J. Joseph Curran Jr.), and a long list of sitting and former state legislators, judges, and a Montana Supreme Court justice (Laurie McKinnon). For an applicant weighing careers in Maryland politics, prosecution, or agency practice, this is a genuinely different alumni network than a national-firm-focused school would offer.
Clerkships are common but concentrated at the state and local level rather than the federal bench. The data show 52 graduates in state or local clerkships against just 1 federal clerkship. That means roughly a quarter of the graduating class took a clerkship, overwhelmingly with Maryland's state courts — a strong signal that UB functions as a feeder into Maryland's judiciary, consistent with its long roster of alumni judges on the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, Frederick County Circuit Court, and other state benches.
82.4% of the reporting class was employed in a job that was full-time, long-term, and either required bar passage or was JD-advantage. That figure sits below the near-universal placement seen at top-ranked schools, and it's a number applicants should weigh directly against the cost of the degree rather than assume away.
UB's first-time bar pass rate was 70.53%, compared with a state average of 73.99% — a gap of roughly 3.5 points. The two-year ultimate pass rate climbs to 78.36%, showing that a meaningful share of first-time non-passers do pass on a later attempt, but the first-time gap versus the state average is a fact applicants should factor into realistic timeline and cost planning, since bar failure means added months (or years) before a graduate can practice and start repaying loans.
UB is best understood as a regional, public-service-oriented law school whose graduates cluster in Maryland small firms, state government, and state courts, with only a handful reaching the largest national firms each year. Applicants whose career goal is Maryland public service, judicial clerkship, or small-firm practice will find a school built around exactly that path; applicants counting on a BigLaw outcome should treat the 2% placement rate as the realistic anchor, not the exception.
For a working adult who cannot leave a job, UB's part-time division is a real, sizable program — 62 of the school's 248 entering students are part-time, alongside 186 full-time — and it comes with a lower sticker price per year than the day division: $25,290 in part-time tuition versus $33,944 in full-time tuition (before the $2,474 in mandatory fees full-time students also pay). The school does not publicly report how many years the part-time track typically takes to finish or its full multi-year cost, so applicants comparing total cost-to-degree across divisions should ask admissions directly for a year-by-year cost projection rather than assume a simple multiple of the annual rate.
Sixty-seven percent of students receive some grant aid, and the median full-time grant is $15,000 a year — which, against a full-time cost of attendance estimated at $61,442 (tuition, fees, and an off-campus living estimate of $25,024), covers a meaningful but partial slice of the bill. The distribution of aid is uneven: 45% of students receive awards below half-tuition, 22% receive half-to-full-tuition awards, and only 1% receive a full-tuition scholarship. That means most aid recipients are still covering a majority of the cost themselves, whether through federal loans, savings, or continued employment — which is precisely the appeal of the part-time track for someone who can keep a paycheck coming in while enrolled.
A real share of UB's incoming scholarship holders see their aid reduced after year one. Across the three most recent entering cohorts reported, the share of students whose scholarship was reduced or eliminated ran from 13.9% to 17.1% — in the most recent reported cohort, 20 of 127 entering students (15.7%) lost some or all of their conditional award. Any applicant evaluating a scholarship offer, part-time or full-time, should read the GPA-retention condition attached to it as closely as the headline dollar figure, since roughly one in six to one in seven students in recent classes did not keep their initial award intact. For a general walkthrough of how to read and negotiate a scholarship letter, see the shared guide on law school scholarship negotiation.
Given that UB's median LSAT is 155 and median GPA is 3.45 (25th-75th percentiles of 152-158 and 3.12-3.70), the applicant pool is broad, and the part-time division functions as a genuine access point for career-changers, government employees, and Baltimore-area professionals who need a JD without stepping away from income for three years. Combined with UB's placement pattern — a strong tilt toward Maryland small firms, state agencies, and state courts rather than national BigLaw firms — the evening division fits naturally with a plan to stay local, keep working, and transition into Maryland practice or public service rather than a plan built around landing a large-firm associate offer.
Yes — clinical and experiential work at the University of Baltimore is not a boutique offering, it's close to universal. The school reports 150 clinic seats available and 149 filled in the most recent cycle, essentially full enrollment, alongside 158 filled field placements and 326 enrollments in simulation courses. Add 19 co-curricular offerings on top of that, and a UB student graduates having done far more than sit in doctrinal lecture halls.
The clinical roster is unusually broad for a school this size. UB runs twelve named clinics: the Saul Ewing Civil Advocacy Clinic, Community Development Clinic, Criminal Defense and Advocacy Clinic, Bronfein Family Law Clinic, Immigrant Justice Clinic, Immigrant Rights Clinic, Innocence Project Clinic, Low-Income Taxpayer Clinic, Mediation Clinic for Families, Mental Health Law Clinic, The Bob Parsons Veterans Advocacy Clinic, and the Legal Data & Design Clinic. That spread covers criminal defense and post-conviction innocence work, immigration (split across two distinct clinics), family and mediation practice, tax controversy for low-income clients, veterans' benefits, mental health law, and even a data/design-oriented clinic — a mix that lets a student build a concentration-length track record in a specific field before graduation rather than sampling one general litigation clinic.
This matters in practical terms because of where UB graduates actually go to work: the school's own outcomes data shows Maryland as its largest employment destination, with the bulk of graduates landing in small and mid-size firms and meaningful placement in government and public interest roles. Those are exactly the settings — solo and small-firm practice, legal aid, prosecutors' and public defenders' offices, agency counsel — where a student who has already run a family-law mediation, defended a client in the Criminal Defense and Advocacy Clinic, or represented a veteran before the VA arrives with a head start that a purely classroom-trained peer does not have.
The caveat worth naming plainly: clinics build practical skill, not a guaranteed outcome. Bar passage (70.53% first-time, against a state average of 73.99%) and the fact that 82.4% of graduates land in jobs that are bar-required or JD-advantage are the real measures of whether the hands-on model translates into a law license and a job — and those numbers, discussed elsewhere in this guide, should be read alongside the clinical strength rather than in place of it.
UB Law's most distinctive asset may not be a ranking or a salary figure but its alumni footprint inside Maryland government — a network built over decades that starts, most famously, with Spiro Agnew (LL.B. 1947), who became Governor of Maryland and the 39th Vice President of the United States. That's an outlier data point, not a template for outcomes, but it anchors a genuinely deep bench of graduates who went on to hold elected and judicial office across the state.
The list runs through governors and statewide officers — William Donald Schaefer (LL.B. 1942, LL.M. 1954), who served as Mayor of Baltimore, Governor, and Comptroller of Maryland; Melvin Steinberg (JD 1955) and Samuel Walter Bogley III (JD 1967), both former Lieutenant Governors; and J. Joseph Curran Jr. (LL.B. 1959), a former Maryland Attorney General and Lieutenant Governor. It continues into the judiciary, with graduates such as Arrie W. Davis (JD 1969) and Robert F. Fischer (LL.B. 1961) on the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, Shirley Brannock Jones (JD 1946) on the U.S. District Court for Maryland, and Katie O'Malley (JD 1991), a former Baltimore judge and First Lady of Baltimore and Maryland. The state legislature reflects the same pattern, with numerous alumni having served as Maryland State Delegates and Senators, including Jill P. Carter (JD 1992), Shaneka Henson (JD 2010), and George W. Della Jr. (JD 1972).
This pipeline is not just historical color — it shows up in the school's current placement data. UB reports 52 state and local clerkships against a single federal clerkship, a ratio that reflects a school whose graduates are deeply embedded in Maryland's state courts and agencies rather than oriented toward the federal appellate track. Combined with a concentration explicitly built around Public and Governmental Service, and a location as one of only two law schools in the state of Maryland, UB functions less like a national feeder school and more like a standing pipeline into Maryland's courthouses, legislature, and executive branch. For an applicant whose goal is a Maryland judgeship, a state's attorney's office, a legislative staff role, or elected office within the state, that network is a real and distinctive asset — one that a nationally ranked but out-of-state school cannot offer in the same concentrated form.
Realistic peer schools to weigh against this one: University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law
A sub-155 LSAT does not put you outside UB's applicant pool — it puts you below the school's own median. UB's reported LSAT split is 152 at the 25th percentile, 155 at the 50th, and 158 at the 75th, meaning a full quarter of the entering class sits at or below 152. The school's overall acceptance rate is 49.5%, which is informative about volume, not about any individual applicant's chances — this guide does not translate a score into odds, only into where it sits relative to the school's own benchmarks.
What a below-median LSAT does affect, concretely, is money. UB reports that 67% of students receive some grant aid, with a median grant around $15,000, but it also reports meaningful scholarship-retention risk: across the last three entering classes, between roughly 14% and 17% of students with conditional scholarships had those awards reduced after their first year. A weaker LSAT relative to the 155 median typically means a smaller initial award and a tighter GPA floor to keep it — so a retake, if you have the runway to prepare with official material over a few months, can move both your admission profile and your scholarship math simultaneously. The general mechanics of LSAT scoring, section structure, and prep timing are covered in depth at /how-to-study-for-the-lsat; the retention-risk math is worth running before you accept any conditional award, and /law-school-scholarship-negotiation walks through how to do that.
The single most useful thing to know about applying to UB Law is that its published entry stats — a 152/155/158 LSAT split and a 3.12/3.45/3.70 GPA split — describe a school that admits a genuinely wide range of academic profiles, so your file needs to work harder on the parts you control: the personal statement, letters, and any addendum explaining a GPA dip or gap. UB's data pack does not report a specific application deadline or fee, so verify both directly on the school's admissions page before you build a timeline — deadlines and fees shift year to year and are not something to guess at.
Because UB reports accepting the LSAT as its testing pathway, confirm current test-score policy directly with admissions if you are considering an alternative like the GRE, rather than assuming national norms apply here. For the general mechanics of assembling a strong file — when to apply within a cycle, how much weight letters and statements typically carry, and how to sequence LSAT retakes against application deadlines — see /law-school-application-timeline.
Financially, worth building into your application strategy from day one: UB's total estimated cost of attendance for a full-time student is roughly $61,442, and two-thirds of students receive some grant support with a median award near $15,000. Given that federal loan rules changed substantially for borrowers starting July 2026 — Grad PLUS is gone, and Direct Unsubsidized loans are capped well below many students' full cost of attendance — treat any scholarship offer as a number to negotiate, not just accept, and read the retention conditions (GPA floors) closely before you commit. /law-school-scholarship-negotiation and /law-school-loans-and-pslf cover both pieces in detail.
Most UB Law students pay something well below the sticker price, but very few pay nothing. The school's estimated full cost of attendance for a full-time student is about $61,442 a year, built from $33,944 in tuition, $2,474 in fees, and roughly $25,024 in estimated off-campus living costs. Part-time students pay a lower annual tuition rate of about $25,290, which matters if you're weighing UB's evening/part-time option against a faster but pricier full-time track.
About 67% of students receive some grant aid, and the median grant among full-time recipients is $15,000 a year — a meaningful dent in tuition but not, for most people, a full ride. The distribution matters more than the median: 45% of students get aid covering less than half of tuition, 22% get between half and full tuition, and only about 1% receive a full-tuition award. In practice, that means the realistic planning assumption for most admitted students is a partial scholarship layered on top of loans, not the headline full-ride figure that a small handful of top applicants might see.
A detail worth scrutinizing before you sign an enrollment deposit: UB's conditional scholarships. Data on scholarship retention shows that in the 2024-25 class, about 15.7% of entering students with conditional awards had their scholarship reduced after year one; the prior two years saw reduction rates of 17.1% and 13.9%. That's not unusual among law schools that award GPA-conditioned scholarships, but it means a meaningful share of students each year end up owing more than they budgeted for going in. Before enrolling, ask exactly what GPA or class-rank benchmark your award requires you to hit, and model your finances assuming you might land in the group that loses part of the award — not just the group that keeps it.
On the loan side, the federal rules that will govern most 2026-27 borrowers are less generous than they used to be (verify current terms before you borrow, since these are time-sensitive federal rules). Grad PLUS loans have been eliminated for new borrowers, and law is capped as a 'professional' program at $50,000 in federal Direct Unsubsidized loans per year, $200,000 in aggregate for the law degree, within a $257,500 lifetime federal cap. Given UB's roughly $61,000 annual cost of attendance, a student without significant grant aid or savings could hit a gap between the federal loan ceiling and actual costs — a gap that has to be filled with scholarships, savings, or private loans at market rates. The 2026-27 federal rate is expected around 8.07%, plus roughly a 1.057% origination fee.
Repayment options have also narrowed to two plans: a Tiered Standard Plan (the default, but one that earns zero credit toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness) and the Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP), an income-driven plan geared to borrowers with lower or moderate post-graduation income. Given that a meaningful share of UB graduates go into government and public-interest work (more on that in the outcomes discussion below), anyone planning on PSLF eventually needs to affirmatively enroll in RAP — the default Standard Plan will not get you there. For a fuller walkthrough of loan mechanics and PSLF eligibility, see our dedicated loans and PSLF guide, and for tactics on negotiating a better scholarship offer before you commit, see our scholarship negotiation guide.
For someone building a career inside Maryland's state and local legal and political system, UB Law's return looks solid; for someone chasing a national Big Law track, the numbers argue for a different calculus. The honest answer depends almost entirely on which of those two goals you're optimizing for, because UB's own outcomes data points clearly toward one and not the other.
Of UB's 2024 graduating class of 204, about 82.4% landed in jobs that were full-time, long-term, and either required bar passage or were JD-advantage positions — a reasonable outcome for a regional public law school. But the composition of those jobs tells the real story. Only 4 graduates (2%) went to the largest firms (501+ attorneys) — the Big Law tier that anchors the widely-cited six-figure salary peak in national law-firm compensation data. The much larger share of UB's employed graduates landed at small firms: 45 of the firm-employed group went to firms of 1-10 attorneys, with another 11 at 11-25-attorney firms. Beyond firms, 17 graduates (8.3%) went into government roles and 13 (6.4%) into public interest work, and 52 graduates secured state or local clerkships versus just 1 federal clerkship. UB's own reporting identifies Maryland as the largest single employment destination for its graduates. Put simply: UB Law is a pipeline into Maryland's courts, state agencies, prosecutors' and public defenders' offices, and small-to-midsize local firms — not a pipeline into large national law firms.
That pattern lines up with UB's alumni network, which is dense with Maryland state judges, legislators, mayors, and even a U.S. Vice President (Spiro Agnew, LL.B. 1947) and multiple Maryland governors and lieutenant governors. If your career goal is practicing law in or around Baltimore, working in Maryland government, or building toward the state bench or legislature, that alumni density is a genuine, hard-to-replicate asset that a national brand-name school elsewhere wouldn't necessarily offer for Maryland-specific placement.
UB's first-time bar passage rate was 70.53%, compared to a state average of 73.99% — a gap worth taking seriously when you're weighing the degree's value. The school's own ultimate (two-year) pass rate rises to 78.36%, meaning a meaningful number of graduates pass on a subsequent attempt rather than the first. Because Maryland's bar sits within the broader landscape of UBE-based and UBE-transitioning jurisdictions (with NextGen changes arriving in many states around 2028), it's worth budgeting both time and possibly a formal bar-prep supplement into your post-graduation plan rather than assuming a first-attempt pass. This is a general feature of bar exam risk that applies to any school below the state average, not unique to UB, but the size of the gap here is specific to UB and worth weighing.
Here the general labor-market picture is useful context, applied carefully: new-lawyer salaries nationally are bimodal, with a large peak near $215,000 concentrated at Big Law firms and a much bigger cluster of salaries well below six figures across government, public interest, and small-firm practice. Since only about 2% of UB's class enters that Big Law tier, the realistic salary expectation for most UB graduates sits in that larger, lower cluster — typical of government, small-firm, and public-interest compensation in Maryland. Against an estimated full cost of attendance around $61,442 a year (about $184,000 over three years before interest), that means most UB graduates need to plan a repayment strategy around a government or small-firm salary, not a Big Law one. For graduates who go into the government and public-interest jobs that make up roughly 15% of the class, enrolling in the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan and pursuing Public Service Loan Forgiveness after ten years of qualifying payments is often the financially sound path — but again, that requires actively choosing RAP over the default Standard Plan.
UB Law is best understood as a value proposition tied to geography and career type, not national prestige. It ranks in the lower tier of nationally-ranked schools (No. 136 in the most recent U.S. News rankings) and is one of only two law schools in the state of Maryland, competing most directly with the University of Maryland Carey School of Law for in-state talent and placement. If your plan is to practice law in Maryland — in government, the judiciary, public interest, or small-to-midsize firms — and you can secure a grant that brings your net cost down from the roughly $61,000 sticker COA, UB's local alumni density, clinical offerings, and placement pattern make it a reasonable, arguably efficient choice. If your plan requires a shot at national Big Law, a different school with a stronger presence in that hiring tier is likely to serve that specific goal better, since UB places only a small handful of graduates into that category each year. For the general framework on how to weigh any law school's cost against its outcomes, see our worth-it guide.