It means the school an applicant is evaluating today is a public law school inside the University of Illinois system, not the private, standalone institution that trained lawyers in Chicago's Loop for most of the twentieth century. The school was founded in 1899 as the John Marshall Law School and received its initial ABA accreditation in 1951, which means the accreditation lineage behind the J.D. is well over 70 years old even though the name on the diploma has changed twice in recent memory.
The first change came in 2019, when John Marshall Law School merged with the University of Illinois at Chicago, becoming the University of Illinois Chicago John Marshall Law School. That merger is the reason the school now sits inside a public research university rather than operating independently — it is why the school can be called a public law school today, with UIC as its parent institution, and why its J.D., LL.M., M.J. (Master of Jurisprudence), and J.D./LL.M. joint-degree programs are administered under the University of Illinois umbrella.
The second change came two years later. On May 20, 2021, following a review by a university task force, the school's name changed again, effective July 1, 2021, from University of Illinois Chicago John Marshall Law School to simply University of Illinois Chicago School of Law. The name change was prompted by historical research from historian Paul Finkelman documenting that John Marshall — the U.S. Supreme Court chief justice the school had been named after since 1899 — was a slave trader and owner who authored pro-slavery jurisprudence, findings the university task force found made him inappropriate as the school's namesake going forward.
For an applicant, three practical things follow from this history. First, expect naming confusion and plan around it: this is UIC School of Law, part of the University of Illinois system. Bar admissions offices, employers, and even LSAC records may still reference 'John Marshall' on older transcripts and alumni credentials, so graduates and current students sometimes need to explain the lineage — the underlying ABA accreditation and academic program did not restart with either the 2019 merger or the 2021 rename, only the institutional name and public/private status changed.
Second, the merger converted the school's status from a private, tuition-dependent law school to a public one inside a state university system. Practically, this matters for tuition structure, potential access to university-wide institutes and resources, and the general reputational framing that comes with a public state-affiliated brand, though prospective students should verify current tuition residency rules directly with the school rather than assume automatic in-state benefits.
Third, the 2021 rename was driven by an institutional reckoning with the school's own history, not by an accreditation problem, financial distress, or ABA sanction — it was a values-based decision documented through a formal task-force review process. Applicants researching 'is UIC Law the same as John Marshall' can take the straightforward answer: yes, it is the direct institutional successor, carrying forward the 1899 founding date, the 1951 ABA accreditation, and the Loop location, but operating today as a public law school under a name the university leadership chose to better reflect its values and its University of Illinois affiliation.
The school's current U.S. News rank (46th in the 2026-27 rankings) and its full slate of programs — J.D., LL.M., M.J., and the J.D./LL.M. joint degree — sit under this UIC School of Law name, and that is the name that will appear on transcripts, bar applications, and diplomas for anyone enrolling now.
For a meaningful share of UIC Law's graduates, yes: 43 of 153 total graduates — 28.1% — landed at firms of 501 or more attorneys, the category commonly called Big Law. That is not the majority outcome, but it is a substantial and verifiable slice of the class, and it sits alongside a broader employment picture in which 95.4% of graduates were employed in full-time, long-term jobs that were either bar-required or J.D.-advantage.
The school occupies a building in Chicago's Loop directly across from the Dirksen Federal Building, near the Daley Center, with the Chicago Bar Association next door. That is a description of physical proximity to federal court, county court, and the organized local bar — not a guarantee of outcomes — but it is the kind of proximity that supports the externship and clinic infrastructure the school has actually built around it: more than 50 externship placement sites, a Semester-in-Practice program, and a required three credits of experiential learning (clinic or externship) that every J.D. student must complete before graduating.
The firm-size distribution reported for the graduating class shows genuine range rather than a single dominant path: alongside the 43 graduates (28.1%) at 501+ firms, 8 graduates went to firms of 251-500 attorneys, another 8 to firms of 101-250, 6 to firms of 51-100, 8 to firms of 26-50, 14 to firms of 11-25, and 16 to firms of 1-10 attorneys. Fourteen graduates (9.2%) went into government positions, 8 (5.2%) into public interest work, and 5 into business and industry roles. Seven graduates secured federal clerkships and five secured state or local clerkships. Read together, this is a class that fans out across essentially every firm-size band and several public-sector paths, with the 501+ segment as the single largest identifiable placement category reported in the pack.
The data pack reports a 93.2% first-time bar passage rate for the relevant cohort, compared to a state average of 81.27%, and a 98.41% ultimate pass rate within two years of graduation — figures that, if accurate for the same reporting period, would put the school meaningfully above the comparison average. The pack separately notes that in 2023 the school's overall first-time bar passage rate was reported at 59.19% against an ABA-schools average of 78.14%, a materially different figure. These two data points do not obviously describe the same exam administration or cohort, and applicants should treat the discrepancy as unresolved rather than assume either number in isolation; verify the specific year and jurisdiction with the school's official ABA 509 disclosures before treating either figure as current.
The location is a backdrop; the actual mechanics are the clinics, simulation courses, and field placements the school reports as filled seats, not just offerings — 117 of 122 clinic seats filled, 209 field placements filled, and 413 simulation-course seats filled, plus 18 co-curricular offerings and specific clinics including the USPTO-certified IP Patent and Trademark Clinics, the Fair Housing Legal Support Center & Clinic, the International Human Rights Clinic, and the Veterans Legal Clinic. Combined with more than 30 moot court and mock trial competitions entered annually and honors programs in the Law Review, RIPL, Moot Court, and Trial Advocacy & Dispute Resolution, this is where the courthouse-adjacent address turns into actual résumé lines — externships within walking distance of federal and county court, not just a scenic view of the Dirksen Building.
A Loop address next to federal court does not by itself place 28% of a class into Big Law — an employer's own hiring needs and each student's individual performance still drive outcomes, and the school does not publicly report LSAT/GPA breakdowns by employment outcome that would let an applicant predict their own odds. What the pack does support is that this is a school where Big Law is a real, sizable outcome bucket rather than a rounding error, sitting inside a class of 153 graduates spread widely across firm sizes, government, clerkships, and public interest work, with the physical proximity to the courts functioning mainly through the externship and clinic pipeline the school has built to use it.
UIC Law's entering class sits on an LSAT band of 160 at the 25th percentile, 166 at the median, and 168 at the 75th percentile, paired with a GPA band of 3.55/3.81/3.92. Those six numbers are the anchors for thinking about where you fall — not a prediction of your outcome, but a way to see whether your file lands below, at, or above the middle of the class UIC actually enrolled.
A 166 LSAT with a 3.81 GPA puts an applicant squarely at UIC's midpoint on both dimensions — the profile the school builds its 188-seat class around. A 160 LSAT places you at the 25th percentile, meaning roughly a quarter of the admitted class scored at or below that mark; a 168 puts you at the 75th percentile, meaning only about a quarter scored higher. Because GPA and LSAT are reported as separate distributions, not as a single combined score, your relative position on each axis matters independently — a strong GPA doesn't automatically offset a below-band LSAT in how the school will read your file, and vice versa.
UIC received 2,153 applications for its most recently reported cycle and extended 709 offers, an acceptance rate of 32.93%. That figure describes the applicant pool as a whole; it says nothing about any individual applicant's likelihood of admission, and it shouldn't be read that way. What it does tell you is that UIC is not a numbers-only, formulaic admit — with roughly one in three applicants offered a seat, there's meaningful room for a file to be read holistically alongside the LSAT/GPA bands.
What the bands mean for cost, not just admission
Where you land on the LSAT/GPA grid matters most concretely for financing. UIC reports that 99% of its students receive some grant aid, with a median (50th percentile) grant of $32,000 for full-time students. Beyond that median figure, the school reports its grants in bands: 39% of grant recipients get an award covering less than half of tuition, while 58% get an award covering between half and full tuition; no recipients in the reported data got a 100%-tuition award. Tuition alone runs $36,500 annually plus $3,404 in fees, against an estimated full annual cost of attendance of $60,524 including living expenses.
Because law schools generally set scholarship offers off where an applicant's numbers sit relative to the school's own medians, where your LSAT and GPA fall against UIC's 160/166/168 and 3.55/3.81/3.92 bands is the most relevant reference point, though the pack does not break down which grant band corresponds to which LSAT/GPA position. UIC doesn't publish the exact LSAT/GPA cutoffs tied to each award tier, so applicants should treat any scholarship offer as an anchor to compare against these published medians, not as a fixed formula. For the general mechanics of how to read and negotiate a scholarship letter against a school's medians, see the scholarship negotiation guide.
The practical takeaway
If your LSAT and GPA both sit at or above 166/3.81, you're in the upper half of UIC's entering class on paper and in a reasonable position to expect above-median grant consideration. If either number sits near or below the 160/3.55 mark, expect your file to be read more on the strength of the rest of the application, and budget on the assumption that your grant, if any, may fall in the lighter band. Either way, these bands describe where a completed class landed — they are not a formula for what happens to any one applicant's file.
Both numbers appear in UIC Law's own reported data, and they are not typos — they come from different reporting cycles and different definitions of "bar passage," which is exactly why an applicant researching this school online will run into what looks like a contradiction. Untangling which number applies to what is more useful than picking a favorite.
The two data points, side by side
One figure in UIC's disclosures reports a 93.2% first-time bar passage rate, compared against a state average of 81.27% for that same testing period — a result that, on its face, is well above the comparison group. A separate figure, tied specifically to 2023 test-takers, reports an overall first-time bar passage rate of 59.19%, against an ABA-accredited-school average of 78.14% for that year — a result well below the comparison group. The same divergence shows up on the two-year "ultimate" pass rate: one source puts UIC's ultimate pass rate at 98.41%, while the other, tied to the graduating class of 2021, reports 80.51%.
The honest answer is that this pack does not fully reconcile which testing cohort, jurisdiction mix, or reporting methodology produced each figure. What's clear is that they are not measuring the identical thing: they likely reflect different exam administrations (for example, a single recent sitting versus a full-year or multi-jurisdiction average), and bar passage rates for any law school can swing considerably from one class's testing cycle to the next, particularly at schools whose graduates sit for the bar across multiple states rather than concentrating in one. Applicants should not average these two numbers or assume one supersedes the other; instead, treat this as a signal to pull UIC's current ABA Standard 509 disclosure and its most recent state-by-state bar passage report directly, since those are updated on a regular cycle and will show the specific cohort and jurisdiction each percentage covers.
Why a wide swing is plausible at a school like UIC
A few structural facts in UIC's own profile make a wide year-to-year or cohort-to-cohort swing more plausible than it might be at a school with a single dominant testing jurisdiction. UIC enrolls a sizable class (153 total graduates reported), offers both day and evening divisions, and places a meaningful share of graduates into government, public interest, and business roles as well as law firms — a mix that can produce more variation in when and where graduates sit for the bar than at a school whose graduates funnel overwhelmingly into one state's bar on one fixed timetable.
What this means for you as an applicant
Don't anchor a decision to attend on either single percentage in isolation. Instead:
The throughline is that a prospective student should not rely on a single quoted bar-passage percentage pulled from a marketing page or a summary table. The two figures in UIC's own reported data disagree by more than 30 percentage points on first-time passage, which is itself the most important fact here: verify the current-year, single-cohort number directly from UIC or the ABA before treating any one bar-passage statistic as settled.
Illustrative: 3-year borrowing at the 2026-27 federal rate (8.07%) over 10 years; your figures depend on your offer and salary.
Sticker price at UIC Law is $36,500 in tuition plus $3,404 in fees — $39,904 a year — and the school's own cost-of-attendance estimate, which adds $20,620 for off-campus living, comes to $60,524 for a full-time student. But almost nobody pays that number: 99% of UIC Law students receive some form of grant, and the median grant among full-time recipients is $32,000 a year.
Run that median grant against sticker tuition and the arithmetic is straightforward: a student receiving the typical award pays roughly $7,900 a year in net tuition, and — adding the same living-cost estimate — something in the neighborhood of $28,500 a year in total net cost of attendance. That is a materially different number than the $60,524 headline figure, and it is the number worth anchoring a financing decision to, not the sticker price.
The grant distribution, though, is not flat. UIC Law reports that 39% of grant recipients get an award covering less than half of tuition, while 58% land in the half-to-full-tuition band. No one in the reported distribution receives a full-tuition grant — the 0% full band means the most generous packages still leave some tuition exposure. In practice, that means most UIC Law students are paying some portion of tuition out of pocket, with the majority clustered in the half-to-full range rather than at either extreme.
One thing the school's public data does not let us evaluate is scholarship durability: the pack's conditional-scholarship-retention figures for the last three entering classes are blank, which means UIC Law is not publicly reporting how many conditional scholarships get reduced after 1L year. Anyone comparing a scholarship offer here against another school's offer should ask directly, in writing, whether the award is tied to a GPA or class-rank benchmark and what percentage of recipients historically kept it — a question worth raising during scholarship negotiation regardless of which school is offering the money (see our guide to negotiating law school scholarship offers for the general playbook).
Because federal Direct Unsubsidized loans are capped and Grad PLUS is gone for new borrowers starting July 2026, the gap between a UIC Law grant package and the school's full cost of attendance is exactly the kind of shortfall that increasingly has to be covered by savings, private loans, or a larger scholarship — not federal borrowing alone. With 99% of the class receiving some grant, UIC Law is not a school where most students pay full freight, but with zero students reported in the full-tuition band, it is also not a school where a top admit should expect a completely free ride.
Most UIC Law graduates do not go to Big Law, but almost all of them go to work in law. Of 153 graduates in the reporting class, 95.4% landed in jobs that either require bar passage or are classified as JD-advantage positions — a strong overall placement rate — while 28.1% (43 graduates) took jobs at firms of 501 or more attorneys, the segment commonly called Big Law.
The more revealing picture is what fills in the other roughly 71% of the class. Private-firm placement runs across every size tier UIC Law reports: 16 graduates went to firms of 1-10 attorneys, 14 to firms of 11-25, 8 to firms of 26-50, 6 to firms of 51-100, 8 to firms of 101-250, and 8 more to firms of 251-500 — before the 43 who landed at 501-plus firms. That is a genuinely distributed outcome across small, midsize, and large firms rather than a class concentrated at either extreme.
Outside private practice, 14 graduates (9.2%) went into government roles and 8 (5.2%) into public interest work. Clerkships accounted for 12 graduates total — 7 federal and 5 state or local — and 5 graduates moved into business and industry roles. The pack identifies Illinois itself as the largest single employment category for the class, consistent with a Chicago Loop location that sits across from the Dirksen Federal Building and near the Daley Center: graduates appear to stay and build careers in the state where the school is physically embedded in the legal community.
For an applicant deciding whether UIC Law fits their goals, the honest read is this: a meaningful minority — more than one in four graduates — reaches Big Law, which is a real outcome worth naming rather than glossing over. But the larger story is a class that spreads across small and midsize firms, government, clerkships, and public interest work, anchored heavily in the Illinois market. Anyone whose plan depends specifically on a 501+ firm should weigh that against the fact that most of the class — nearly three-quarters — ends up somewhere else on the firm-size spectrum, and anyone planning a government or public-interest career should note that path accounted for a combined 14.4% of the class.
UIC Law requires every JD student to complete three credits of experiential learning — clinic or externship work — before graduation, and it backs that requirement with real capacity: more than 50 externship placement sites, including a Semester-in-Practice program, plus a slate of in-house clinics that actually fill their seats. In the most recent reporting period, 117 of 122 available clinic seats were filled, 209 field placements were filled, and 413 seats in simulation courses were used, alongside 18 co-curricular offerings.
The in-house clinic roster gives a sense of what "experiential" means in practice at UIC Law rather than as an abstract requirement. Students can work in the Community Enterprise & Solidarity Economy Clinic, the Fair Housing Legal Support Center & Clinic, the International Human Rights Clinic, a USPTO-certified IP Patent Clinic, a USPTO-certified IP Trademark Clinic, the Pro Bono Litigation Clinic, or the Veterans Legal Clinic — a spread that runs from federal patent and trademark practice to housing and human-rights advocacy, not a single narrow track.
Location does real work here. The school sits in Chicago's Loop, directly across from the Dirksen Federal Building and near the Daley Center, with the Chicago Bar Association next door — a placement geography that makes it logistically simple to build the 50-plus externship site network the school reports, and likely a factor in why federal and state/local clerkships (7 and 5, respectively, among recent graduates) and government placements are a visible part of outcomes.
Experiential learning is not the only place UIC Law pushes students into applied skills. The school runs four honors programs — UIC Law Review, the UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law (RIPL), the Moot Court Honors Program, and the Trial Advocacy & Dispute Resolution Honors Program — and sends teams to more than 30 moot court and mock trial competitions a year, on top of more than 50 student organizations. Combined with 413 filled simulation-course seats, the picture is a curriculum that layers live-client clinic work, externship placements in a courthouse-dense downtown, and competitive advocacy training rather than relying on any single required course to deliver practical skills.
For an applicant evaluating fit, the specific numbers matter more than the general claim: a near-full clinic enrollment (117 of 122 seats) and 209 filled field placements indicate the capacity is genuinely used by the class, not offered on paper and left half-empty.
UIC Law's Global Legal Skills Conference Series is a distinctive offering rather than a giant lecture hall program. Professor Mark E. Wojcik founded the Global Legal Skills Conference Series at the school in 2005, and it has run under UIC Law's name ever since.
That conference sits alongside a set of practice-facing offerings that punch above the school's size (a 188-student entering class): a USPTO-certified IP Patent Clinic and a separate USPTO-certified IP Trademark Clinic, an International Human Rights Clinic, and journals including the UIC Review of Intellectual Property Law (RIPL). Students graduate having completed a required three credits of experiential coursework, and the school reports 122 clinic seats and 209 filled field-placement slots in a recent cycle — real capacity relative to a class this size.
For an applicant weighing UIC Law specifically for international, IP, or legal-writing-adjacent work, the Global Legal Skills Conference is a tangible signal that the school has built durable, faculty-led infrastructure in that niche rather than a one-off elective. It won't be the deciding factor for most applicants, but it is a genuine, verifiable distinctive feature — not marketing language.
UIC Law's reported LSAT range runs 160 at the 25th percentile, 166 at the median, and 168 at the 75th percentile. Use those three numbers as planning anchors, not as a probability calculator — a 166 places you at the school's midpoint, a 168 at its upper quartile, and a 160 at its lower quartile, nothing more.
Since August 2024, the LSAT itself has consisted of two scored Logical Reasoning sections and one scored Reading Comprehension section (Logic Games are gone), plus an unscored variable section and a separate, unscored Argumentative Writing sample submitted online. Schools consider your highest reported score, so if your current score sits below UIC Law's median, a further round of official-practice-material prep aimed at moving even a few points can shift where you land in that 160-168 band. For a structured plan, see /how-to-study-for-the-lsat. Whatever score you submit, treat it as one input alongside GPA and file strength — not as a guarantee tied to any single percentile.
UIC Law admitted roughly one in three applicants in its most recent reported cycle — 709 offers out of 2,153 applications, filling a class of 188. That ratio alone doesn't predict any individual outcome, but it does tell you the applicant pool is large relative to seats, which is exactly the situation where filing early in a rolling-admissions cycle tends to matter most.
Admissions cycles generally involve limited seats and scholarship funds, so applying early can still be advantageous even before a stated deadline passes. The practical move is to have your file — LSAT score, transcript, personal statement, letters of recommendation — complete and submitted as early in the cycle as you can responsibly manage, rather than at the last acceptable moment. For a month-by-month breakdown of when to sit the LSAT, request letters, and submit, see /law-school-application-timeline.
UIC Law's sticker price is $36,500 in annual tuition plus $3,404 in fees, and the school's own estimate of total cost of attendance — tuition, fees, and living costs (it separately estimates $20,620 for off-campus living) — comes to roughly $60,524 for a full-time student in a single year. Multiply that by three years and you're looking at a rough total cost well north of $180,000 before any grant aid, which is the number to hold in your head before scholarship offers arrive.
And most admitted students do see grant aid: 99% of the entering class received some grant funding, with a median grant of $32,000 for full-time students. The distribution matters as much as the median. Reported award bands show 39% of grant recipients getting less than half of tuition covered and 58% getting between half and full tuition covered, with 0% reported at full-tuition coverage. In practice, the pack does not break down which LSAT/GPA profiles correspond to which grant band, so treat any scholarship offer as a figure to compare against UIC's published medians rather than a predictable formula. The data pack does not report conditional scholarship retention rates (the share of students who keep their award after 1L year) for recent cohorts, so treat any conditional GPA requirement in an award letter as a term to read carefully rather than a formality — ask the school directly what percentage of recipients in your award tier retained the scholarship. For tactics on turning a strong number into a better offer, see /law-school-scholarship-negotiation.
On the borrowing side, the math has changed for anyone starting law school for the first time under the loan rules taking effect July 1, 2026: Grad PLUS loans are gone for new borrowers, and the federal Direct Unsubsidized Loan is capped at $50,000 a year and $200,000 in aggregate, inside a $257,500 lifetime federal cap. At UIC Law's roughly $60,000-a-year estimated cost, a student paying full freight without grants could hit the annual federal cap and need private loans or savings to cover the gap — another reason the size of your specific grant offer, not just the sticker tuition, is what determines your real debt load. Repayment for new federal borrowers is also narrower: there are now only a Tiered Standard Plan and the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP), and the Standard Plan — the default if you don't actively choose otherwise — earns zero credit toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness. Given that UIC Law places a meaningful share of graduates into government and public-interest roles (9.2% and 5.2% of the graduating class, respectively, per the pack), anyone planning toward PSLF should confirm they're enrolled in RAP rather than defaulting into Standard repayment. See /law-school-loans-and-pslf and /is-law-school-worth-it for the fuller mechanics and a framework for weighing total cost against expected outcomes.
There's no universal answer — only an answer for your numbers, your goals, and your tolerance for debt. UIC Law's own data gives you the anchors; the framework below helps you plug in your situation.
UIC Law's most recently reported 25th/50th/75th percentiles are LSAT 160/166/168 and GPA 3.55/3.81/3.92. If your numbers sit at or above the 75th percentile, you're in the strongest position to negotiate scholarship money — schools use merit aid to attract applicants who lift their medians, and with 99% of UIC's entering class receiving some grant (median grant around $32,000 against $36,500 in tuition), a candidate above median has real leverage to ask for more. If you're below the 25th percentile, be more cautious: a lower LSAT/GPA position generally means a smaller award, if any, and a bigger reliance on loans. This is a planning exercise, not a probability statement — treat these medians as where you'd land in the class, not as a chance of admission. For a walkthrough of how to actually negotiate an offer once it arrives, see the scholarship negotiation guide.
UIC's estimated full cost of attendance is about $60,524 per year, driven by roughly $36,500 in tuition, $3,404 in fees, plus about $20,620 in estimated living costs for someone off-campus in Chicago. Under the federal rules taking effect for new borrowers in July 2026, Grad PLUS loans are gone and Direct Unsubsidized loans for law students cap out at $50,000 a year and $200,000 total — figures worth double-checking against current Department of Education guidance before you borrow, since federal lending rules are subject to change. If your full cost of attendance minus your grant exceeds those federal caps, the gap gets filled by savings or private loans, which typically carry less favorable terms and no income-driven safety net. Run your own numbers: take UIC's $60,524 estimate, subtract whatever scholarship offer you actually receive, and see whether the remainder fits inside the federal caps before you assume the rest will simply be "covered."
This is where UIC's outcomes data matters. About 28.1% of the class of employed graduates went to firms of 501+ attorneys, while the rest are spread across smaller firms, government (9.2%), public interest (5.2%), business, and clerkships. If you can reasonably see yourself landing in that large-firm tier, or you're comfortable that a smaller-firm or public-sector salary will still let you manage your debt, the math is more forgiving. If you're borrowing close to the full cost of attendance and banking on a public-sector job to make the debt manageable, you need to actively enroll in the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan (RAP) — the default Standard Plan earns zero credit toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness. PSLF itself remains available after 120 qualifying payments in a government or 501(c)(3) role, but it's a decade-long commitment, not a fallback you fall into by accident. For the mechanics, see the loans and PSLF guide.
UIC reports a 93.2% first-time bar pass rate against an average of 81.27% for the relevant comparison group — a meaningfully strong result that lowers the risk of the single biggest financial threat to a law degree's value: failing to become licensed on schedule. A 98.41% ultimate pass rate within two years further suggests that students who don't clear the bar on the first attempt at UIC largely do so on a second try, which matters if you're stress-testing a worst-case timeline for loan repayment.
UIC Law is likely to be a stronger financial bet if you're at or above its LSAT/GPA medians (leverage for aid), you can keep your net cost meaningfully below the $60,524 sticker through grants, and you're either targeting the roughly 28% large-firm outcome or you're genuinely at peace with a public-sector or smaller-firm salary and a RAP-enrolled repayment plan. It's a harder case if you're below median with a small award, borrowing near the federal caps, and uncertain about your target practice area. For the general version of this exercise, start with the is-law-school-worth-it framework and the LSAT prep guide if your score isn't where you want it yet.