UIC Law's most recently reported first-time bar passage rate is 68.82%, against a state average of 81.07% for that same administration — a gap of roughly 12.25 points. That gap is not a one-time dip: the school's own historical disclosure notes that in 2023, its overall first-time pass rate was 59.19% against an ABA-school average of 78.14%, an even wider spread. Whichever year you look at, UIC Law has posted a persistent, double-digit shortfall against both the state and national first-time averages.
The gap narrows — but does not close — over time. UIC Law's ultimate bar passage rate (graduates who pass within two years of graduation, the ABA's standard measure) is 77.78% most recently reported, and was 80.51% for the class of 2021. That means roughly one in five to one in four graduates who eventually pass still needed a second attempt, and a meaningful share may not have passed within the two-year window at all. A first-time rate in the high-60s combined with an ultimate rate in the high-70s tells you the same story two ways: a sizable portion of each class is not clearing the bar on the first try, and the school's remediation and retake support only partially closes that gap.
What the entering class profile suggests. UIC Law's admitted LSAT band is 150 (25th percentile) to 156 (75th percentile), with a median of 153. GPA runs 3.13 to 3.64 (25th to 75th), with a 3.40 median. None of this is disqualifying on its own, but LSAT and undergraduate GPA are the strongest available predictors of first-time bar performance, and a school admitting across a 150-156 LSAT band is, by definition, taking on more academic risk in the aggregate than a school clustered in the 160s.
What the conditional scholarship data adds. UIC Law's ABA-required conditional-scholarship disclosures show that in the 2024-25 cohort, 162 entering students held conditional scholarships and 76 (46.9%) had those awards reduced or eliminated for failing to maintain the required GPA. The prior two years show similar patterns: 48.9% reduced in 2023-24, 51.0% reduced in 2022-23. In other words, roughly half of every conditionally-scholarshipped class is not maintaining the GPA benchmark the school itself set as a marker of on-track academic performance.
Why this matters for a prospective applicant. A bar-passage gap of this size and duration has downstream consequences beyond the exam itself. UIC Law reports that 77.4% of its graduates land in jobs requiring bar passage or where a JD provides a meaningful advantage — meaning almost a quarter do not. If you are weighing UIC Law against other options, the honest way to use this fact is not to treat it as disqualifying but as a planning input: know that the school's own numbers show a substantial share of each class needs more than one attempt, budget time and possibly a commercial bar-prep course beyond whatever the school provides, and ask directly — during a visit or in an admitted-students session — what structured academic and bar-support resources exist for students whose first-year performance puts a conditional scholarship at risk. The pack does not disclose the specifics of UIC Law's academic support or bar-prep infrastructure, so that is a question worth asking the school directly rather than assuming an answer.
UIC Law's 153 median LSAT (25th percentile 150, 75th percentile 156) and 3.40 median GPA (25th 3.13, 75th 3.64) place it as an accessible entry point into the Chicago legal market rather than a nationally-selective one. The school received 2,488 applications and extended 1,308 offers for a 52.57% acceptance rate, then enrolled 379 students — 302 full-time and 77 part-time — with a day division and an evening division that carry identical instruction and requirements.
For a numbers-oriented applicant, the LSAT band functions as a planning anchor, not a probability estimate: a 150 sits at UIC Law's 25th percentile, a 153 at the median, and a 156 at the 75th percentile. Scores toward the top of that range are the ones most likely to be relevant in scholarship conversations, since 61% of students receive some grant aid, the median full-time grant is $23,250, and the school's own banding shows 27% of grant recipients get less than half tuition covered, 33% get between half and full tuition, and just 1% receive a full-tuition award. The pack does not report UIC Law's tuition figure, so translating grant dollars into a net-cost estimate requires pulling the school's current published tuition and cost-of-attendance directly.
Where UIC Law fits geographically and professionally. The school sits in Chicago's Loop, across from the Dirksen Federal Building and the Daley Center, with the Chicago Bar Association next door — a location built around proximity to the courts and downtown practice rather than a suburban or standalone campus. That geography lines up with the outcomes data: UIC Law's largest reported employment category is
Yes, most UIC Law students start with a scholarship — 61% of the entering class receives one, with a median award of $23,250 for full-time students. But UIC's own ABA-required disclosures show that in three consecutive entering classes, roughly half of the students whose scholarships came with conditions saw that award reduced after their first year. That combination — broad initial generosity, high downstream attrition — is the single most important financial fact to understand before enrolling on a scholarship here.
Start with how the money is distributed. Of the class receiving grants, the awards split into three rough tiers: 27% of all students got a grant covering less than half of tuition, 33% got one covering between half and full tuition, and just 1% received a full-tuition award. In other words, most scholarship money at UIC is partial, not full-ride — which matters because partial awards are more often the ones attached to renewal conditions rather than given unconditionally for all three years.
The retention numbers tell the real story. Among students entering in 2022-23, 147 held conditional scholarships and 75 of them — 51% — had their award reduced. For the 2023-24 entering class, 139 students carried conditions and 68 (48.9%) lost part of their money. For the most recent cohort on record, 2024-25, 162 entered with conditional awards and 76 (46.9%) had them cut. That is a remarkably stable pattern across three years: close to half of every conditionally-scholarshipped class loses some or all of the award after 1L, year after year, regardless of which specific class you look at.
Why does this happen so consistently? Conditional scholarships, as reported in this ABA disclosure format, are tied to a minimum benchmark — typically a cumulative GPA threshold — that a student must hit at the end of the first year to keep the money. UIC's incoming class profile helps explain why so many students miss that bar: the middle 50% of admits span a 150-156 LSAT and a 3.13-3.64 GPA, a wide academic range in which a meaningful share of any cohort will land in the bottom half of the first-year curve by definition. Because law school grades are curved, a class this academically dispersed will always produce a large pool of students who fall below whatever GPA cutoff a conditional scholarship requires — the curve does not bend to accommodate everyone's scholarship terms.
What this means practically: if you are offered a conditional scholarship at UIC, the number on the offer letter is not the number you should build your three-year budget around. Ask the admissions or financial aid office, in writing, exactly what GPA or class-rank threshold you must hit to keep the full award, how many students historically have kept it at that threshold, and whether the reduction is partial or total. Because roughly half of similarly-situated students in each of the last three entering classes lost some portion of their conditional award, a rational applicant should budget as if the award might shrink, and treat the maintained award as the upside case rather than the baseline. For a general framework on how to interrogate a scholarship offer before you commit — including how to compare a conditional award against a smaller but unconditional one at another school — see our guide on negotiating law school scholarships.
None of this means the scholarships aren't real or valuable in year one; 61% of the class does start with meaningful help, and the median $23,250 award is a substantial offset against the cost of attendance. But 'conditional' is doing real work in that phrase, and the school's own three-year track record shows that condition binds on close to half of recipients. Treat the first-year GPA requirement, not the headline award amount, as the operative term of the deal.
Yes, most UIC Law graduates find work that requires a law degree — 77.4% of the class landed full-time, long-term jobs that were either bar-passage-required or JD-advantage — but the honest answer to what kind of job is: overwhelmingly small-firm and government work in Illinois, not Big Law. Of 274 graduates, only 10 (3.6%) went to firms of 501 or more attorneys, the category that includes the highest-paying national firms. That is a small slice, and it should recalibrate expectations for anyone enrolling with a large-firm salary in mind.
Look at where the rest actually land. The firm-size breakdown shows a clear shape: 50 graduates went to firms of 1-10 attorneys, 25 to firms of 11-25, 17 to firms of 26-50, 18 to firms of 51-100, 8 to firms of 101-250, and 5 to firms of 251-500, alongside 1 solo practitioner. Add those together and roughly 124 graduates — about half the class — ended up in a law firm of some size, and the large majority of those firms are small (under 50 attorneys). That is the realistic center of gravity for a UIC Law degree: small and mid-size Illinois firms, not the Am Law 100.
Government work is the other major outcome, and a substantial one: 46 graduates (16.8%) took government jobs, making it the second-largest employment category after private firms. Public interest employers absorbed another 14 graduates (5.1%), and 28 went into business and industry roles. Clerkships were modest in number — 1 federal clerkship and 4 state or local clerkships for the entire graduating class. The pack also flags that the single largest employment type for UIC graduates is in-state: Illinois. Read together, these numbers describe a law school whose placement engine runs on the Chicago and Illinois legal market rather than a national one.
That regional concentration is not incidental to the school's design. UIC Law sits in the Loop, across the street from the Dirksen Federal Building and near the Daley Center, with the Chicago Bar Association next door — a location built around proximity to the courts and the local bar rather than a national recruiting circuit. The school also requires three experiential-learning credits to graduate, and its numbers back that up in volume: 167 law clinic placements filled, 307 field placements filled, and 1,241 simulation-course enrollments in the most recent reporting period. That heavy experiential footprint — seven community legal clinics and more than 50 externship sites, including a Semester-in-Practice program — is consistent with a placement pattern built on local government offices, small firms, and public-interest organizations that take on externs and hire from within their own talent pipeline, rather than on-campus interviewing programs run by national firms.
One more number belongs in this picture even though it is not strictly an employment statistic: bar passage. UIC's first-time bar passage rate was 68.82%, compared to a state average of 81.07% — a meaningful gap. The two-year ultimate pass rate was higher, at 77.78%, meaning a real share of graduates who did not pass on the first attempt did pass on a later attempt. Because most of the jobs described above — small-firm and government roles requiring bar passage — are contingent on actually clearing that exam, a first-time pass rate below the state average is a genuine input into how reliably the 77.4% employment figure converts into a practicing legal career on the timeline a graduate expects, not just eventually.
Put together, UIC Law functions as a solid pipeline into Illinois legal practice — small firms, government agencies, and business roles concentrated in and around Chicago — with a small but real Big Law channel (3.6% of the class) and a below-average first-time bar pass rate that applicants should weigh against their own timeline for entering practice. Anyone evaluating UIC against a national-placement school should judge it on that regional, practice-ready profile rather than expecting a broad national outcome distribution.
Yes, in a specific and traceable way: UIC Law's Loop address feeds directly into its externship pipeline, though the payoff shows up more in government and field-placement volume than in federal clerkships. The building sits in Chicago's central financial and legal district, directly across from the Dirksen Federal Building, near the Daley Center, and next door to the Chicago Bar Association — putting students within a few blocks of federal and county courthouses, city and state agencies, and the bulk of the Chicago legal market.
The school has built its experiential program around that geography. UIC maintains more than 50 externship placement sites plus a Semester-in-Practice option, and in the reporting year students filled 307 field placements — a volume that depends on having courts, agencies, and firms within walking distance rather than a commute away. That scale of field placement is a direct, structural benefit of the Loop location, not just a marketing point.
Where this shows up in outcomes is more mixed. Among 274 graduates, 46 (16.8%) went into government work — the single largest reported employment category alongside private practice — and the school's largest overall employment type is Illinois-based work, meaning most graduates stay in the local market the building sits in the middle of. Judicial clerkships, however, remain a small slice of outcomes: 4 state/local clerkships and just 1 federal clerkship in the reporting class. So proximity to the Dirksen Building translates reliably into externship access, exposure to practitioners, and a foothold in the Chicago legal community — but it does not, on the pack's own numbers, translate into large numbers of federal clerkships, which remain rare even for a school located across the street from the courthouse.
The Chicago Bar Association's location next door is also a practical asset beyond externships: it puts students near a hub for local CLE programming, bar-admission logistics, and the kind of everyday professional contact that comes from being embedded in, rather than adjacent to, the city's legal infrastructure. For an applicant weighing UIC against a suburban or campus-isolated law school, the honest takeaway is that the Loop location functions as a career-services asset for local placement and government-adjacent work, not as a shortcut to the most competitive clerkships.
Every UIC Law JD candidate must complete three credits of experiential learning before graduation, and the school gives students two main routes to satisfy it: seven in-house Community Legal Clinics or one of more than 50 externship placement sites, including a Semester-in-Practice program that places students full-time with a legal employer for a term.
The seven clinics span a deliberately varied set of practice areas: 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, and the Veterans Legal Clinic. The two USPTO certifications are notable — they allow students to practice patent and trademark matters before the federal agency under faculty supervision, a credential-building opportunity that lines up with UIC's Intellectual Property Law concentration and its RIPL journal.
In terms of scale, the pack reports 250 clinic seats available against 167 filled, and 307 field placements filled through externships — meaning externships, not in-house clinics, carry the larger share of experiential enrollment at UIC. Beyond the mandatory three credits, the school also reports 1,241 simulation-course enrollments across the student body, covering the kind of practice-based courses (trial advocacy, drafting, negotiation) that don't require a live client but do require students to perform lawyering tasks under supervision. Small-group Lawyering Skills courses, focused on writing, research, and oral argument, run alongside this experiential track from the first year.
For an applicant evaluating fit, the practical picture is that UIC guarantees hands-on legal work before graduation rather than leaving it optional, and it backs that requirement with more placement capacity (externships) than in-house clinic capacity — worth factoring in if a specific clinic, like the IP or human rights clinics, is a reason for choosing the school, since clinic seats are more limited than externship placements.
UIC Law runs a genuine day and evening division split, and the school states that both follow identical instruction, course content, and scholastic requirements — meaning the JD earned by an evening student is not a different or lesser degree track. Of the entering class of 379, 302 are full-time (day) students and 77 are part-time, so roughly one in five students in a given class is on the part-time/evening path, typically the option chosen by students working while attending.
UIC also offers January enrollment, giving part-time and working applicants a mid-year entry point rather than forcing everyone into a single August start — a scheduling flexibility that matters more for evening-division students juggling employment.
On cost of living, the school's reported off-campus living estimate is $24,976, a figure evening-division students weighing work income against law school expenses will want to plan around; the pack does not include separate, verified tuition figures for the full-time and part-time divisions, so applicants should confirm current per-credit or annual tuition directly with UIC before comparing the financial cost of the two divisions.
UIC Law dropped the name "John Marshall" in 2021 after university-commissioned historical research found that Chief Justice John Marshall had been a slave trader and slaveholder who practiced what the researcher called "pro-slavery jurisprudence" — a legacy the university concluded was incompatible with the school's mission, prompting the official change to University of Illinois Chicago School of Law effective July 1, 2021.
The school's lineage runs from 1899, when it was founded as the John Marshall Law School, through ABA accreditation in 1951, to a 2019 merger with the University of Illinois at Chicago that first produced the University of Illinois Chicago John Marshall Law School. The 2021 rename, announced May 20 of that year following a university task force review of historian Paul Finkelman's research, completed the transition to the school's current identity as UIC Law.
For prospective students, the practical takeaway is continuity rather than disruption: it is the same 1899-founded institution, now under its permanent public-university affiliation with the University of Illinois Chicago, with diplomas issued under the UIC Law name. Applicants researching outcomes, rankings, or alumni under the older "John Marshall" name should expect to find historical records under that name and current data under UIC Law or University of Illinois Chicago School of Law.
UIC Law is the host institution of the Global Legal Skills Conference Series, an annual conference founded in 2005 that has convened sessions in Chicago, Washington D.C., Mexico, Costa Rica, and Italy. It brings together legal-writing, legal-English, and skills-training faculty from around the world to share teaching methods for lawyering in cross-border and multilingual practice settings.
The conference is listed among UIC Law's centers and institutes alongside the school's Louis L. Biro Law Library, signaling that it functions as an ongoing institutional program rather than a one-off event. Faculty member Mark E. Wojcik is identified in the school's materials as a notable member of the law faculty, and the conference's continued run under UIC's banner reflects a longstanding faculty commitment to international and comparative legal-skills instruction.
For applicants, the practical relevance is narrower than it might sound: the conference itself is a scholarly and pedagogical gathering for law teachers, not a student career fair or recruiting event. Its value to a prospective student is mostly indirect — it signals that UIC Law has an established, decades-old niche in global legal skills training and legal English instruction, which can matter if you're specifically interested in international business law, comparative legal writing, or teaching-oriented scholarship. It sits alongside the school's International Business and Trade Law concentration and its International Human Rights Clinic as part of a broader international-law thread running through the curriculum, though the data available doesn't specify how conference programming connects to specific student coursework or credit.
A low-150s LSAT sits close to UIC Law's reported median: the school's 25th/50th/75th percentile LSAT band is 150/153/156, meaning a 150 is at the 25th percentile and a 153 is squarely at the median for its entering class. That doesn't predict an outcome — no probability language belongs anywhere in your admissions planning — but it does tell you where you'd land relative to the class UIC actually enrolled, which is the only honest anchor available before you apply.
Since the August 2024 reformat, the LSAT consists of two scored Logical Reasoning sections and one scored Reading Comprehension section (Logic Games is gone), plus an unscored variable section and a separately submitted, unscored Argumentative Writing sample. Most people who move their score meaningfully do it through sustained, official-practice-material-based prep over several months rather than a single short cram — see /how-to-study-for-the-lsat for the general mechanics. Because schools consider your highest score, a retake strategy is often the single highest-leverage move available to an applicant sitting in the low 150s, especially at a school where the 75th percentile (156) is only a few points higher.
GPA matters in tandem here. UIC's GPA band is 3.13/3.40/3.64 at the 25th/50th/75th percentiles, so a below-median LSAT paired with a GPA at or above the 3.40 median is a materially different application than the same LSAT paired with a sub-3.13 GPA — schools weigh the two together, not in isolation. If your numbers land below both medians, addressing that gap through addenda, a strong personal statement, or demonstrated upward trend in your record becomes more important than it would be for an applicant already at median on both metrics.
Because roughly 61% of UIC's admitted class receives some grant aid, and scholarship dollars at most schools scale with where your numbers fall relative to the class, an LSAT that clears the 153 median or approaches the 156 75th-percentile mark is also the number most likely to change your financial-aid conversation, not just your admission file. If you're weighing whether to retake before applying, model the cost of a few more months of prep against the realistic swing in scholarship offer — a framework covered in more detail at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation. What you should not do is treat a low-150s score as disqualifying or as a guarantee; treat it as a data point to weigh against the rest of your file and against how much scholarship risk you're willing to accept (see the financing section below on UIC's conditional scholarship reduction rates).
UIC Law received 2,488 applications and made 1,308 offers for its most recent cycle, an acceptance rate of roughly 52.6% — a pool large enough that a generic, unedited personal statement is unlikely to stand out. In a pool this size, the file elements within an applicant's control (personal statement, addenda, letters of recommendation, and application timing) do the real differentiating work once your LSAT and GPA have placed you in a rough band relative to the school's 150/153/156 and 3.13/3.40/3.64 medians.
Submitting a complete file earlier — once your LSAT score reflects your real capability and your recommenders have had adequate time — can be advantageous at schools that review applications on a rolling basis, though the pack does not specify UIC's review process. A general cycle timeline is covered at /law-school-application-timeline.
For UIC specifically, an applicant whose numbers sit below the school's medians can use the personal statement and any addenda to explain context (a difficult semester, a career change, a nontraditional path) rather than to restate the resume. Because UIC offers both a day and an identically instructed evening division, part-time applicants also have a distinct avenue worth flagging clearly in the application if that flexibility is the reason UIC is a fit — it's a structural feature of the school, not a workaround, and reviewers can weigh it as such. Letters of recommendation carrying specific, substantive detail from someone who can speak to legal-relevant skills (writing, analysis, argumentation) generally do more work than a letter from a high-status but distant recommender. None of this changes the two medians that anchor where your numbers sit — but in a pool of nearly 2,500 applicants, the parts of the file you control are what separate similarly-numbered applicants from each other.
The single most important number to understand before accepting a conditional scholarship at UIC is this: across the three most recent entering classes reported, roughly 47-51% of students who started with a conditional scholarship saw it reduced. In the 2024-25 cycle, 76 of 162 entering students with conditional awards (46.9%) had their scholarship reduced; the two prior years ran at 48.9% and 51.0%. That means a UIC conditional scholarship is close to a coin flip on whether you keep your full award through graduation — a risk profile every admitted student should model before committing.
Conditional scholarships are typically tied to maintaining a minimum law school GPA, and because law school grading is curved, a cohort of students who were all strong undergraduates will necessarily sort into a range of outcomes — some below whatever threshold their award requires. The general mechanics of how curves interact with conditional scholarships, and how to negotiate an offer before you enroll, are covered at /law-school-scholarship-negotiation; the UIC-specific takeaway is that you should ask the school directly, in writing, exactly what GPA your specific award requires and treat anything close to half your class losing money as the realistic base rate, not a worst case.
On the aid-availability side, about 61% of UIC students receive some grant, and the reported 50th-percentile grant for full-time students is $23,250 — useful as a planning anchor for what a "typical" grant recipient gets, though it doesn't tell you what any individual applicant would receive, and roughly 27% of students get less than half tuition covered against only about 1% receiving a full-tuition award. The data pack does not report a published annual tuition figure or full cost-of-attendance estimate for UIC, so precise net-price and net-cost-after-scholarship math needs to be confirmed directly with the school's financial aid office; the reported annual off-campus living estimate is $24,976, which is one real component of your budget even without a confirmed tuition number.
On the borrowing side, remember that federal loan rules are shifting: Grad PLUS loans are being eliminated for new borrowers, and law students will be capped at $50,000 per year and $200,000 aggregate in federal Direct Unsubsidized loans within a $257,500 lifetime cap, at a rate near 8.07% for 2026-27 plus roughly a 1.057% origination fee (verify current terms before you borrow). Because those caps may not cover the full cost at any given school, a scholarship that gets cut mid-program can force a student to cover the gap with private loans at less favorable terms than federal loans. If public-service work is part of your plan, note that the default federal repayment plan earns zero PSLF credit — you'd need to affirmatively enroll in the income-driven Repayment Assistance Plan to build toward forgiveness. For a fuller walkthrough of loan and repayment mechanics, see /law-school-loans-and-pslf, and for how to think about whether the total investment pencils out, see /is-law-school-worth-it. The bottom line for UIC specifically: budget as if your conditional scholarship has a near-coin-flip chance of shrinking, and get the GPA retention threshold in writing before you enroll.
There's no universal answer to whether any law school is "worth it" — the honest approach is to run your own numbers through three filters: what you'll likely pay, what your degree is likely to produce, and how much risk you can absorb along the way. UIC Law's own data gives you real anchors for two of those three; the financing mechanics are the same ones every 2025-26 applicant faces nationally.
Start with the financing reality, not the sticker price. As of the 2026-27 aggregate federal borrowing rules, Grad PLUS loans are gone for new borrowers, and law students are capped at $50,000 per year and $200,000 total in federal Direct Unsubsidized loans, inside a $257,500 lifetime cap (verify current figures before you borrow — this is a time-sensitive rule). That cap matters most at schools where tuition plus living costs regularly exceed it; UIC Law does not publicly report a combined annual cost-of-attendance figure in the data available here, so you should request a current, itemized COA letter directly from the school before assuming federal loans alone will cover your budget. What the school does report is that 61% of students receive some grant aid, with a median grant of $23,250 — a meaningful offset, but one you should compare against your own award letter, not the median, because scholarships at UIC are not evenly distributed (27% of students get less than half tuition covered, 33% get half to full, and only 1% get full rides).
Then price in the scholarship cliff. Conditional scholarships that require a minimum GPA to renew are common in legal education, and UIC's own retention data shows real churn: across the three most recent entering cohorts reported, roughly 47-51% of students who started with a conditional scholarship saw it reduced. If you're admitted with a scholarship, ask in writing what GPA or class-rank threshold protects it, and model your second and third years as if the reduction happens — because for close to half of recent cohorts, it did. That's not a UIC-specific character flaw; it's how the entire tiered-scholarship system works nationally, but the size of the risk here is UIC-specific and belongs in your budget, not just your hope.
Weigh outcomes against the bar and the job market as they actually are, not as you'd like them to be. UIC's most recently reported first-time bar pass rate was 68.82%, well below the state average of 81.07% for that cycle; the two-year ultimate pass rate climbs to 77.78%, which tells you that a meaningful share of graduates need a second attempt to become licensed — a real cost in time, retake fees, and delayed income that a worth-it calculation should include. On employment, 77.4% of graduates were in jobs requiring bar passage or a JD advantage, with the largest employer concentration in Illinois: about 3.6% went to firms of 501+ attorneys (the Big Law tier), while government work (16.8%) and public interest (5.1%) accounted for a much larger share of placements than large-firm work. If your goal is a Big Law salary to justify heavier borrowing, that outcome describes a small minority of UIC graduates; if your goal is Illinois-based government, public-interest, or small-to-midsize firm practice, the placement pattern lines up more closely with the degree's actual track record.
Where UIC's case for "worth it" is strongest is access, not prestige. A 52.57% acceptance rate, an evening division with identical academic requirements to the day program, and a January entry option make this a law school genuinely built for working adults, career-changers, and applicants who wouldn't get a look at a highly selective program. If you're an LSAT 150-153-156 (25th-50th-75th) or GPA 3.13-3.40-3.64 applicant whose alternative is not attending law school at all, and you can graduate with manageable debt because of grant aid or your own resources, the calculus is different than for someone comparing UIC against a T20 offer. Run the actual numbers on your award letter, your realistic practice-area goals, and your risk tolerance for the bar exam and scholarship renewal — not on rankings or averages — before deciding. For the generic mechanics of loans, PSLF, and scholarship negotiation referenced above, see the linked spoke pages.