by Bobby Larsen
Jessica Valdez is a 2018 graduate of Creighton University who has been working at an Omaha law firm since graduating. Her next step, going to law school and becoming an immigration attorney, has hit roadblocks, not due to any lack of qualifications but due to the costs associated with just applying to law school.
Valdez, a first-generation college student, recently shared on Twitter: “Just paid $240 for one law school application. Let’s talk about how application fees are unnecessary barriers to higher ed for low income students.”
Law school applicants first must pay to take the LSAT, which costs $200 without a waiver. An applicant is also capped at one free LSAT at most, meaning the many applicants who take the LSAT more than once still have to pay eventually. Applicants then must pay a one-time $195 Credential Assembly Service (CAS) fee for LSAC to process their LSAT score, a $45 fee for LSAC to send the report to each law school, and a separate application fee charged by each school.
While certain fee waivers exist, they are often limited and sometimes difficult to obtain. An applicant who has never known anyone who has gone to law school may not even be aware of which waivers exist. As Valdez pointed out, low-income students are disproportionately affected by these fees. Applicants may not be able to apply at many schools, limiting their options to compare scholarship packages. Not knowing where they’ll even get in and which schools will ever offer scholarships, they are taking inherent risks in choosing where to apply; risks that applicants of means might not have to make.
Lack of diversity is an issue throughout higher education and application fees are just one of many obstacles. Even with many schools actively working to increase diversity, the schools are not the only entity charging fees; LSAC is as well.
Valdez said she didn’t expect application fees to be so high, misconstruing the LSAC website to believe that applying to the University of Nebraska College of Law would only cost $50, the application fee the school charges. While she received a fee waiver from Nebraska Law, she didn’t realize she then had to pay the $195 CAS fee and the $45 LSAC report fee. Something she thought would cost $50, and then $0 once Nebraska Law gave her a fee waiver, wound up costing her $240. These restrictive costs have prevented her from applying to any law schools besides the two in Nebraska.
None of these issues are unique to Valdez. Brenda Gallardo, a native of Wakefield, Nebraska and a 2018 University of Nebraska-Lincoln graduate, is currently a 1L at Rutgers Law School. Gallardo, the daughter of immigrants, isn’t just a first-generation law student; she was a first-generation college student, and a first-generation high school graduate. Throughout her undergraduate career, Gallardo worked at Nebraska Law’s Civil Clinic as a student worker and served as an interpreter for the Immigration Clinic.
While Gallardo originally applied to go to law school starting in 2018, she wound up holding off and going through a second round of applications for the 2019 cycle. Gallardo said that she applied for and received all waivers she was eligible for, including LSAC’s low-income fee waiver, which allows an applicant to apply to up to four schools without paying the $45 LSAC reports. However, the four-school maximum is permanent; an applicant doesn’t get more fee waivers if she applies in a second cycle. Gallardo said that she had to pay a substantial amount of money just on sending her LSAC report to schools. She noted that for the 2018 cycle, the report fee was $25 and for the 2019 cycle it had jumped to $35. Jessica Valdez reported that the fee for the 2020 cycle has climbed to $45 now – an 80% increase in just two years.
Gallardo remembers seeing wealthier law school applicants posting on social media that they had applied to over ten law schools so that they could compare scholarship awards. Seeing this led Gallardo to state, “Poor students literally do not have that option. If we want to encourage poor students and students of color to go to law school, it has to start with LSAC. Charging $45 for each report is ridiculous.”
When a law school applicant gets a strong LSAT score, they have reason to be hopeful about receiving a good scholarship package. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to get offered scholarship packages when one has difficulty even applying to schools.
2019 Nebraska Law graduate Wade Burkholder stopped working so he could study for the LSAT full-time, knowing the importance of a high score. While he got a 163, a score putting him in the 88th percentile of all people who take the exam, he said that he didn’t feel like he could spend the hundreds of dollars necessary “to cast a wide net” when it came to applying to schools.
Similarly, a man who now works in public health management in Philadelphia and chose to remain anonymous got a 167 on the LSAT – a score putting him in the 95th percentile. However, he didn’t even apply for law school “because of the outrageous cost.” He explained, “It would have cost me over $1000 in order for me to apply to the six or seven law schools I wanted to.”
A current 3L at Nebraska Law, who paid for her undergraduate education with a Pell Grant (granted to students with exceptional financial need), noted that she had to sell plasma just to afford to apply for law school. She said the LSAT cost half a month’s rent and she could only afford it because her mom paid for it as that year’s Christmas present. The 3L said that while most law schools she applied to agreed to waive their fees, LSAC still takes its fee for each application sent, meaning she “couldn’t afford to apply many places.”
Application fees will continue to pose a problem for low-income law school applicants. Even though many schools are generous with fee waivers, and some schools have eliminated them entirely, costs still add up. Jae-Lyn Takemura, a senior at the University of Kansas from Papillion, Nebraska, is currently applying to law school. She said that despite numerous schools waiving their fees, the fees charged by LSAC cause costs to rise quickly. Takemura called the current system “absolutely ridiculous” and said it “feeds into the issue of ‘poor’ people not being able to go to school and all the rich people getting to go.”
Of course, application fees are only one of the obstacles low-income applicants face while applying for law school. In her 2009 Rutgers Law Review article titled "Legal Education Reform, Diversity, and Access to Justice," legal scholar Michelle Anderson, a former CUNY Law Dean and current President of Brooklyn College, wrote, “Being able to afford to take a test preparation course, for example, can enhance an LSAT score. One major test preparation company guarantees a higher score or your money back, while another touts the tens of thousands of students who have achieved double-digit point increases by purchasing its services.”
Anderson furthered that privilege can enhance scores while a lack of privilege can depress them, noting also that the LSAT has “a disparate impact on students of color.”
Application fees, then, are just one roadblock among many. This problem is important not only for the low-income applicants, people of color, and first-generation students who are more likely to be affected, but also for the communities lawyers go on to serve. Anderson, citing research that studied thousands of graduates of an elite law school, wrote that attorneys of color are more apt to serve clients of color, work in public interest law, and offer pro bono services. She added that at CUNY Law, where she was Dean at the time, the school’s goal was “to be an access institution, to provide keys to the profession to communities that have historically been locked out. We aim to increase diversity in the legal profession, and to populate it with lawyers seeking justice above personal gain.”
While CUNY has a reputation as a law school that prioritizes public interest work, the message Anderson was promoting is one that is oft-repeated, in word if not in deed. LSAC has a page on its website titled Diversity: Why It Matters, with an explanation that, “Access to justice is essential for a democratic society, and diversity in the legal profession increases the likelihood of access for people from an increasingly diverse population.”
This is exactly what Anderson alludes to her in her law review article. However, it’s one thing to know diversity is important...it’s another thing to be willing to dive deep into existing practices to see what continuing obstacles exist for so many law school applicants. When LSAC report fees jump from $25 to $45 in two years, according to Brenda Gallardo, or when Jessica Valdez is stunned to realize she has to pay $240 for what she thought would cost $50 at most, there is a problem.
Every person interviewed for this article is qualified to attend law school. Many have overcome substantial obstacles just to obtain those qualifications, only to be priced out of partaking in the competitive application process that more privileged applicants get to. Schools and LSAC ought to consider the role the application fees they charge plays in determining who has access and who doesn’t, to ensure that there exists a way for Jessica Valdez, and the thousands of others in her position, to someday become JDs advancing justice.
Bobby Larsen is a second-year student at the University of Nebraska College of Law and a contributing writer for JDs Advancing Justice. Bobby also serves as Vice President of the Equal Justice Society, Community Legal Education Project, and American Constitution Society and as a member of the Student-Faculty Honor Committee, Student Faculty Committee and Pro Bono Committee. He is the college's Equal Justice Works Student Representative and an ex officio member of the Nebraska State Bar Association's Legal Services Committee.