🎓 Your Weekly Pitch: Stolen scholarships in higher education

Students accuse law schools of “section stacking” to covertly trap people into predatory scholarships

Alexandra Sahara

and

kate

Jun 29, 2021

A 7 minute read

AN IMPORTANT NOTE FOR THIS PITCH

This pitch is designed as an investigative piece about the unconfirmed practice of section stacking—where law schools group students together in cohorts that increase the likelihood they will lose their scholarship.

As incoming law students, this is a practice we hear about constantly from other students.

However, keep in mind that there might not be enough evidence to prove the problem of section stacking exists beyond a commonly misunderstood fact.

That being said, enough students suffer from scholarship loss as a possible result of section stacking that it is worth investigating.

As a journalist, this pitch could work for you either way.

You can dispel the myth or prove that the monster is real.

Approach accordingly.

THE INVESTIGATION’S LEDE

Law school is a mind-bogglingly expensive and competitive space. Plenty of students take out loans of $200,000 or more without a guarantee that they’ll find the kind of employment able to pay their crushing student loan debt.

To make matters worse, law schools—particularly low ranked schools with abysmal employment statistics—have long engaged in the practice of providing students with “conditional scholarships.” Simply put, those are scholarships that are dependent on how well you do in school.

These are generally understood as a really bad idea by the consulting experts, since law school is so significantly different from undergrad, and everything is graded on a curve. As a result, students have genuinely no idea how well they’ll perform compared to their peers.

The concept works something like this: ‘To keep your full scholarship of ~$60,000 per year, you have to be in the top 50% of students and maintain a 3.0 GPA. Fall out of line, and you’re S.O.L. We will reduce or even eliminate your scholarship entirely.’

These types of scholarships tend to be concentrated around the lowest-ranked schools, and they heavily affect a significant portion of their student body. According to Spivey Consulting, an expert group in the space of law school admissions,

83 law schools reported that at least 1 member of their incoming 2018 class had conditional scholarships...
2,492 students had their scholarships reduced or eliminated, an overall rate of 27% of those who received them…
There are 36 law schools with reduction/loss rates in excess of the 27% national average. In fact, there are 27 law schools where over a third of those matriculating with conditional scholarships see them reduced or eliminated. There are even 6 schools where you are more likely to lose your scholarship than to keep it.

And with record numbers of applicants to law school, more and more students are signing up for these predatory deals.

The New York Times does a great breakdown on conditional scholarships here, but we believe this story goes even further—further into what has become a systematic and predatory practice fueled by obfuscation and misinformation coming at the cost of bankrupting and emotionally shattering students thrown into financial ruin.

BEST PITCH TEASER

The Guiding Question:

Do law schools use “section stacking” as a technique to increase the chances students will lose their conditional scholarships?

The Answer:

We don’t know. Students all over internet forums consider it an open secret that schools “section stack.”

But finding out could de-accredit some predatory schools, and considering the scale of the issue, we bet this reporting could win you a major award.

Here’s how section stacking works

In an effort to limit the amount of scholarship money they need to give out, a—usually low ranked—school puts a majority of conditional scholarship students in the same cohort, a.k.a. a ‘section’ so that they compete on the same curve together.

By adding in some of the students with the highest LSAT and GPA combinations (who are statistically more likely to outperform other students), the students with conditional scholarships become much more likely to fail to meet their scholarship requirements, therefore suddenly facing another 2 years of school at full ticket price—upwards of $60,000 per year.

This is how someone could be the 20th smartest student in their year overall, but still wind up in the bottom 10%.

One Reddit user explained it perfectly—

Assume a school with 100 students divided into 5 sections. They then stack all the conditional scholarship kids in the same section. That kid who finishes last in the conditional scholarship section might end up with a 2.3 or something and be the bottom 10% of the class, but if they did an even distribution of the students, s/he'd maybe finish 4th or 5th in her/his section. Those are the people who get really shafted by this regime. Their lives are absolutely ruined. Self-esteem shot. Career prospects massively curtailed.

There are real consequences to section stacking

As a result of their lost scholarships, students face bleak choices.

They can try and transfer, but chances are their GPA is too low for most schools.
They can finish out their degree by taking out loans they didn’t anticipate needing and hope their grades improve... But finding jobs—especially firm jobs that pay enough to handle $200,000+ worth of debt—is often based on your GPA, which is now shot.
Drop out. Maybe try applying again at a different school next year… and take on all the time, money, and effort it takes to retake the LSAT and reapply to new schools.

News peg

It seems that in 2020 Cal Western was one of the schools that upped the ante when it comes to conditional scholarships. In this case for this student, their scholarship is entirely eroded if they’re not in the top 40% of the class.

Why this story is worth pursuing

On a macro level, the U.S. has a major student debt problem it needs to solve.

On a micro level, it’s not hard to see why this practice, if confirmed through investigative reporting, would make any student's blood boil.

Conditional scholarships are risky, but most students believe they have an understanding of how the game is played.

Maintain a certain GPA or rank and you get to keep your promised reward.

But section stacking is like someone changing the rules of the game and not telling you they did it.

Now you’re stuck wondering why you lost.

From the perspectives of some of these schools, this is playing fair. Jerry Organ, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law stated,

I am not in favor of lower retention rates… but people can make their own choice now that data is available [on retention rates]. In 2011, people were making choices without a lot of information.

This is the same defense as “read the fine print” which, in some cases, is a fair argument…

But not here.

Section stacking deliberately misleads students into believing their chance to maintain financial stability is greater than it actually is.

Those students make decisions on their financial and career future with decades-long ramifications, ultimately having little to no recourse in case things go sideways.

What we don't have answers to

This is a heavily discussed topic on the law school subreddits, however, a good journalist wouldn’t make the assumption that section stacking is true without further factual confirmation.

That being said, this may be tough to discover without a direct source.

A good place to start may be to FOIA data from public universities that engage in conditional scholarship practices and have high attrition rates (you can find that here on Law School Transparency). This may also work with some private universities since FOIA can apply to organizations that receive federal funding.

Diverse sources worth interviewing

You can’t trust a single student’s comments on Reddit about the practices of a law school. However, with some legwork, you can figure out the names of students within specific sections and ask/calculate how many of them had (and lost) conditional scholarships.
Above the Law is one of the few reputable sources we can find that mentions section stacking as a fact of school procedure. Speak with their reporters to see if they can lead you to how they confirmed that practice.
Spivey Consulting (and countless other law school admissions consulting practices) keep close contact with and regularly publish research on law schools. Additionally, many of them worked in admissions offices and may be willing to confirm or deny certain school practices.
Whistleblower: We’d be remiss if we didn’t state the obvious. Getting someone within a school itself, even if just a former administrator, would be your biggest ace in the hole with this story.

PUBLICATIONS TO PITCH TO

ProPublica
- ProPublica is a beast at long-term, long-form, award-winning investigative journalism. If you don’t know where to start with this story to validate the practice, they’ll be the journalists who can give you a running start in your research.
- Contact: suggestions@propublica.org
The Guardian U.S., Features
- The Guardian is one of investigative journalism’s heaviest hitters. With its focus on U.S. domestic issues, the Guardian U.S. could certainly be swayed to one-up the similar New York Times article from a decade ago.
- Jessica Reed at jessica.reed@theguardian.com, Alastair Gee at alastair.gee@theguardian.com, and Frida Garza at frida.garza@theguardian.com
Vox, The Goods
- The Goods is where Vox explores how our psychology affects our economic choices. The emotional angle to this mixed with real financial stakes makes this prime content for The Goods.
- Contact: meredith.haggerty@vox.com