Scholarship Negotiation Question

[abcdef1234]

Hey Powerscore crew hope everyone is doing well.

I just got a few questions regarding scholarship negotiations.

1. If I am trying to negotiate school X to increase their scholarship offer, and I currently have one scholarship offer from a peer school, but have three more peer schools I am still waiting on admissions decisions from , do I wait until all my offers are in before I email school X for reconsideration, or can I ask for multiple rounds of reconsiderations and ask for a new round of reconsideration every time I get a new offer?

2. What counts as a comparable offer I can present for negotiation? I understand if its a higher ranked school they can generally offer less scholarship money and still be a comparable offer. Is there a general rule of thumb as to how much less a school can offer for each rank they are higher? Can I even use a school offer that has zero scholarship money but is significantly higher in ranking, such as Rank 16 with 50k scholarship vs Rank 4 with zero scholarship?

Thank you!

[Rachael Wilkenfeld]

Hi abcdef,

Congrats on the scholarship offer!

The key to think about with using a scholarship offer from one school to push another is how the target school views the scholarship school. You want to think about peer schools from the perspective of that target school. Do they see the scholarship school as a peer? For them to increase the offer, the target school should be at least a peer, if not a bit better.

When talking about scholarship negotiation, I consider three big factors: the money they have, the money you need, and the competition they see.

1) The money they have. Here's where you are going to have to really consider your position a bit. We are somewhat late in the overall game. Schools generally have less and less funding available for offers as the cycle goes on, so waiting on other admissions decisions will potentially leave you asking schools with less money available to offer.

2a) The money you need. If you are trying to get the school to increase your offer by 5k a year, that's a very different sort of ask than asking them to increase 20k a year. Before you go to the school for negotiation, you'll want to know what you are looking for moneywise.

2b) Make sure you understand the terms of all relevant scholarship offers, as well as your comparative costs at different schools. Some scholarships offer X amount of money per year, which will become less valuable as the costs of law school rises each year. Some are a percentage of the overall tuition, which is a bit better. Some are full tuition as of the date of enrollment, or even better, full tuition increasing along with the increases in cost as you attend. But other costs matter as well. Living costs can vary considerably, and you want an idea of how much school X will cost v school Y overall.

3) The competition. For your example, rank 4 won't really care about rank 16, but rank 16 would care about rank 4. The admission from the better school isn't the same as a scholarship from the better school though.

You don't really get multiple rounds of negotiation. If they meet what you ask for the first time, you can't really go back and ask again for more because a better offer comes along. Shoot your best shot the first time, and only negotiate for something you'd happily accept if it was met.

Best of luck!