Same Score, No Scholarship

Start Here If You Skipped Part One

Here’s what Part One covered.

Law schools are in a money crisis they built themselves. For years, a federal loan program paid any price at any school. That program ends July 1, 2026. And 8 other problems are hitting at once. There’s a demographic cliff. A new bar exam. States walking away from ABA accreditation. The schools most at risk borrowed and built during the good years.

None of this is a guess. It’s already happening.

If you know how this works, you can plan around it. Most applicants don’t, and they pay full price.

The rest of this book is your half of the story.

James is a composite. I built him from a pattern I’ve seen across hundreds of real applications over the last 3 years.

He scored a 170 on the LSAT in fall 2024. Back in 2022, a score like that at a school ranked in the 30s usually meant a full scholarship, sometimes more than 1. Full tuition, 3 years, no debt. The scholarship charts those schools published at the time showed exactly that for his score.

He applied in the 2024-25 cycle. He got in. He got no scholarship money at all.

Same test, same score, same schools. The one thing that changed is the number everyone else reports, and it went up. Applicants didn’t get smarter, and the LSAT didn’t get easier to prep for. The system pushes scores up on its own, even when real ability stays flat. When scores rise, school medians rise. Scholarship lines move up with them, and the money that used to go to the 164 applicant now goes to applicants with 171s.

James didn’t get worse. The bar he had to clear got higher.

He enrolled anyway, at a school he really wanted to attend. His total cost for 3 years came to about $297,000, tuition plus living expenses.¹ I estimated what that scholarship would have been worth at the same school 3 years earlier, using the grids those schools published then. The gap comes to about $147,000. Take that as an illustration built from real data, not an audit of one person’s award. It shows what the treadmill costs a real person in real dollars.

$147,000 changes which jobs you can afford to take after you graduate, whether public interest work is even possible, whether a small firm makes sense, and how long you carry the weight of a bet you made at 25.

And law school debt was already extreme by any normal standard. The average debt for a private law school grad runs well past $100,000. At many schools, the full 3-year cost tops $250,000.² The Grad PLUS program covered any price any school set, with no limits. It’s gone for new borrowers after July 1, 2026. The new federal cap for law students is $50,000 per year, $200,000 total across all years.³ At schools where tuition alone tops $60,000 a year, that cap doesn’t even cover tuition, let alone room and board. So James’s classmates are walking into that wall right as the old safety valve closes.

The scholarship was the way through the wall. When it vanished because the median moved, James was paying more and could borrow less federal money than any class before him. The treadmill and the loan cap are 2 separate machines, and both are running the same way at the same time.

To see how this happened, you need to understand 3 forces. I’ll spend the next few chapters on each.

The first is the engine, retakes plus the highest-score rule. LSAC lets you take the LSAT 5 times in a 5-year window.⁴ In June 2006, the ABA changed how schools report scores. Before that, schools reported the average of a student’s LSATs. After that, they reported only the highest.⁵ Put those 2 facts together and you get a machine that pushes school medians up on its own, whether or not real reasoning ability improved.

The second force is an accelerant, accommodations. Extended-time grants (extra time to take the test) rose from about 6,000 in 2018-19 to about 15,000 in 2022-23.⁶ Approval rates ran around 98 to 99 percent.⁷ Test-takers with extra time score about 4 to 5 points higher on average than they do under standard conditions.⁸ Those scores go into school medians with no label.

The third force is the other accelerant, cheating. In late 2025, LSAC suspended online testing in mainland China after finding organized misconduct. Some services were charging up to $8,000 per client.⁹ Then in February 2026, LSAC announced the end of all online testing, starting August 2026.¹⁰ Going back in person helps, but the scores from the online era are already baked into the medians.

Each of these forces is real and confirmed on its own, and all 3 are running at once. I’ll break them down in the next 2 chapters.

First, the arms-race math, because it’s what makes James’s story structural instead of bad luck.

Schools compete for rankings. Rankings depend heavily on median LSAT scores. When the median at a target school rises, the applicant who used to sit comfortably above it now sits at or below it. So that applicant retakes. Retake scores run higher on average than first tries.¹¹ The new scores push the median up. Scholarship lines follow the median, and the money moves up the scale. The applicant who would have gotten that money 3 years ago now needs a score they didn’t have to get the same deal. Every turn of the cycle comes out of the applicant’s pocket.

Look, no single school decided to take the scholarship money from James’s class. Each one just reacted to the medians around it and moved its scholarship lines to protect its ranking. The money moved without anyone voting to move it. That’s not okay, but it is predictable, and it’ll keep going as long as the engine runs.

The applicant who wins is the one who sees the structure and plans inside it. Medians keep rising because retakes and accommodations and reporting rules push them up. So prep past the new floor and leave yourself margin, instead of prepping to the old median. That’s not how the game should work, but it’s how it works right now, in 2026, for the cycle you’re in.

I’ll come back to the score you need, and how to build it for real, in Part Four. For now, know that the treadmill has a pace. You can learn it ahead of time, or find out when the scholarship offer doesn’t come.

James is still in school. He’ll graduate with a credential he worked hard for, from a school he chose for real reasons. He might be fine. A lot of people carrying $147,000 more than they planned find a way. But he’s running a race with a handicap that didn’t exist when he decided to enter it, and nobody told him the treadmill was speeding up.

Let’s go look at the engine.

Watch: how the same LSAT score prices 2 different offers

Same Score. $147,000 Apart. | The 2030 Law School Crisis

This chapter is from Anyone Can Beat the Law School Collapse by Steve Schwartz, LSAT Coach and Founder of LSAT Unplugged. I've been coaching the LSAT since 2005.

Published July 28, 2026.