Brooklyn Law School offers partial tuition refund to unemployed graduates

Trent Crabtree | college.usatoday.com

At a time when many college graduates are facing mounting debt and limited job prospects, Brooklyn Law School is now offering to alleviate this burden -- by offering graduates a refund.

As part of the Bridge-to-Success program, the school will begin refunding graduates 15% of their paid tuition if they are still searching for a job nine months after receiving their degree, the school announced on July 13, 2015. According to the school’s website, the program is designed to serve as “both a boost while graduates conduct their job search and as a safety net if the process takes longer than anticipated.”



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To qualify for the refund, graduates must be actively seeking employment and working closely with the school’s career services center. They must also be planning to take the bar exam.

Moot court room @blsadmissions #lawschool A post shared by Brooklyn Law School (@brooklynlawschool) on May 30, 2013 at 8:20am PDT

Nicholas Allard, president and dean of BLS, says that the program was created because of the long and expensive process that many law school graduates endure on their way to becoming lawyers.

“When they graduate, law students typically have to pass the bar and in order to do that they often have to often pay for an expensive bar review class and forego working in many cases,” Allard says. “And then when they take the bar exam, they have to wait months to get the results.”

As this process drags on, the debt begins to add up as well.



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“This length of time makes it challenging in many cases to pay your bills and to find jobs, so some people just need more time than other people,” Allard says. “We want our students to not only have the counseling support, but have the financial support they may need in some cases to find a good job that they feel is worthwhile and a good way to start their career.”

Based on statistics presented by the school, the program likely won’t affect many graduates. BLS — which has a total enrollment of 1,119 — states on its website that it had a 90% job placement rate in 2014.

According toCNN Money, the maximum cost of full tuition at the school is $130,000, which means that the most the school can refund unemployed graduates is $19,500 — assuming students paid completely out-of-pocket.

And Allard says that he isn’t worried that graduates will try to take advantage of the program to receive a refund even after finding a job, adding that he believes that his students will take a job over a check.

“Our students are our paying customers,” Allard says. “My concern is not that the customers rip us off. My concern is that we do everything within our power to make sure that our students graduate and believe they got value from the legal education and that it empowers them to get meaningful jobs.”

Bridge-to-Success is the latest initiative in a series of steps that the school has taken to help its current students as well as its alumni. BLS recently announced a 15% tuition reduction that will go into effect this year for all students. Last year, the school introduced a 2-year J.D. program -- the first of its kind in the New York City area, according to a report by CNN Money.





Trent Crabtree is a student at The University of Oklahoma and a summer 2015 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent.

This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.