So, for everyone who hasn't heard, we are getting ready to move out to St. Louis in about 3 weeks. After applying to law schools I was accepted to Franklin Pierce Law Center in New Hampshire, BYU, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and waitlisted at Notre Dame, Washington University in St. Louis, George Washington University, The College of William and Mary, and Boston University. Illinois offered me $25,000 a year to attend there, which made them about as cheap as BYU, so we accepted, put down my seat deposit, made our plans to move out to Champaign and pretty much wrote off my chances at the other schools because applications have been up about 25% this year.
About a month ago I got an email from Washington University in St. Louis offering me $15,000 in scholarships per year to attend. My first reaction was to say no thanks and just stick with Illinois, as Illinois is ranked 21 and WashU is only 2 spots higher at 19. But I thought, "What the heck, I'll see if they'll match Illinois' offer," so I told them my situation at Illinois and they came back the same day with an offer to match the scholarship Illinois offered. That surprised me, because I had pretty much already decided that they weren't really interested in me. So, we asked for another week to decide and then spent that week trying to decide what to do. We went to the temple, made some calls, and spent tons of time trying to compare what the schools could offer as far as academics. In the end we decided we wanted to switch to WashU, but found out that we would have to come up with $1800 to break the lease we had signed in Champaign. I wrote to the admissions dean at WashU explaining the situation, and she offered to increase my scholarship to cover the cost of breaking the lease and my seat deposit at Illinois that we were giving up. That pretty much decided it for us, we figure if they want us that much then we want to be there. It was kind of sad to withdraw at Illinois, but I'm pleased with the decision now.
