Cost in Time and Money (Continued)
    Bar Exam Expenses - The costs listed up until this section represent the price of obtaining a J.D.  The J.D., or Juris Doctorate, is a degree conferring upon its possessor the status of having obtained a legal education.  There are very few of you who will plan to stop after obtaining the J.D.  Most law students intend to be lawyers, and to that end you will need to take the Bar Exam of the state in which you plan to practice.  This site will cover the Bar Exam in detail later.     
     For those of you planning on becoming lawyers, enter $2300 on line 2f.  $2300 represents approximately $1300 on a Bar Preparation course, $700 in fees, and $300 in costs associated with the Bar itself (e.g. hotels, meals, etc.).  This amount will prove to be very accurate for the vast majority of you.  The amount on line 2f represents the cost of taking the Bar once.  If you were to fail the exam, there would be further expenses, but again, the coverage here is sufficient for our current purposes.  To obtain the cost of a J.D. degree and taking the Bar Exam once, add together lines 2e and 2f.
    If your only intention for attending law school is to obtain a J.D., then the amount you see on line 2e of the worksheet represents the total cost of a legal education for you. 
   
    Conclusion - While I don't know the exact number you came up with, I do know that the number is big, and we didn't even include the costs of registering with LSDAS, LSAT costs, and application fees!  Since you likely don't have that kind of money lying around, you will be taking out loans to cover a part of your total.  The point of this exercise is to make you aware that law school is very expensive.  The worksheet also gives you a figure to use when we discuss salaries in the job outlook section of this site.
    NOTE:  The amounts you have calculated on the Worksheet are not the amounts you will have to pay back in loans!  Do not confuse these issues.  The Worksheet above factors in income you would have realized had you not gone to law school.  This is done to show you the real cost of attending law school but does not in any way indicate the loan amounts you would have on exiting law school.  For information on financial aid see p. 26 of this site.