Hi all,

I know that it is clearly stated on NYU's web site that they don't have any need based scholarships or grants. I just wanted to ask if someone has an experience of asking for tuition waiver (even partial one) on the basis of hard financial situtaion?

I doesn't hurt to ask AFTER you've been accepted.

But I believe the philosophy is that you can borrow $62,000 and therefore you don't need any additional aid.

The purpose of the LL.M. program is to make money for NYU, and how can it make money if they give it away for free?

Well bob_d, I was speaking about partial tuition waiver. Secondly, yes if I had a financial history or american co-signer I could borrow 62000$. But after looking through such threads like "employability" I doubt I would be able to repay such a debt.
It makes me think about value of all these LLM's. It costs a LOT of money, and then you must work really hard to find a job. I believe that many of LL.M students, who come to pursue an LL.M in USA want to stay there...

I don't think an LL.M. is such a good deal for a foreign student who wants to find work in the U.S.

First of all, without a green card you can't work here. The U.S. doesn't hand them out so readily. I personally would prefer that well educated people should get them over some high school drop out Mexican, but my government doesn't seem to agree with me there. (Favored jobs, like law, are especially protected. The best way to find work in the U.S. is by becoming a computer programmers. The U.S. hands out H1-B visas left and right for computer programmers. The powers that be have decided that it's in the national interest to lower the salaries for computer programmers, but not the salaries of lawyers.)

Secondly, even U.S. citizens who graduated from U.S. law schools have a very difficult time finding good legal employment. You probably read about these high salaries at the top law firms, but less than 10% of law school graduates get those jobs. A lot of law school graduates are severely underemployed.

Government salaries are the easiest to obtain because they are public, and they are very low, often less than $40K to start, and they will never go into six figures no matter how long you've been there. Lawyers wouldn't be working for such low salaries if they could easily find higher paying work elsewhere.

There are many quite contradictive opinions about LL.M's employability. I don't want to stay in USA desperately, but I'd prefer to. I chose law because I like this profession and not in order to immigrate somewhere. My field of study is International law. I was wondering if the employment situation for foreign LL.Ms at this field is also bad.

Whether you should pay for a year at NYU should be based on how that degree will help your employability in your home country, which is not something I have any knowledge of.

You should certainly not count on finding a BIGLAW job in the U.S. to pay off the tuition. Of that I'm pretty sure.