A new partnership between Hope College and the Indiana University Maurer School of Law provides an outstanding opportunity for graduating Hope seniors and alumni seeking to pursue careers as attorneys.
The Hope College Law Scholars Program, which will begin this fall, guarantees that the highly competitive, three-year J.D. program will reserve two spots for qualified Hope graduating seniors or alumni, in addition to providing scholarship support equal to at least half the cost of tuition and access to a formal mentoring program.
“We are very pleased to partner with Indiana University in providing this opportunity for our graduates whose professional interests call them to pursue a graduate degree in law,” said Dr. Richard Ray, provost and professor of kinesiology at Hope. “Hope has a proud tradition of preparing students with the intellectual and moral formation to serve others through careers as attorneys. That our partners at IU have provided us with an opportunity to extend and deepen this legacy is gratefully appreciated.”
The program seeks to significantly reduce the cost of legal education for qualified students interested in legal studies. The Maurer School of Law established the partnership with Hope because of the high quality of Hope graduates who have enrolled in the program in previous years.
“Graduates of outstanding liberal arts colleges like Hope have the writing and critical thinking skills that make them ideal law students and skilled lawyers,” said Austen L. Parrish, dean and James H. Rudy Professor of Law at the Maurer School of Law. “We are honored to be joining forces with Hope to bring its graduates to Bloomington as they shape their professional careers.”
Students admitted through the program will be designated as Hope College Law Scholars during their time at the law school. The scholarship award across each student’s three years in the program will total about $45,000 for Indiana residents and $75,000 for out-of-state residents. The mentorship component will match the students with an alumni mentor, an upper-division student mentor and a faculty mentor with similar career interests.
As one of oldest law schools in the country and Indiana’s top-ranked public law school, the IU Maurer School of Law has a history of developing deep relationships with other prestigious institutions in higher education, both in the United States and abroad. The school has developed partnerships with 15 other liberal arts and engineering schools throughout the country, including such distinguished Midwestern schools as Wabash College, Grinnell College, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Purdue University.
Located in Holland, Michigan, Hope College is a four-year, co-educational, Christian liberal arts college affiliated with the Reformed Church in America, and has 3,433 students from 40 states and 23 foreign countries. Founded in 1866, Hope offers majors through more than 50 departments leading to a Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Music, Bachelor of Science or Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree.
Hope is a recognized leader in collaborative faculty/student research and creativity, and has one of the largest summer undergraduate research programs in the nation among non-Ph.D. granting institutions, with other academic distinctions including national accreditation in all four of the arts. Featured in the book “Colleges That Change Lives,” Hope has been named to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s “Community Engagement Classification.”