I'd rather work in New York, but then again, I've yet to visit Boston. I hear it's an incredible city. How could I check the curve on the NESL scholarship? Why is NESL a place that kicks out so many people for academics? If NESL kicks students out for doing poorly, wouldn't that make my 2.5 easier to maintain?
Call the school and ask what their curve is if you can't find it online. I bet it hits right around a 2.4 - 2.5 being median.
NESL presumptively kicks out a bunch of people on the front end so they don't end up graduating, taking the bar, failing, and harming the school's passage rate on the back end. When 25% of the entering students have a 2.9/150 or less, it's obvious that a number of them simply won't be able to pass the bar no matter what the school does. As a result, drastic measures must be taken at some level, and making the entire 1L class sink or swim right out the gate (and continue swimming for a few years) is a pretty easy way for the school to go about getting rid of the bad students while panning for gold. This is a common T3/4 tactic.
The fact that they kick a number of people out won't make it easier to maintain your scholarship, it will just make it easier for you to lose your scholarship and get kicked out yourself. Remember, the first semester (and to a lesser extent, the first year), you'll have something of a built in airbag of bodies underneath your grades, an airbag that will be heavily depleted after December and more or less gone after 1L. Every time you have a poor performing classmate leave, you fall one rung down the grading curve ladder, unless you're already below them or you're at the very top of the class. Even if you're not the guy that's eating the Ds and Fs left behind by the fallen, you may well be the victim of a collapsing floor that sees your previous median-worthy performance devalued. What you actually want is for people above you (and yourself) to transfer out.
Finally, and I'm not saying that NESL does or doesn't do this, just that it happens and it tends to happen more at lower ranked schools based on what I've personally heard, some schools will lump most or all of the scholarship recipients into one section, which will necessarily cause a large percentage of them to lose their scholarships. Again, I have no idea if NESL does this, and by default I'd assume that they don't, but approach with caution all the same.
When I asked if you were tied to the New England region, I meant it more in terms of "how do you feel about The South?"
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