City Colleges of Chicago-Harold Washington College Acceptance Rate, GPA, and Admission Requirements

Harold Washington's Paralegal Program, housed within its Law and Paralegal Studies AAS degree, explicitly positions itself around producing "highly trained paralegals" for corporations, law firms, and legal departments - its stated learning outcomes center on legal research using tools like Westlaw, client and witness interviewing, drafting legal forms and documents, and probate-matter support, developed through a structured sequence of interrelated courses culminating in an optional supervised internship in your final semester. This is meaningfully different in emphasis from a "pre-law" or legal-studies transfer track focused on theoretical legal reasoning for eventual law school application - HWC's program is built for direct workforce entry as a paralegal, working under attorney supervision, immediately upon completion. If you're applying to this specific program (or discussing your interest with an advisor), frame your motivation and prior experience around practical, applied interest in legal-support work - internships, office administration experience, interest in research and documentation - rather than academic legal theory, since the program's entire structure, faculty expectations, and internship placement network are oriented around that practical outcome. Note also that if you're transferring in paralegal coursework from elsewhere, HWC caps transfer credit at three classes (nine semester hours) for this specific program - plan your prior coursework accordingly if you're hoping a substantial chunk of outside credit will count.

Harold Washington maintains an unusually dense partnership relationship specifically with Roosevelt University, structured as four separate named programs rather than one blanket transfer agreement: a Roosevelt Degree Completion pathway specifically for Paralegal Studies graduates, a Roosevelt Dual Degree Program, a Roosevelt Honor's Program admission partnership, and Roosevelt's own version of the Chicago Star Scholarship continuation. Because these are structured as distinct partnerships rather than one bundled deal, a student should investigate each separately based on their specific goals - a Paralegal Studies student has a direct, named degree-completion pathway that a general Liberal Arts transfer student doesn't automatically have access to, while a strong-GPA student regardless of major might specifically qualify for the Roosevelt Honors admission partnership on top of (or instead of) the standard transfer pathway. Don't assume "Roosevelt University partnership" is a single monolithic benefit - ask your transfer advisor specifically which of the four named programs you qualify for, since they carry different eligibility requirements and different downstream benefits.

The Chicago Star Scholarship, which can cover full tuition and books for eligible CPS or Big Shoulders Fund partner Catholic high school graduates with a 3.0+ GPA, has a specifically structured testing requirement most students don't realize is intentionally generous: qualification can come from any of three separate paths - a 17 or higher on both the English and math sections of the ACT, a 460+ on SAT English combined with 440+ on SAT math, OR simply testing "Completion Ready" on CCC's own internal placement exam - with the single best-performing component across all three used to determine your eligibility. This means a student who never took the ACT or SAT at all, or who scored below the ACT/SAT thresholds, is not automatically disqualified from the Star Scholarship - the CCC placement exam functions as a genuine third path to qualification, not just a fallback for students who can't access standardized testing. If you're a CPS graduate assuming you don't qualify for Star because your ACT/SAT scores were below the listed thresholds, don't skip applying - take the CCC placement exam specifically and see if you test "Completion Ready" through that separate pathway before concluding you're ineligible.

Unlike several other City Colleges of Chicago campuses situated in more residential or outlying neighborhoods, Harold Washington sits directly in Chicago's downtown Loop, placing it within walking or short-transit distance of the Cook County court system, major downtown law firms, and the dense concentration of professional-services employers that make Chicago home to some of the largest law firms in the country. For a program like Paralegal Studies specifically, where the final-semester internship is a core structural component of the degree, this isn't incidental - proximity to downtown legal employers materially expands your realistic internship and post-graduation employment options compared to a program based farther from that professional core. If you're weighing Harold Washington against another City Colleges campus for a business, legal, or finance-track program, factor in this location advantage directly rather than treating all seven City Colleges campuses as interchangeable in terms of professional access, since the physical geography genuinely differs in ways that matter for internship-dependent programs.