Home / General / The end of the law school epidemic

The end of the law school epidemic

/
/
/
865 Views

The University of Tulsa’s law school has just announced that it is effectively cutting tuition by 54% for the incoming first year class, from $33,428 to $15,428. The cut is coming in the form of a “scholarship” which will be given to every admitted student from a 12-state region (but as a practical matter will have to be given to any admit from outside that region whom the school hopes to enroll). The “scholarship” is renewed annually if the student maintains good academic standing, which in recent years approximately 95% of Tulsa’s admits manage to do.

So in effect the law school is cutting sticker price by more than half for everyone who starts attending this fall (last year about a third of Tulsa’s students got comparable discounts, which makes one wonder what the other two-thirds of the current 1L and 2L classes will do about this development).

Note that this price cut is coming when we’re more than 70% through the current application cycle, which indicates that Tulsa is even more dire shape than the average school when it comes to its current applicant pool (nationally, applications were down 11.7% year over year as of last week, making this the fourth straight year of severe declines).

Naturally the school’s administration is characterizing this as a sudden outburst of public-spiritedness on the institution’s part:

“The ALES program directly responds to rising tuition, mounting student debt and a challenging job market for law school graduates,” said Janet Levit, TU law school dean.

She added that a recent American Bar Association report encouraged innovation by law schools to address the issues.

ALES, she said, is TU’s response to that call for action.

Currently, Levit said, there’s a growing need for more attorneys to serve rural communities, as well as to advocate for children and families, military veterans and small companies.

“TU Law graduates, with less debt, will be prepared and willing to represent underserved populations in our region,” she said.

It’s tiresome to keep repeating this but apparently my rock awaits me:

*The notion that Tulsa’s graduates will decide to take low-paying jobs to serve clients with little or no money is ludicrous on its face, since the existence of such a “choice” entails the option of taking a high-paying job — an option which practically no Tulsa graduate currently has (exactly one graduate in the class of 2012 got a job with a large (100+ lawyer) law firm).

*Even the most public-minded and altruistic lawyer can’t work for free. Under-served communities are under-served because their members don’t have the money to pay for lawyers. Cutting law student tuition doesn’t create jobs for lawyers.

*The amount of debt a law graduate carries has literally zero effect on the market for that graduate’s services. Lower debt leaves people who are unable to get a legal job better off in regard to their overall economic circumstances, but it does not make it more likely that these people will get to be lawyers.

Tulsa’s radical slashing of tuition follows on the heels of similar moves by several other law schools. And this is merely the publicly available information: many other schools are undoubtedly offering ever-more extreme discounts to potential students on a case by case basis. With first year enrollment this fall likely to total around 36,000 students (down from 52,500 in 2010) the combination of much smaller classes and lower per capita real tuition is going to prove unsustainable for some schools.

. . . a commenter points out:

Regardless of the motive this is a move in the right direction. Law schools need to end racially exploitative reverse robin hood scholarships and charge the same tuition to everyone.

I would add that reverse Robin Hood scholarship policies have a severe class bias, since the lower a student’s SES, the less likely the student will benefit from such policies. (Because lower SES students will, all other things being equal, have weaker entrance numbers than students who buy big discounts off sticker price with their LSAT/GPA scores, and because lower SES means less of the sort of cultural capital that allows high SES students to figure out how to game the system).

Total number of 1L students enrolled at Tulsa:

2008: 139

2009: 140

2010: 166

2011: 108

2012: 110

2013: 83

Total number of ABA-accredited law schools by year:

1972: 149

1982: 172

1992:176

2002: 186

2012: 201

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Linkedin
This div height required for enabling the sticky sidebar
Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views : Ad Clicks : Ad Views :