The law school tuition collapse

For the last several years I haven’t paid much attention to what’s being going on at the national level in regard to the law school tuition bubble. I have kept track of the ongoing collapse of my own law school’s finances, which afforded me a mordant laugh when The Dean presented a three-slide Power Point deck on this topic to the faculty last week. The first slide consisted, in its entirety, of the following English-language sentence, presented in large bold type:

KEY TAKEAWAY: WE ARE IN A STRONG FINANCIAL POSITION CURRENTLY

Needless to say, this ex cathedra pronouncement was more than enough evidence to convince much of the faculty not to worry their pretty little heads about all these complicated and boring numbers any further. After all, that’s Campus Leadership’s ™ job, is it not, and if you can’t trust them who can you trust exactly?

Also I had published two general articles on the topic already: One written 14 years ago, predicting that law school tuition was going to have to come down eventually, on the basis of the economic axiom that something that cannot go on forever will stop, and another written nine years ago, documenting that the first signs of such a reversal of law school financial fortunes were already visible. (These articles used 2010 and 2015 national data respectively).

Plus ten years ago something or the other started happening that distracted me a little from the problems of two little people that don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy mixed up world. BTW the first time I ever saw Casablanca was at a college film series in Ann Arbor back in about 1980 or so, and when Ingrid Bergman’s character exclaims to Humphrey Bogart’s “Oh Rick, you’ll have to do the thinking for both of us!” (or something like that, this is from memory) all the girls in the audience started to hiss and boo! That’s when I first knew that the Woke Mind Virus was out of control.

These digressions are symptomatic, so let’s get back to the main feature.

I’ve just spent a week or so rolling around the data from the last decade or so, and . . . yikes.

Here’s what happened to law school tuition between the mid-1950s and 15 years ago:

Average tuition net of discounts at ABA law schools IN 2024 DOLLARS. I repeat, IN 2024 DOLLARS:

1956

$5550.

1974

$10,419

1985

$15,534

1991

$20,761

1995

$24,707

2000

$27,524

2005

$32,262

2010

$37,734

Here’s the past president of the AALS, John Kramer . . . FORTY YEARS AGO:

Research to date has yielded no firm answer to the question of how elastic the demand for legal education is. Superficial evidence, however, suggests that demand has proven amazingly inelastic with reference to
price. . . . This apparent inelasticity is of course good news to administrators who have budgets that are heavily tuition-dependent. A more careful analysis, however, reveals ample reason for serious concern. The seats
may be full in most law schools today. They may remain full tomorrow. They may even remain full until the year 2000 or beyond. But those seats may be filled almost exclusively by the sons and daughters of rich and upper-middle class white families . . .

Two startling facts should frame this passage in retrospect. First, Kramer was only looking back over the previous dozen year — he was comparing prices in 1986 to those in 1974 — without really taking into account how much tuition had ALREADY skyrocketed in the twenty years before that (see above data). And of course he couldn’t see the extent to which tuition would skyrocket in real terms for another 25 years (again see above).

But all things must pass, as it says in the Bible and the album, and here we are now:

2023: $28,760

What’s happened is that 35 years ago net tuition was 90% of sticker, with essentially all of the difference accounted for by actual scholarships. that is endowments that were throwing off income that made up the difference between what some students paid and the sticker price (the vast majority of students paid sticker). What’s happened since is that, first as a result of competition in re the idiotic USN law school rankings, and then out of sheer desperation to fill seats that would otherwise go empty, schools started slashing tuition via straight up discounts.

The result was that 15 years ago net tuition was 79% of sticker, ten years ago it was 67%, and two years ago it was 57%.

The result is a 24% decline in per capita real tuition over thirteen years, and even that number is inflated for practical purposes by the fact that the top dozen or so elite schools have still managed to raise their prices by about 5% over that time frame, although even they have been hit by the cold hard reality of a bubble that, if it hasn’t burst for them, is nevertheless no longer inflating:

Harvard Law School tuition and fees      Nominal dollars/July 2025 dollars BLS CPI

1955-56:  $837.50.      $10,058

1965-66:  $1,581          $16,163.   60.7% increase

1975-76:  $3,160.         $18,696.   15.7%

1985-85:  $10,235.      $30,530.    63.3%

1995-96: $21,134.      $44,565.     46%

2005-06:  $36,470.     $59,263.     33%

2015-16:  $58,242:   $79,073.       33.4%

2025-26: $82,560.                         3.8%

I’m using Harvard’s specific data, but it looks pretty much exactly the same for all the other elite schools, where tuition has gone up a total of 4.4% in the last ten years.

But for the other 95% of law schools, tuition is down on average between 25% and 30% since Peak Law School in around 2010. Enrollment is down sharply too, so net JD tuition at ABA law schools has fallen by more than 40% since then.

The result of all this is that, after seeing one ABA school close in the previous 60 years (Oral Roberts; grifters gotta grift as it says in the Bible, King Donald version), a dozen have disappeared over the last decade, and several more seem likely to follow.

There’s a bunch of other stuff to say about all this but that’s enough for now.