By
ELIZABETH OLSON December 1, 2014
Summer was waning and students were already packing for the fall semester, but Prof. Daniel B. Rodriguez, dean of the
Northwestern University School of Law, was still fielding phone calls from incoming students seeking to bargain down the tuition at the elite school.
“It’s insane,” Professor Rodriguez said. “We’re in hand-to-hand combat with other schools.”
In the new topsy-turvy law school world, students are increasingly in control as nearly all of the 204 accredited law schools battle for the students with the best academic credentials. Gone are the days when legal educators bestowed admittance and college graduates gratefully accepted, certain that they were on the path to a highly paid, respectable career.
Now, financially wobbly law schools face plunging enrollment, strenuous resistance to five-figure student debt and the lack of job guarantees — in addition to the need to balance their battered budgets.
To entice new students, some middle-tier schools have reduced tuition, including the law schools at the
University of Arizona,
University of Iowa and
Pennsylvania State University. In Detroit, Wayne State University Law School, seeking to stanch falling enrollment, recently announced that it would freeze tuition at least through the 2015-16 academic year, guarantee a minimum of $4,000 in scholarships for all incoming students and offer nearly $1 million in new scholarships to current students.
The Roger Williams University School of Law in Bristol, R.I., slashed tuition by 18 percent, to $33,792 from $41,400 through the 2015-16 academic year, and locked in the rate for three years for first-year students.
“We realize we are not returning to the frothy enrollment days,” Michael J. Yelnosky, the school’s dean, said, adding that the school had shaved costs by combining some activities with its parent university, Roger Williams. “We had to right-size to be able to deliver the same education.”
Once seen as cash generators, many university-affiliated law schools now lean on their parent institutions to survive a rough period. They fear that they could end up like Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School, which laid off staff and announced in October that it would close its Ann Arbor campus, one of four, because of shrinking enrollment.
Law school enrollment has been tumbling because the economic recession has reduced the number of legal jobs. In the economic fallout, law firms began to cut positions and have not restored them.
In New York, Albany Law School has cut faculty members — who had been sacrosanct at most law schools — in the face of a 34 percent decline in enrollment in its entering class this year, to 123 from 187 first-year students a year ago.
The number of first-year law school students fell 11 percent in fall 2013 from fall 2012, part of a striking 24 percent decline in just three years, according to the American Bar Association. The incoming class in 2013 stood at 39,675 students, the smallest first-year class since the 1970s, when law school enrollment began to rise substantially. About two-thirds, or 135, of the association’s accredited law schools, registered a drop in first-year enrollment that year — and little has changed this fall.
Nine months after graduating, only 57 percent of the 2013 class had full-time jobs that required passing the bar, the association said. Law schools are left in the unenviable position of trying to allay students’ fears that they will not be able to find a job that pays enough to repay $150,000 to $200,000 in education loans.
“Students are voting with their feet, and demanding a better deal,” said Professor Rodriguez of Northwestern, who is also president of the Association of American Law Schools. “And they are willing to spend less,” he said, meaning they are seeking the best deal.
Northwestern, in Chicago, like some other well-financed schools, has increased financial aid, calling on alumni for donations, so that 74 percent of first-year students this academic year got aid, compared with 30 percent in 2009. But the sticker price for annual tuition is $56,134, up from $47,202 five years ago.
The law school has 244 first-year students this year, down from 271 in 2009. Enrollment is up at other schools that have cut tuition, including Roger Williams, but that has come at a price — students at some schools have lower admissions test scores and college grades.
Students, too, have a more pragmatic view toward legal education. Emily Trieber, 24, a first-year student at Roger Williams, for instance, said she saw her relationship with the school “as a business contract.” After two years of saving for law school while she worked for a private ambulance company in Connecticut, she was accepted by the Rhode Island law school with a scholarship that lowered the $33,792 annual tuition bill.
“Then, I asked for more,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt to ask.” She said she got more and was paying $20,000 to $25,000 annually, with her scholarship money taken into account.
Ms. Trieber, who wants to become a family or elder law practitioner, said talk of discounts was common among her fellow students. Even if she does not keep her scholarship, she said, “I’m still paying a lot less than I would have been at the other schools I applied to in the Northeast.”
People who are skeptical of across-the-board tuition cuts contend that some schools are padding enrollments with students who have lower Law School Admissions Test scores — the top score is 180 — and lower undergraduate grades. Lower academic scores raise concerns about whether the students will be able to pass the state bar exams that are mandatory to practice law.
Even Northwestern and some other prestigious law schools have seen a slight decline in average academic scores, with a 168 median L.S.A.T. score for first-year students this school year compared with 170 in 2009. The median grade point averages for Northwestern students were better, though, at 3.75 this year, up from 3.72 five years ago.
At Roger Williams, the median L.S.A.T. score was 148, and the median undergraduate G.P.A. was 3.16 for the most recent entrants, down from a 152 median law test score and a 3.26 G.P.A. score for those who entered in 2009. Scores are keenly tracked because law schools vie for academic stars to maintain their standing in the national rankings, though the pool of prospective students is shrinking. The number of people taking the L.S.A.T. test was 8.1 percent lower this fall than last year, and about 50 percent below the comparable testing period in 2009, the Law School Admissions Council said.
With the declining interest, law schools have been working hard behind the scenes to trim their operations and to expand their offerings of joint degrees in, say, law and medicine. Still they are trying to avoid wholesale cuts in faculty or degrees, steps that would publicly eviscerate their business model and reputation.
“I don’t get how the math adds up for the number of schools and the number of students,” Professor Rodriguez said. “We all know it’s happening, and we are all taking steps that urgent, not desperate, times call for.”
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