Core Faculty
March 24th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
The tenured and tenure-track professors form the core of a law school faculty. At most of our schools, those faculty teach doctrinal courses and seminars; they also devote considerable time to research. Over the years, we have added clinical and legal writing professors to our faculties, but they rarely are part of the core. These writing and clinical professors are paid less, usually lack tenure, and bear fewer expectations for scholarly research. They may vote on curricular matters; they may even chair committees and perform significant administrative work for the school. Their lack of tenure and lower status, however, make them more cautious about their votes and the opinions they voice. They know that they are outside of the core.
I would flip this structure. If I were starting a law school, I would hire experienced legal writing and clinical professors as the core tenure-track faculty. At existing schools, I would move as quickly as possible to that structure. Why? The legal writing and clinical professors are the ones who know best how to teach what we claim to teach in law schools: how to think like a lawyer.
Legal writing professors have analyzed the components of thinking like a lawyer, developed the vocabulary for explaining that process to students, and created hundreds of well designed exercises. Where does a student really learn how to analyze and synthesize cases? In a class of 75-120 students, where the professor calls on one student at a time for 150-200 minutes a week, offers little individualized feedback, requires no written product until the final exam, and tests students on issue-spotting during a 3-4 hour exam? Or in a class of 18-20 students, where the professor offers a sequence of assignments designed specifically to teach analysis, synthesis, and other critical reasoning skills; provides frequent individualized feedback; requires several written assignments; and grades students on their ability to produce well reasoned analyses of a problem that requires research, analysis, and synthesis of new cases and statutes?
The traditional law school classroom, with its case method and socratic questioning, is better than pure lecture at teaching critical reasoning. But it is still a woefully inefficient and ineffective process of teaching students how to read cases and statutes, how to synthesize those materials, and how to apply them to the facts of novel problems. During the last thirty years, our legal writing programs have developed at a remarkable rate. They now surpass other first-year courses in their ability to teach critical thinking. If you want a professor who knows how to teach legal analysis to first-year students, and who has studied the pedagogy of teaching those skills, then choose a legal writing professor.
The same is true of clinical professors in the upper level. These professors know how to build on the reasoning skills that students developed in the first year. They don’t greet students with the same casebook/socratic method of instruction. Whatever its merits in the first year, that style offers diminishing returns in the upper level and bears little relationship to how practicing lawyers learn new areas of law. Clinical professors are accustomed to helping students identify unfamiliar areas of law that may affect their clients, research those issues (using an appropriate combination of secondary sources, cases, and statutes), and think critically about the sources in connection with a particular case. They are also experienced at the other types of critical thinking (fact analysis, separating wheat from chaff in client or witness interviews, problem solving, etc) that students should encounter before graduation.
If we want a tenured law faculty that focuses on teaching students how to “think like a lawyer,” then legal writing and clinical professors fit the bill. I would put them at the core.
These professors could also teach doctrinal courses. Currently, we swamp legal writing professors with too many students. If each taught a section of 18-20 students, the professor could teach two legal writing courses (one each semester) plus a large section of a doctrinal first-year course. These professors would bring their pedagogic skills to those doctrinal courses, enhancing the teaching of analysis and reasoning throughout the first-year curriculum.
Similarly, a clinical professor could supervise a clinic each semester and also teach a doctrinal course one semester. Many clinicians already do that; their ongoing practices keep them up-to-date in many areas. A school could hire additional tenure-track faculty to teach other doctrinal courses, although I would encourage each of those professors to teach at least one writing, clinical, or simulation course: that is where we really teach students how to “think like a lawyer,” whether that thinking requires close reading of a case closely or thoughtful questioning of a client.
What about research? I’ve taught doctrinal, legal writing, and clinical courses during my almost thirty years in teaching. A course load of two reasonably sized writing courses and one doctrinal course allows plenty of time for scholarship. For a clinician, the balance is somewhat closer; it depends somewhat on the nature of the clinic and the clients’ demands. Many clinicians, however, have already shown their ability to combine clinical teaching with scholarship–as have writing professors. The strongest barriers to scholarly work by these professors, I believe, are the second class status we currently afford them, together with the constant suggestion that they’re not capable of excellent scholarship.
There is room for many types of teaching and scholarship on law faculties. Our biggest error, perpetuated at most law schools, has been keeping legal writing and clinical courses at the periphery of the curriculum and faculty. If we move those professors and their courses to the core, where they belong at any institution devoted to teaching students to think like lawyers, we would solve many of the pedagogic problems plaguing law schools today. We could teach doctrine and new “practice ready” skills, while improving the ways we teach traditional methods of thinking like a lawyer.
We could also solve some of our budget problems. Legal writing and clinical professors typically earn half of what tenured doctrinal professors bring home. What if we split the difference? If we paid all professors a salary between the one currently offered legal writing/clinical faculty and the scale used for tenured doctrinal faculty, we could moderate faculty salaries to where they were a generation ago. Those salaries would still exceed wages paid to professors in other disciplines and, I predict, would be more than enough to attract and retain talented professors in the academy.
Accrued Interest
March 22nd, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Earlier this week, a student forwarded an email that he received from his federal loan servicer. After a perky “Hi,” the email reminded the student that interest accrues every day on unsubsidized educational loans. The email then spelled out his personal liability: He’s accruing $21.79 per day in interest. As he studies for his final law school exams, celebrates on graduation day, studies for the bar, and searches for a job, interest will accrue seven days a week. By November 1, when he hopes to have received good news of bar admission and obtained a job, he’ll owe another $4,881 for his law school education–just from interest accrued after today.
This student’s experience is not unusual. In fact, the interest gathering daily on his loan is lower than the interest accrued by many students. This student is an in-state resident at a public law school, and he received a three-year partial scholarship. During his first two years of law school, Congress subsidized some of his loans (meaning that interest did not accrue). Congress revoked that benefit for professional students last July, so 1Ls and 2Ls are gathering more interest than this 3L did. The interest does not compound until six months after graduation, but it accrues every day.
Paying jobs have declined during law school, and many students feel pressure to complete unpaid internships during the summer and academic term. Those factors, combined with rising tuition and living expenses, push law school loans ever higher. The interest rates on those loans, furthermore, are steep: 6.8% for the first $20,500 borrowed each academic year and 7.9% on anything above that amount. At those rates, daily interest charges mount quickly.
ABA and media reports about “average law school debt” don’t include this accrued interest. Law schools report only the amounts that their students borrow, not the full debt at graduation. The accruing interest falls through the gap because schools process only the initial loans, they do not handle interest charges or debt collection. This unfortunate circumstance means that both the borrowers and the schools may overlook the interest gathering daily.
Concern about that neglect seems to have motivated the email my correspondent received. The loan servicer wanted him to remember that interest was accruing daily on his loan, and that he could save money by paying the interest now. But how is a borrower supposed to pay interest while still collecting the loan? Should he borrow additional funds to service the interest? If funds were available at a lower interest rate, he would have tapped them before the student loan. The message suggests that students are partying with their money rather than studying for finals, worrying about the bar exam, and searching for jobs. For a law student, this type of message just ratchets up the anxiety.
I think it would be better to send these messages to law faculty. Imagine opening an email that read: “Hi! 185 of the third-year students in your law school have loans supporting their education. We want to remind you that these loans accrue interest daily. At your school, the average amount of daily interest is $21.79 per student. That’s $4,031 in interest accruing daily in your third-year classrooms. Accrued interest between now and graduation will exceed $200,000 for your class. Between now and August 1, when these students finish the bar, the collective total will be just over $536,000. That doesn’t include principal or interest accrued earlier in law school. Have a nice day.”
The messages, of course, could be customized by school. Average accrued interest and number of indebted students would vary. For some schools, the numbers would be lower. For many, especially large private schools, they would be much higher.
None of that accrued interest will come to law schools. Nor will it benefit the clients our graduates hope to serve. Interest payments support the work of loan servicers, including the profits they realize. They also compensate the government for the lost use of the loan money, forgiven loans, and defaulted loans. What a waste of our graduates’ assets. Our costly education programs require our students, not only to pay our hefty fees, but to shoulder high-rate interest that accrues daily.
It’s sobering to think how much interest accrues on student loans during each day that we teach, hand out exams, grade, or watch our students claim their diplomas.
Summer Research Grants
March 20th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
A survey of law faculty salaries, conducted by the Society of American Law Teachers, suggests that the overwhelming majority of law schools offer summer stipends to at least some faculty. The reported stipends range from a low of $5,000 to a high of $25,000. Notably, those reports do not include any of the schools with the most highly compensated faculty; you won’t find the summer salaries for schools like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, NYU, the University of Chicago, or Stanford on this list.
These summer stipends supplement salaries that already rank among the highest in the academy. They are also quite unusual in the academy; other university faculty do not receive summer research grants with the ease or regularity that law faculty do. Professors in other disciplines usually apply for outside grants if they want summer support. More often, they do without: they devote their summers to research even though they technically are unpaid during that time.
Why do law faculty need so much financial encouragement to produce research? Why aren’t we encouraging our faculty to seek outside grants if they want that summer support? Summer research grants are wonderful bonuses, but they shouldn’t be necessary to encourage research. People join the academy to research and teach, so that’s what we should do.
A first step in reducing the cost of legal education would be to eliminate summer research grants for full professors. We could continue to award grants to junior faculty, who are seeking tenure and may bear their own student debts. For full professors, summer research grants seem like a luxury we can give up to help both our students and our institutions.
First 2012 Employment Postings
March 18th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Kudos to the William S. Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas for posting employment information about its Class of 2012. I look forward to other schools following suit.
What’s the Financial Value of a Law Degree?
March 18th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Last year, the columnist Shawn O’Connor offered some provocative calculations about the financial value of a law degree. Drawing upon a study from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, O’Connor claimed that a financial investment in a law degree “is likely to produce at least a 10x return” over the graduate’s career.
O’Connor has a personal interest in encouraging students to apply to law school; he is the founder and CEO of a company that offers test prep and admissions counseling to prospective law students. That fact alone should make readers wary of O’Connor’s claims. Several legal educators, however, have asked me to comment on O’Connor’s calculations, so let’s take a close look.
Bad Math
O’Connor gets off on the wrong foot by making a basic arithmetic error. He subtracts $2.3 million from $4.03 million to get $2 million–instead of the actual difference of $1.73 million. This is much more than a rounding error; it significantly affects O’Connor’s claim that investing in a law degree “is likely to produce at least a 10x return.” The sloppy math should further increase any reader’s skepticism.
Degrees and Occupations
A more fundamental problem with O’Connor’s analysis is that he compares the financial payoff for a degree (the BA) with the payoff for an occupation (lawyering). The Georgetown report repeatedly stresses the difference between those two categories: earnings vary by both occupation and educational level. A significant number of law graduates don’t practice law. Indeed, saturation of the legal market is pushing increasing numbers of graduates into other careers. Given that, one can’t estimate the value of a degree by looking at just one of the occupations pursued by degree holders.
The Georgetown study, in fact, suggests that a professional degree provides little financial return compared to a master’s degree in some job categories. Managers with a master’s degree average $3.76 million in lifetime earnings, grossing almost as much as managers with professional degrees (who average $3.87 million) Similarly, an accountant with a master’s degree averages $3.03 million in lifetime earnings, not far below the $3.20 million expected by an accountant with a professional degree. For an elementary or middle school teacher, a master’s degree offers average lifetime earnings of $2.16 million while a professional degree yields just $2.29 million.
These comparisons suggest that a JD does not pay off financially for many law graduates who fail to practice law. O’Connor computes the cost of a law degree as $285,000, which includes three years of foregone income. In each of the comparisons cited above, the lifetime earnings differential is considerably smaller than O’Connor’s cost of a law degree. The law degree, furthermore, must be purchased today–while any earnings bonus occurs over a lifetime.
A master’s degree, of course, also requires financial investment. But many professionals earn master’s degrees while working full-time, avoiding the heavy costs of foregone income. Most master’s degrees also cost considerably less than a JD, due to lower tuition and a shorter time frame. Using O’Connor’s own calculations, law school is a bad financial bet for graduates who go into business, accounting, primary school teaching–and, most likely, other fields outside of law. A master’s degree will lead to equal or better financial success in those occupations.
If Not Law, Then What?
O’Connor assumes that a student who eschews law school will not attend any other graduate program, settling for the average lifetime earnings of a college graduate. Students who can secure law school admission, however, are not average college graduates. If they opt against law school, they are likely to pursue other types of graduate education. Even if they leave higher education with just a BA, they are unlikely to be average wage earners in that group. The same talents that bought them admission to law school will pay off in the workplace.
The Georgetown report shows that 17.2% of workers with only a BA earn more than professional degree holders. The professional category in that comparison, moreover, includes doctors–who earn considerably more than lawyers. If we looked just at lawyers, closer to 25% of college graduates (with no further education) would earn more than the average lawyer over a lifetime. Similarly, 24.2% of master’s degree holders earn more than the average professional (again including both doctors and lawyers in the latter category).
The top quarter of PhD holders also earn considerably more than the average lawyer. According to the Georgetown report, those PhD’s average $4.7 million while the average lawyer earns just $4.03 million. With lower tuition and fellowship support, doctoral students usually pay less than JD students–further enhancing their financial advantage.
The Value of Money
Even the middle-of-the-pack college graduate, who obtains no further education, can obtain better financial returns than the average lawyer. All she has to do is invest the money she would have spent on law school in a conservative mutual fund, such as a stock index fund. Then she can work at her BA job while watching her nest egg grow. O’Connor and the Georgetown report both use 40 years to calculate lifetime income, and 40 years is a long time for an investment to grow.
Even at just 6% interest, a college grad’s investment of $285,000 (the cost of law school as calculated by O’Connor) will grow over 40 years to more than $2.9 million. That’s considerably more than the $1.76 million lifetime bonus the lawyer will secure. Indeed, as long as the BA grad secures at least a 4.7% interest rate–easily achievable over 40 years–she’ll beat the lawyer’s return on the law degree.
What about lower priced law schools? A student might pay just $20,000 a year with a scholarship to a public school. Adding that $60,000 to three years of lost salary ($135,000 in O’Connor’s calculations) yields a cost of just $195,000 for a law degree. Again, however, the college graduate who invests that money in a mutual fund will easily beat the $1.76 million bonus earned by a lawyer. $195,000 invested for 40 years at just 6% interest will yield a little over $2 million as the college graduate’s bonus. (O’Connor omits any discussion of taxes in his calculations, so I do as well. Both salaries and investment income are taxed, at a variety of rates, so it is not clear how taxes would affect the comparisons.)
Most college graduates, of course, don’t have money sitting around to invest. They borrow money for law school, hoping that the financial return will pay off their debt plus more. This reality, however, doesn’t improve the financial comparison. Let’s assume that we have two college graduates, one who goes directly into the workforce and the other who borrows money for law school. To simplify the comparison, let’s eliminate living expenses; we’ll assume that they each have the same living expenses, paid for three years by their parents.
Again using O’Connor’s figures, the grad who enters the workforce will earn $135,000 over three years. Since her parents are paying her living expenses, she’ll invest all of that salary in a mutual fund. If she realizes a return of 6.5%, she’ll have $1.67 million after 40 years–plus, of course, her earnings during those 40 years as a college graduate.
The grad who attends law school, on the other hand, will borrow at least $60,000–the money needed for three years of discounted tuition at a state law school. She won’t need to borrow any money for living expenses in this comparison, because her parents are paying those. This hypothetical law student is borrowing less than $20,500 per year, so she’ll benefit from the lowest interest rate for graduate student loans (6.8%). If she’s able to repay her loan within 10 years of graduation, an optimistic scenario, she’ll pay about $32,500 in total interest (including the interest that accumulated during law school). Assuming this law school graduate works 40 full-time years as a lawyer, her financial bonus is $1.67 million (her $1.76 million premium for working as a lawyer minus her tuition and interest payments). Even with very favorable assumptions on tuition and repayment rates, the lawyer will fare no better financially than the college graduate.
Both graduates in this comparison face some risks. The college graduate, for example, might not obtain 6.5% interest on her investment. The law graduate, however, faces equal or greater risk. If she is unable to find work as a lawyer, takes time off to care for family, or suffers any months of unemployment, her earnings premium will fall. The college graduate’s mutual fund will grow regardless of her employment history.
Past, Present, and Future
No one knows what today’s law graduates will earn over their lifetimes. O’Connor, like the authors of the Georgetown report, can only try to predict the future from the past. To do that, the Georgetown authors looked at workers in different age cohorts. They collected data on the wages that lawyers (and other workers) of different ages earned between 2007 and 2009.
Each of those age cohorts started practicing at different times. The 25-year-old lawyers in the Georgetown study started practicing law after 2005. The 64-year-old ones started practicing as early as 1967. It is very unlikely that a legal career spanning the years 1967 through 2007, widely recognized as boom years for the American legal profession, will look the same as one reaching from 2005 through 2045–much less from 2016 through 2056 (the projected career span for students who will enter law school this fall). Projecting one generation’s financial success from a very different generation’s experience demands caution.
The Georgetown report, in fact, includes an ominous note on this point. The authors acknowledge that their data show salaries for professionals climbing steeply from age 25 through 40, then leveling off for the rest of the working lifespan. That pattern could suggest that professionals work hard early in their careers to build their earning potential, reaping their greatest financial returns after age 40. But it could also mean that the professionals who were over 40 in 2007-2009, those who began their careers before 1995, are riding a wave of high return on their professional degrees–while those who graduated later are doing less well. Without more longitudinal data, we can’t distinguish these explanations.
Conclusion
O’Connor’s calculations offer little reassurance that investing in law school promises high financial rewards. On the contrary, a closer look at the math suggests that law degrees are overpriced compared to their likely financial pay-off. If we want people to continue serving as lawyers, we need to reduce the cost of law school. Senior lawyers today undoubtedly benefited financially from their legal education; they averaged $1.76 million more in lifetime earnings than their college graduate peers, and they paid very low rates for law school.
The calculation for today’s law students is very different. High tuition, the need to withdraw for three years from the workplace, and uncertain job outcomes make law school a relatively poor financial investment. It’s time to shift that balance.
2012 Employment Data
March 15th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Consumer advocates have criticized law schools, not only for posting misleading employment data, but for disclosing those figures too slowly. The ABA acted to remedy both of those problems. Its revised Standard 509 and accompanying worksheet require schools to publish specific employment outcomes “on the school’s website each year by March 31” for “persons who graduated with a J.D. degree between September 1 two calendar years prior and August 31 one calendar year prior.” That’s legalese for: nine-month employment outcomes for the Class of 2012 must appear on websites by the end of this month.
There’s no reason for schools to neglect that deadline. They already have the 2012 outcomes, which are tabulated as of February 15. They’ve had another month to compile the figures, which are due in the NALP office by next Monday, March 18. Most important, prospective students need that information. As applicants weigh the offers extended to them, and decide whether to attend law school, they should know the job outcomes for the students who graduated ten months ago–not just for the ones who graduated twenty-two months ago.
I have great sympathy for Career Services staff, who feel that they operate under a blizzard of deadlines. First NALP wants this, then US News wants that, and now the ABA wants a somewhat different set of numbers by yet another deadline. Permeating all of that, deans and faculty want them to !!get jobs for graduates by February 15!! Sometimes the dates and reports seem more important than the jobs and graduates themselves.
But this ABA deadline is the most essential one: publishing updated information to prospective students is crucial. That shouldn’t be simply the task of Career Services staff; it should be the first website priority for the school as a whole.
Every accredited law school will update its website multiple times between now and March 31. With admitted students weighing offers, there will be plenty of upbeat news items about alumni accomplishments, faculty awards, and other achievements. That’s as it should be. But let’s make sure that the 2012 employment data appear as well. They’re the first website priority.
I welcome notifications of schools that have already complied with the ABA rule and posted their 2012 job data.
The Illinois State Bar Association Speaks
March 14th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
The Illinois State Bar Association’s Special Committee on the Impact of Law School Debt has issued a final Report with a striking set of recommendations. The Bar Association’s Board of Governors endorsed the Report and Recommendations on March 8; the Association’s full assembly will vote on them in June.
The full Report deserves study by all legal educators, as well as practitioners who care about the future of the profession and legal education. The committee compellingly describes the plight of graduates burdened with high debt, as well as the challenges that debt causes for employers and clients. The Report then explores the companion problem, that graduates are poorly prepared for the jobs available to them. Here are just a few of the committee’s many recommendation:
1. The federal government should cap loans available to law students.
2. The government should also impose outcome-based requirements for schools to maintain loan eligibility. A school, for example, would lose its loan eligibility if more than 35% of its graduates failed to reduce their loan principal by at least $1 during a given period.
3. Congress should make private educational loans dischargeable in bankruptcy, using the pre-2005 definition of “financial hardship.”
4. The ABA should modify accreditation standards to expand the credits that students may earn through distance education.
5. The ABA should require schools to gather and report more information about job outcomes, including outcomes over the course of their graduates’ legal careers. The latter requirement would not involve tracking all graduates, but could rely upon sampling.
6. Law schools should focus on practice-oriented courses and teach fewer “exotic” courses. They should also teach law office management.
7. Law schools should include judges and practitioners on faculty hiring and tenure committees. “Practicing judges and lawyers,” the Report suggests, “can provide unique insight into the candidate’s skills as a practitioner and will ensure that the law school hires faculty who are best able to educate law students for practice.”
8. State supreme courts should find ways to reduce the cost of gaining bar admission. Courts should consider allowing third-year law students to take the bar exam, as Arizona has done. They should also consider Wisconsin’s model of granting a “diploma privilege” to graduates of in-state schools who obtain a specified GPA and complete designated courses.
9. Bar Association members should assist pre-law advisers in giving debt and career counseling to students interested in attending law school.
10. Bar Associations should also work with law schools to develop apprenticeship programs that could start during the third year of law school.
The Report contains many other recommendations, as well as fuller discussion of the rationales for each proposal. John E. Thies, President of the Illinois State Bar Association, created the Special Committee that produced the Report.
How fortunate you are
March 13th, 2013 / By Kyle McEntee
Dean Dan Rodriguez has written to his students at Northwestern University Law School to announce a class size reduction, a tuition increase, and a commitment to increase scholarships and to cover LRAP costs. (Letter below.)
The letter is a mostly honest assessment of the challenges faced by Northwestern, its peers, and law schools generally. There are too few jobs; attending law school costs a lot of money; and the legal economy is undergoing (and has undergone) a significant shift. Rodriguez is not the first dean to go on the record about these issues and he will not be the last. Without a doubt, acknowledgement is an early step for reform.
The far bigger challenge is having legal education leaders provide solutions that actually combat the problems they rarely struggle to articulate. Here I find that sincere philosophical differences stand between the people who want to see a reimagination of legal education and the people who believe that the scope of necessary change is relatively narrow. Both groups acknowledge the need to reform, but disagree on what reform looks like. In my opinion, the differences largely stem from how far away one thinks legal education is from a reasonable price and from a reasonable balance between students and jobs.
In the rest of this post, I respond to three of the solutions adopted by Northwestern to combat the problems facing law students, recent graduates, and the legal profession. However, Dean Rodriguez’s letter could have been written by any number of law school deans, faculty members, or trustees. The applicant market has forced schools across the country to cut class sizes, increase tuition discounts, and stop unrestrained budget expansion. Credit is due when schools move in the right direction, like when a school cuts enrollment because there aren’t enough jobs or because the school refuses to admit students who are unlikely to ever pass the bar. However, the motivation is never solely noble; among other vanity measures, schools want to maintain their U.S. News ranking. It’s important that decisions like Northwestern’s receive in-depth analysis and be challenged beyond their glossy exterior.
Class Size
Legal education is in an interesting place when an elite law school like Northwestern reduces class size due to a weak entry-level hiring market that cannot absorb all of its graduates. Each school needs to do its part to reduce size, and it appears that Northwestern’s contribution will be about 12-15% over a three year period. Compared to the incoming class of 2013 (274 students, enrolled in 2010), Northwestern’s incoming class of 2016 (enrolling in 2013) will be roughly 235-240 students. Northwestern has publicly set a baseline for class size reductions for schools of its kind. I’d say it amounts to a challenge to schools that do not have job outcomes like Northwestern to justify why they do not follow suit. For schools like Northwestern and its peers, they need to continue to assess whether current cuts suffice.
Of course, if a school reduces the number of people it charges, it needs to cut expenses and/or increase revenue.
A “Moderate” Tuition Hike
Rodriguez takes a page out of the higher education administrator’s playbook when he talks passively about tuition increases, as if they just happen to schools. According to this play, schools simultaneously deserve credit for restraint and sympathy for having to raise tuition. One current Northwestern student sarcastically thanked Rodriguez for “tell[ing] us how lucky we are that the school is taking more money from us, but [] not as much as they could be taking.” That the increase is in line with expected inflation and better than peers is supposed to be a consolation. Students do not see it that way.
| Increase | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tuition | $ | % | CPI | x inflation | |
| 2004 | $35,896 | ||||
| 2005 | $38,372 | $2,476 | 6.90% | 3.40% | 2.03 |
| 2006 | $40,680 | $2,308 | 6.00% | 2.50% | 2.41 |
| 2007 | $42,942 | $2,262 | 5.60% | 2.80% | 1.99 |
| 2008 | $45,332 | $2,390 | 5.60% | 3.80% | 1.46 |
| 2009 | $47,472 | $2,140 | 4.70% | -0.40% | -11.8 |
| 2010 | $49,714 | $2,242 | 4.70% | 1.60% | 2.95 |
| 2011 | $51,920 | $2,206 | 4.40% | 2.90% | 1.53 |
| 2012 | $53,168 | $1,248 | 2.40% | 2.10% | 1.14 |
| 2013 | $54,763 | $1,595 | 3.00% | 3% | 1 |
| Total | $18,867 | 52.56% | 20.80% | 2.53 | |
My criticism is not directed at Rodriguez alone. The law school dean has less responsibility than one might expect and a variety of factors go into the nominal tuition rate–how many factors and to what extent each factor impacts the final number depends on the school. Nevertheless, somebody or a group of somebodies at Northwestern is responsible for a price point that continues to trend in the wrong direction. The appropriate next step for Northwestern stakeholders is to wonder why a law school representative–at any school, law or otherwise–would find it distinctive to talk about an increase of “only” three percent. Rodriguez’s letter stipulates that Northwestern is part of the solution, but its supposedly-progressive policies showcase what’s truly wrong these days in higher education.
But fear not, to temper the tuition hike even more, the school can increase its financial aid awards.
Tuition Discounts
Financial aid sounds completely benevolent. After all, it’s “aid” that helps all but the very wealthy afford to attend school. The term refers to student loans (at exorbitant rates), as well as merit and need-based scholarships. The latter category is an expenditure like faculty salaries or janitorial services. While scholarship money sometimes comes from limited purpose endowments, they’re usually tuition cross subsidies. That is, a scholarship for one student comes from the tuition revenue of all others. Need-based scholarships are scarce, so a huge chunk of scholarship expenditures comes from the tuition revenue from the students least likely to succeed. These students subsidize the students with the best incoming LSAT scores and GPAs (i.e. those most likely to succeed).
This translates to something far less noble than a solution to the soaring cost of a Northwestern education. Like almost every other law school, the school has chosen to expand its budget to buy credentials to continue its participation in the U.S. News charade. Who pays for this? The incoming 1Ls who pay more than the average price paid, current 1Ls, current 2Ls, and the alumni that Northwestern plans to obtain “external funding” from to recoup lost (and apparently necessary) revenue from class size reductions. At a certain point, if it hasn’t already happened, alumni will simply refuse to cover the difference and wonder why the budget must grow to provide a sound legal education. As mentioned previously, students already wonder.
Digging into Northwestern’s three solutions, even if presented as non-exhaustive, takes some polish off of Rodriguez’s letter. These are conscious spending decisions dressed up as solutions to various aspects of the legal education crisis that’s hitting even students at elite law schools. Unfortunately, continuous boasting from law schools about how they’re ahead of the curve on reform, when their solutions can only hope to make tiny dents into the legal education crisis, proves how far we are from affordable legal education that provides entry into the legal profession.
Letter from Rodriguez (emphasis mine)
During the past year, we have met in various venues and with a multitude of stakeholders to discuss the challenges facing legal education today, all of which are receiving due attention in the media and blogosphere. Most notably, over the past few years a decline in hiring at firms and the outsourcing of certain types of legal jobs have led to fewer opportunities for law school graduates. Further, too many students graduate with student loan debt that seriously affects both their career choices and their quality of life. And fewer people are applying to law schools nationally (20% fewer this year and an estimated 38% decline since 2010). Northwestern has not faced the same level of decline as other schools, nor have we suffered as greatly from the decline in legal positions as most other law schools. We are not immune, however. And we are not going to ignore the ways in which the legal economy affects our alumni, current students, and prospective students.
This significant shift in the legal economy presents real challenges. It also presents real opportunities. Informed by our culture of innovation and with the creative work of our faculty, students, and staff we will craft strategies, big and small, to meet the challenges facing legal education so that we will continue to thrive in the years to come. The strategic planning process, which is actively underway, will help shape curricular and external relations strategies to help propel us to the next level of achievement and reputation. Meanwhile, we will carry out three important first steps with an eye toward addressing these challenges. These steps result from several months of deliberate analysis and are, quite properly, focused on protecting and enhancing our reputation and reducing financial burdens on our students.
First, we will implement a modest reduction in the size of our traditional JD program: approximately 10% or 20 to 25 fewer entering students in 2013. As we become leaner, this modification also provides an opportunity for us to further enrich the strong and close-knit sense of community and camaraderie for which we are known.
Underlying this decision is the match-or, if you will, the mismatch-between the number of JDs who graduate each year and the actual demand the legal economy is creating and can sustain. Earlier this year the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicted that the economy will generate approximately 75,000 new legal jobs in the next decade while ABA-approved law schools are graduating more than 40,000 students annually. The specifics are debatable but the big picture is credible, and law schools must take heed and act in strategically responsible ways.
Second, we will continue to moderate our tuition increases. JD program tuition for the 2013-2014 school year will once again rise by just 3%, matching last year’s increase which was our smallest in more than 40 years and a rate that coincides with historical measures of inflation. Last year, this modest increase was at the very low end of the spectrum for top law schools. We expect that this will be at the low end this year as well.
Third, we will increase our total investment in need- and merit-based financial aid for entering students and in our LRAP program for graduating students by at least 25% during the next two years. This commitment, along with other measures we will explore, and our conservative approach to tuition increases going forward, are manifest efforts to limit the rising cost of a Northwestern legal education and corresponding burdens of student indebtedness.
Finally, we will look closely at managing more conservatively the expenses within the Law School, investigating ways we can repurpose dollars toward more efficient and efficacious methods of instruction. No part of the Law School will be immune from this careful review. For years, we have been asking students to make sacrifices by the tuition we charge and the debt undertaken; as faculty and staff of the Law School, we need to be prepared to make these sacrifices ourselves. While we look at cost-saving measures, we will be guided by answers to this overriding question: “Does this request for additional expenditures further directly the goals and objectives of our academic program?” That all said, we are not going to shrink precipitously the size of the Law School budget so as to impair the quality of our academic program. Indeed, due to the prudent and forward-thinking budgetary and contingency planning by our administrative team, we will be able to carry out these adjustments without the need to implement any major cuts to our operating budget. In the long run, however, we will need to pursue ambitiously alternative sources of revenue and, in particular, we will need to secure significant external funding, at even higher levels than before, through the generous financial support of our alumni and friends. This, too, we will do.
These changes are no panacea and no doubt there will be further adjustments down the road. Yet, present times call for these actions which, when implemented collectively, tangibly begin to address the convergent challenges facing all law schools. At Northwestern Law School, we know that a first-class, innovative legal education need not be provided with insufficient regard to students’ economic circumstances. We can be great and efficient, elite and compassionate.
Our Law School provides an exemplary legal education. Our graduates have been remarkably successful at lucrative and influential jobs around the globe. Supported by our community and our culture of innovation, we are prepared to confront these issues, and we will emerge from this era well ahead of the curve.
Thank you for all you do for Northwestern Law School.
Deluged by Debt
March 13th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
As Brian Tamanaha writes at Balkinization, law school debt levels continue their relentless climb. The latest figures from US News show that, among 2012 graduates, the average amount borrowed for law school exceeded $150,000 at six law schools. Only one of those schools (Northwestern) ranks among the top fifteen law schools; one other (American) ranks 56th. The other four (Thomas Jefferson, California Western, Phoenix, and New York Law School) lie in the unranked fourth tier.
As Brian’s post shows, the job outcomes at five of these schools (all but Northwestern) are dismal. Less than 40% of the students at these schools obtained full-time jobs that required bar admission and would last at least one year. Even at Northwestern, only 77% of the class met that mark. How can all of the graduates with part-time, temporary, or non-lawyering jobs possibly pay off more than $150,000 in debt–plus all of the accrued interest on that debt? What calculations can justify attending most law schools at that debt-to-outcome ratio?
The problem, of course, reaches far beyond these six schools. They are at the top of the debt ladder, but most other law schools are close behind. 123 law schools, well over half of the 193 listed schools, reported average amounts borrowed that exceeded $100,000. Even Irvine law school’s first graduates, who paid no tuition for their three years of law school, reported debt. More than two-thirds (68%) of Irvine’s initial class incurred debt, borrowing an average of $49,602 for their “free” law school ride. Remarkably, that figure gave Irvine the second lowest average debt load among the 193 law schools.
When students borrow almost $50,000 to attend law school, even without paying tuition, we have to re-think the way we structure legal education.
US News and Employment Outcomes
March 12th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Over the last two years, pressure has mounted for more transparent information about the jobs that law school graduates obtain. US News traditionally used very coarse measures of employment, most recently focusing on the percentage of graduates who reported any type of job nine months after graduation. Those nine-month employment rates included part-time jobs, temporary positions, and employment with little relationship to a law degree. A part-time sales clerk at Macy’s was just as “employed” as a law firm associate on the partnership track.
This measure allowed law schools to claim very high employment rates, both in the US News tables and in their own promotional materials. The dazzling nine-month percentages–97%, 98%, 99%!–implied that law school was still a sure road to secure, professional, and well paid employment. Applicants had to seek other information, often buried in complex websites, to understand how many of those “employed” graduates were working in part-time, short-term jobs–sometimes funded by the law schools themselves.
We’ve made progress over the last year. Law School Transparency led the way by publishing more detailed job information about every ABA-accredited law school. The ABA followed suit by requesting more nuanced information from law schools and publishing that data. The ABA also revised its accreditation standards to insist that law schools disclose more complete information to students. But still, those tables in US News, with all of those high employment rates, were very, very appealing.
Today US News joined the push for more accurate employment information. The 2014 rankings include a new measure of employment outcomes. US News now weights jobs according to whether they are JD-related, part-time or full-time, and short-term or long-term. The online magazine is not disclosing the full formula, but notes that “[f]ull weight was given for graduates who had a full-time job lasting at least a year where bar passage was required or a J.D. degree was an advantage.” At the other end of the spectrum, “[t]he lowest weight applied to jobs categorized as both part-time and short-term.”
Perhaps most important, US News has published for each law school the percentage of its 2011 graduates who obtained jobs falling into the first category–jobs that were full-time, long-term, and related to the JD. Those percentages are available, free of charge, for all law school applicants to ponder.
The results aren’t pretty. At the top eight schools, more than 90% of graduates are still finding full-time, long-term jobs that use their law degrees. Some of those jobs may not justify the cost of attendance, and we might still wonder about some of the graduates who didn’t obtain full-time, long-term, law-related work within nine months of graduation. But law-related employment rates of 90% or more might justify three years of expensive, intensive professional education.
Outside the elite eight, however, job outcomes plummet sharply. Berkeley and Michigan, two premiere public schools, tie for ninth place in the new ranking. Yet only 82.6% and 85.8% of their graduates, respectively, found full-time, long-term employment for which the JD conferred an advantage. Conversely, by nine months after graduation, 14-17% of their graduates were still marking time in part-time, short-term, or non-legal positions. Those aren’t outcomes for which students should pay top tuition dollars.
Further down the list, the outcomes are even more bleak. Minnesota and Washington University in St. Louis round out the top twenty law schools with a tie for nineteenth place. Yet nine months after graduation, only two thirds (66.3% and 66.6%) of the graduates from these schools were working in long-term, full-time jobs related to the JD. A full third of each class failed to achieve employment that used their expensive and hard-won degrees.
The percentages vary after that, climbing as high as 88.0% (for George Washington) and falling as low as 23.6% (Whittier). Over the next few days, bloggers will analyze the factors that contributed to higher employment rates (school-funded positions, geography, a large percentage of JD Advantage jobs) and those that produced lower outcomes. No amount of analysis, however, can conceal the overall pattern. No school outside the top eight placed more than 90% of its graduates in full-time, long-term, law-related work. Only 13 schools, including that top eight, exceeded the 85% mark. And only 34 schools, out of the 195 supplying employment information, managed to place as many as three-quarters of their graduates in a full-time, long-term, law-related job within nine months of graduation.
The new employment measure devised by US News is far from perfect. Its greatest flaw lies in equating all “JD Advantage” jobs with positions requiring bar admission. Statistics gathered by NALP show that law graduates are far less satisfied with JD Advantage jobs than with ones requiring a law license. Among 2011 graduates, 46.8% of those in JD Advantage jobs were still seeking other employment; just 16.5% of those in bar-admission-required jobs were doing so. Those statistics appear only in NALP’s Jobs and JDs book, and they do not distinguish full-time, long-term jobs from part-time, short-term ones, but I will ask NALP if they can provide more information on those distinctions.
Even more worrisome, I don’t believe that any organization audits the claims that graduates and law schools make about which jobs carry the “JD Advantage” tag. NALP counts the jobs reported in that category but, apparently, does not ask schools to identify the positions that count as “JD Advantage.” Nor, to my knowledge, does the ABA or US News. Does a job as a court assignment clerk count as a “JD Advantage” position? What about a job as a middle school social studies teacher? Or one as a bail agent, debt collector, or police officer? I can imagine a JD assisting workers in any of these fields–but the jobs are ones that the majority of job holders perform quite well without the training or expense of a JD.
These are issues that we need to address very soon, both for purposes of the US News ranking scheme and with respect to the information that law schools provide their applicants. But for now, the generous definition of “employed,” which includes any job carrying the “JD Advantage” label, makes the outcomes reported by US News especially troubling. Even allowing for a very liberal definition of law-related jobs, even including all of those “alternative” careers that schools have touted, law schools are leaving a remarkably large percentage of their graduates without jobs that use their degrees. Short-term and part-time jobs are not good outcomes for students who have spent over $100,000–often borrowed at high interest rates–for a legal education. Neither are jobs unrelated to the JD, ones for which schools don’t even dare claim a “JD advantage.”
Prospective students and law schools need to take note of these outcomes and take them seriously to heart. If we can’t provide even solid “JD Advantage” jobs to a substantial number of our graduates, then the value of our degree is in serious question.
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