During a lengthy U.S. Senate debate in 1917 discussing the various “needs” of the country, then Vice President Thomas Marshall purportedly leaned over to a clerk and whispered, “What this country needs is a really good five-cent cigar.”
The sentiment of high quality at a good price could not be more appropriate than it is at present. The traditional model of the law profession is starts to crack and crumble under the shrinking number of high-paying lawyer jobs available to support heavy law student debtloads of $100,000 or more. It was never a good idea to have new law grads indebted such that they had to work long hours for years at jobs they might not want to in order to pay for their pricey legal educations. And now they are finding in increasing numbers that those jobs are not even available. As we blogged earlier, the untenable situation has some calling for a long overdue re-examination of how the legal profession does business.
One element of that is I would like to see considered is some value-based competition for a traditional legal education. While some have maintained that there are too many competing law schools in Minnesota, an argument could be made that there aren’t enough — at least of the right kind of competition. Minnesota’s four law schools compete on a strategy of differentiation, distinguishing themselves on the basis of such criteria as a national ranking (the U of M), a faith-based, ethics-driven mission (St. Thomas), a focus on practical skills (William Mitchell) and nationally known ADR and international law programs (Hamline). All of these schools cost tens of thousands of dollars a year, as does almost any school that gets American Bar Association approval. (My alma mater is more than $30,000 a year in tuition alone.) Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, was able to obtain a pretty good legal education for the price of his textbooks, which he read by the fire. While I am not advocating reintroducing self-taught lawyers (there are only so many Lincolns out there after all), I am in favor of finding a way for someone to be able to become a lawyer without having to take on all the debt that traditional law schools require.
I am not trying to be flip here. I know good law schools need to spend a lot for their libraries, teachers, facilities, etc. And I think those fine institutions serve a valuable function, and would almost certainly remain the primary feeding ground of new associates for traditional law firms, even if there were a low-cost alternative legal education provider were out there. I just think we need to come up with viable models that provide some of the services, but are less expensive, for students who don’t want to be forced to concentrate in an area where they will make a lot of money when they graduate. I know there are some Internet law schools out there (and California even allows grads of some of these schools to take the bar). Internet education certainly may be part of the answer in Minnesota, although I fear you’d lose something valuable going completely online. Personally I would like to see some schools take more of a combination Internet and traditional approach. If you could find a way to design a decent legal education without requiring students to part with an arm or a leg to graduate, I think you’d see a whole new generation of public-spirited lawyers enter the profession. Of course, this would require changes to the law-school accreditation process, which is heavily weighted toward the traditional model.
In light of the economic changes to the profession locally and nationally, I think the time has come for some out-of-the-box thinking in the legal education arena. To paraphrase Thomas Marshall: What this country needs is a really good $5,000 (a year) law school.
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Law school could be cheaper if it were simply shortened. There are too many fluff type classes that students take in order to meet graduation requirements. A law school curriculum could be accomplished by 12-18 months of classroom work and a period of internship/apprenticeship. If the bar is the measure of what you need to be competent, then all you really need is the first year plus a few extra courses.
A lawyer from rural Minnesota, who graduated from the U, proposed closing the U of M Law School in a Bench and Bar article probably 20 years ago. His point was that Hamline and Mitchell had grown to meet the need in this market, and that the U no longer met a market need. At that time, the tuition was state-subsidized by about two-thirds, and this came up in a tight budget year. Kentucky had apparently done this. Isn’t the argument all the stronger now with three private schools and the biggest deficit the state has ever seen? On the fluff, common law crimes and future interests never come up in practice. If the old English history could be taken out of school and off the bar exam, we’d be closer to what it takes in the real world.
Of course, precisely because of this subsidy the U is currently the most affordable of the choices (factoring out financial aid). Plus, looking at it from your supply/demand perspective, the U is the only “nationally ranked” Minnesota law school, if that distinction has any meaning to you. Since some “demand” this attribute, with the U gone there would be no one locally to “supply” it.
Trimming down the length of a legal education seems an intriguing idea, particularly if done in conjunction with students adding some law electives in their college years. In the early 1900s, you could go directly from high school into law school. We forget that there is nothing magical about three years or doing the curriculum exactly as we have always done it. On the other hand, I am enough of a history geek to believe that English legal history and some of the other “fluff” has some relevance.
As a law student attending an out-of-state law school with a heavy emphasis on practical learning (four full-time, three-month internships throughout our law school education), I am strongly in favor of twisting and tweaking the traditional law school model. Practical experience has taught me far more legal skills and theory than my classroom experiences (no offense to my fabulous professors). Doing the law by working as a full-time law clerk has made the law stick more than reading and discussing cases in an 80-person classroom.
That’s not to say that I agree with the first anonymous poster of this morning when he suggests that we cut down the number of hours we spend in puff courses, or in law school in general. 12 months of law school education? That seems a bit radical when so many lawyers leave law schools around the country already unprepared for the work they’re about to face. Furthermore, I agree with Mark, that sometimes the “puff” courses are the smallest, most-critical thinking intensive courses in a law school education.
The law school’s price tag definitely needs to be fixed and I have to admit that I have no easy answers. It would seem to me that law students should somehow pay per service, as in pay in accordance with the type of lawyering they will be engaged in after graduation. Social justice and public interest law students should not have to put themselves through the same financial gut-wrenching struggle as a student preparing to work at a large law firm post-graduation. Thoughts on how to make that ideal a reality without government intervention (scholarships, etc)? And if government scholarships are the answer, how can we invest in those scholarships when our federal, state and local governments are broke?
How about $11,594 resident tuition? That is the cost at the University of New Mexico School of Law in the sunny Southwest. And non-resident students may be eligible for resident status after 12 months of residency (the non-resident cost is $25,694 for the first year).
New Mexico is not so much competing on price as making a real effort to offer access to legal education to those who could not otherwise afford it. It remains heavily subsidized by the state, allowing it to have among the lowest faculty-student ratios in the country at the same time it has one of the lowest tuitions.
When I was accepted to the U of Mn law school only ten years ago, the in-state tuition (which I qualified for, as a WI resident) was $9,000. I was also offered a $1,000 scholarship. This was by far the primary reason I chose to go to the U of Mn law school: it was an incredible bargain. Of course, by the time I actually got to law school, tuition was over $10,000, and it increased about $1000 every year. Now in-state tuition (including fees of $2500) is . . . $24,500?! That’s $10,000 more than UW law school, which is where I would go if I were making the choice today. U of Mn will not continue to attract top students at that price, especially in this economic climate. I agree with Dean Washburn’s advice: follow him to New Mexico, spend a year bartending or something, and then go to law school for $36,000.
I concur with threads of each post. My path to law school was unique. Shooting robustly from blue collar roots, law school always seemed a bit out of reach. Following high school, life directed me to the military, where I was fortunate enough to earn my undergraduate degree under the G.I. Bill. With G.I. Bill money left to burn, I looked at law school. Despite the G.I. Bill, following graduation, I am still staring at $75,000 in student loans.
Like the previous poster, I was laboring under the misconception that tuition costs at the University of Minnesota were “reasonable.” From the time I applied to the time I graduated, tuition increased by numbers that, in hindsight are extreme. One “solution” to this dilemma would be to “lock-in” students at the applied-for rate. This would protect would-be students from the tuition explosion I experienced.
The root of the problem to me, however, lies in law school’s length. I agree that the current three-year model can be improved. While a law school student I worked on a number of committees designed to address the law school curriculum. My experiences led me to believe a major overhaul is in order.
The first-year curriculum is strong. It teaches students the basics for succeeding in our profession. After that, there is diminishing return gained from continued classroom instruction. More focus on practical application could better serve would-be lawyers and our communities.
I support a second year which is a split between being practice and theory-driven. I envision a year of intense clinical work administered by the law school which marries that work with some subset of additional classes beyond traditional classroom topics. (e.g., Tax, Evidence, BA Corps, Criminal Procedure) There is no reason why the clinics cannot rotate through different practice areas in order to supplement first-year instruction.
As for the third year, I think there is room in our profession for an apprenticeship/internship model. For too long we have employed a “summer associate” program in an effort to select lawyers for particular positions. It seems we could improve the system by encouraging students to sample a variety of legal disciplines before corralling them toward a specific post.
All posters thus far have arrived–or come close to arriving–at the same conclusion: law school is too expensive. I agree; it’s one of the single most important worries for prospective students and it may even discourage those who could be very successful in the profession.
But how do we fix the problem? State schools generally have an easier time of it because they can rely on government subsidies. But even then, tuition at the U of M has gone up dramatically since I was applying to law school and it shows no sign of slowing down. The private institutions are even worse, as students inevitably bear the majority of operating costs.
I honestly don’t see how the trend in higher costs can be reversed. Law schools need to attract the “best” professors, so salaries are heavily incentivized. Law schools need to attract the “best” students, so higher and higher amounts available for scholarships become imperative, and negative shifting occurs toward the non-scholarship students. And what about something so simple as heating and cooling the campus, or the massive electrical bill? All these factors point toward a steady and expensive climb.
Perhaps it’s just the market at work. Hypothetically speaking, if a law school charging $30,000 tuition were to suddenly and permanently reduce that number by half, I’d bet good money that it would close within a few years, barring significant intervention from government or private donors. Regardless, I wouldn’t want to sit in on those budget meetings.
Anonymous #2 and Mark Cohen: Are either of you aware of the fact that UMN Law School only receives 7% of its operating budget from state sources? That’s right, 93% of the funds to cover its operating budget comes from tuition and other private sources (e.g. endowment income).
Interesting, although if you are suggesting increasing that subsidy to create a more affordable state law school, I’m thinking that’d be a pretty tough sell in the Legislature right now given the deficit situation. I don’t suspect that the conundrum of making legal education is likely at this point to be solved with public dollars.
[...] 21, 2009 by Mark Cohen We’ve had a good discussion on this blog about the need for a lower cost means of obtaining a legal education (or at least one that would [...]
Mark, I’m not suggesting that the subsidy should be increased (although that would be welcome), but I point out the number in response to your earlier comment that “precisely because of this subsidy the U is currently the most affordable of the choices.” I think your comment was assuming a much larger state subsidy, or at least you certainly didn’t demonstrate that the removal of the 7% the U currently receives would completely eliminate the difference in price between the other three law schools.
I also point out the stat because Anon #2 seems to assume that eliminating the state subsidy would create significant savings for the budget, while the real amount of state funding the U law school receives suggests otherwise.
I think you also raise a point worth noting regarding the “nationally ranked” tag. If the U were to shut down, I’m not sure the would-be applicants would automatically flow to the other three law schools.
Compare the difference in the LSAT scores and GPAs among the entering classes at each of the law schools. The difference is quite significant. It’s clear that the U’s ranking allows it to attract applicants that the other three law schools do not. I think having a nationally ranked school here helps the legal market. Without the U (or another school with a similar national ranking), I certainly would have attended law school outside of the state and may not have wound up here to practice, given the provincial nature of the legal hiring.
I’m certainly not in favor of scrapping the U’s law school — and I can’t imagine there being an effort in that direction. The U right now has the double advantage of being the only “nationally ranked” law school (for what that’s worth) and being the least expensive tuition-wise. not a bad deal. My point was that despite being the least expensive, it’s still a pretty penny that will leave most students in debt. Maybe Dean Washburn is right — New Mexico is where it’s at in the future. I’d like to see the U able to give in-state folk a deal like that. But you know what they say, if wishes were horses …
[...] 29, 2009 by Mark Cohen I have blogged before here that something has to give in our current system of legal education. Annual tuition rates are in an [...]
[...] a bit on this site about the pernicious effects of growing law student debt loads (see, e.g., here, here, here and here.) . In case you missed it, there was a story in the New York Times that provides a [...]
UMN Law competes in all of the categories. It is one of the best law schools in the country, hands down!
Minnesota Law is still the least expensive elite (top 20) law school in the country. Isn’t it nice to have such a school in our backyard?
The fact that this school doesn’t get more private support is disturbing! Graduating from a prestigious law school opens up doors leading to productive careers in private and public sectors. Without more private financial support for the University of Minnesota Law School, the bragging rights to having such a prestigious law school in our State will be gone, and our best and brightest will seek opportunities elsewhere!