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.

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.

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.