Law students now borrow from the Department of Education directly, so all federal student loans are investments. In this table, I calculate the total annual investment that the government made in law schools over the past two years and project the annual investment next year. While the numbers are quite large, they are declining and that means law schools will continue to face difficult business questions.
Harvard Law School has announced a new, extra early decision program. The school will consider Harvard College juniors for admission, delivering decisions during the summer after junior year. The students, however, will not matriculate immediately after college graduation. Instead, this program defers admission for two years after college, requiring students to work or pursue a fellowship during that time. Depending on the results of the pilot program, Harvard may extend it to juniors at other colleges. The Boston Globe, Harvard Crimson, and Above the Law all have stories about the new program.
In my comments to the ABA Task Force, I endorse an accreditation standard that embraces academic freedom but does not require tenure. Brian Tamanaha made the same proposal in his book Failing Law Schools, but most academics vigorously defend an accreditation standard requiring tenure. Why do I favor the looser standard? Here are my top [...]
Like many other lawyers and educators, I have submitted comments to the ABA’s Task Force on the Future of Legal Education. As I note in my letter, the challenges facing legal education will require responses from many quarters. I tried to focus my comments on issues where the ABA could play an effective role. My six recommendations are:
QS, a British company that supports international study, has published a ranking of law schools worldwide. Like all other rankings, this one undoubtedly has flaws. The method, however, seems at least as plausible as the one used by U.S. News for our domestic rankings. The QS ranking for subjects like law focuses on academic reputation surveys, employer surveys, and measures of scholarly productivity and impact. Let’s see what the results of the survey tell us about the place of U.S. schools in the wide world of law.
As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week, four-year colleges have been increasing their tuition discounts. According to a survey conducted by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, the average discount rate rose to 45% for this year’s freshmen. On average, therefore, colleges collected a little less than half of their list-price tuition from first-year students. That steep discount caps seven straight years of deepening discounts.
