Jan 3

Tuition Breaks for Externships

Table started by on Jan 03, 2013 at 12:30 am
Student Costs, , ,

I’ve grown to like the idea of workplace externships. Properly supervised, students can learn quite a bit from an externship. Today’s employers undeniably want that type of proven experience in new hires. Working at an externship also puts a student “on the spot” when an employer wants to hire. Externships won’t create jobs, but they may make a school’s graduates more competitive for the ones that exist.

On the other hand, I’m a bit queasy about charging students tuition while they work somewhere else for free. That seems like a negative wage, rather than a minimum one. When an externship constitutes just part of a student’s course load, and the school charges a flat fee for full-time students, the concern is small. It costs the school something to supervise the externship, the student’s marginal cost may be zero, and we don’t differentiate other credits based on the number of students in the class, the professor’s salary, or other cost factors.

But what about externships that consume an entire semester? Or ones that occur during the summer? For these externships, students pay high fees for the privilege of providing free workplace services. Here, as Northwestern’s Dean Dan Rodriguez suggests on PrawfsBlawg, tuition reductions might be appropriate.

Sure, the school will lose revenue from those students but the market is going to force us to reduce the cost of law school attendance in one way or another. We already subsidize lots of law school credits through scholarships. Reduced-cost externships are just another targeted means of reducing tuition–and it’s a mechanism that might prove quite attractive to students.

Suppose, for example, that a school told every student: “We provide one no-cost summer externship to any student who wants one. We’ll help you find a suitable placement, provide appropriate classroom instruction, and award up to 5 hours of credit–all with no tuition charge to you. You can take advantage of this externship opportunity after either your first or second year; joint degree candidates may use the opportunity during any semester of their degree program.”

To me, that seems like an attractive way to discount tuition. It tells prospective students that a school recognizes the importance of workplace experience and will help every student obtain that opportunity. A strong externship program can also complement a school’s career services office: the ties with externship organizations can yield regular placement opportunities. And alumni are likely workplace supervisors, solidifying their ties with the school.

How much would this cost a school? You would have to include (a) the costs of externship supervisors, including the time they would spend identifying good externship oppportunities; (b) any charges the central university would impose on these subsidized credits; and (c) forgone tuition from students who would use summer credits to graduate a semester early. In past years, relatively few students have used summer credits to graduate early, but that number may increase in coming years.

For full-semester externships the calculus is similar–except that the risk of forgone tuition is closer to certainty. Few students enjoy law school so much that they will stay for a seventh semester. Still, as pressures mount to reduce the cost and length of law school, a no- or reduced-cost externship semester could draw students to a particular law school.

What other costs and benefits do you see? Are there other ways to structure externships to serve students and keep down educational costs?

  • afdsa

    test post?

  • Guest

    I see strong unwillingness on the parts of the universities to not charge full price for externships. Look at the med schools. The last two years are clerkships at various hospitals but the kids get no price break.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Ryan-Probasco/548406208 Ryan Probasco

    I think this post misses another valuable and quease inducing thing students are getting when they pay for an externship, which is a guaranteed GPA boost in the form of an A in a 3 or 4 credit class.

    • anewname

      This is not the case at every school. At my law school, all externships are P/F only. So it has zero effect on your gpa. Moreover, we can only do a limited number of externship hours toward our degree requirements (two part-time, or one full semester). Because of this, I’ve already done two externships during the semester without any credit (or pay) since I want as much experience as possible, but cannot exceed the limited number of externship hours.

      • http://www.facebook.com/people/Ryan-Probasco/548406208 Ryan Probasco

        Hmmm, that is different from what I have heard. I’ve never taken one, but I just checked with a friend who has and he said at WCL you get a grade and its a certain A or A- in a class that can be worth potentially up to 7 credit hours.

  • anewname

    I’ve also found it troubling that my school will not permit me to take any externship that offers a stipend. I have looked into several full-term externships at NGOs that offer modest living stipends (like $700 a month – not much, but it would pay my rent). It’s not like working for a for-profit organization and it is still more of an educational experience than a work experience. It would be an enormous help to me to stop borrowing for living expenses.

    Furthermore, why can’t I work more than 20 hours a week during the school year? That restriction is silly and forces me to borrow for living expenses. Without borrowing for COL, my debt would be pretty reasonable (only $60,000)

    • Guest

      I worked for a for-profit company my 2L summer and received externship credit. I would have loved to have some help with living expenses, but would have been fine just paying much less to my law school.

  • Steve Pershing

    First, a tremendous thanks to Deborah Merritt, and to Kyle McEntee, for starting this site. Anyone who was just at AALS and heard Prof. Merritt’s visionary remarks will know what tremendous value her wisdom and imagination are to us all.

    Second, on full-semester externships: I’ve just started an inter-school D.C. law semester program, a total immersion experience (necessarily full time for full credit) that I consider highly desirable, whose revenue comes from a small slice of tuition per enrolling student. I believe schools should properly charge less for away terms. Ha, easy for me to say, since I don’t have the challenge of making a school’s ends meet–in fact I’m the one claiming a slice, so throw your tomatoes here (points to target on chest). But if a student wants an externship experience for credit (more about no-pay-for-credit in a moment), especially if he or she can’t overcome the glut of applicants for summer, and wants to graduate on time, this is a way to do it, and I think it’s worth a good deal. So suppose we float the notion that charging half to three-fourths of tuition for an away semester is fair, morally and economically, to students and schools. (I take it the placement host’s position is neutral–maybe that’s debatable.)

    Two supposed benefits of sending students away come up for examination. One is the double dip, i.e. the potential monetary gain from the emptying of a seat, at no loss of tuition, that could then be filled by a full-tuition-payer, e.g. a transfer student. But that benefit will accrue to only those schools that cap transfers or class sizes; to other schools a transfer student’s tuition may not meaningfully offset existing expenses. Plus macroeconomically I suppose the transfer offset idea is a wash, or not even, since neither transfers nor away placements expand total U.S. law tuition dollars, while tuition discounts self-evidently reduce them. Our perceptions of debt are another factor: some sage once said debt is an expression of the confidence of other people in your future earning ability, and yet our conversation here is rightly about questioning those assumptions for our students’ sake (I know, employability/debt repayability is what they’re talking about at the next table).

    Two, and the premise of our conversation seems to presuppose this, externships are cheaper for law schools to offer than other more strictly controlled types of experiential learning (think clinics of all types, hybrids, &c). I suspect clinical law faculty feel, and I see justification for such a feeling, that to the extent externships are cheaper, they make compromises to other clinical education all too tempting for deans scraping to keep schools afloat. Tuition breaks for away terms would reduce this gap, which may be to the good: we and our students want options, not a race to the programmatic bottom in the name of cost savings. Plus there’s the view that every dollar spent on program is a dollar taken away from student financial aid. I think either of these valid notions taken to its extension leads us to absurd results, but I sympathize with the distress that prompts them both.

    Segue to why not allow pay for credit as a way of rebalancing externship costs and benefits (thanks to “anewname” for raising this important question). Let me cite two chief reasons among many, the first pedagogical, the second philosophical. (I’m keenly aware of the financial pinch I’m saying should not be relieved this way, and also aware of the minority view to the contrary, see Prof. Backman.) First, if they pay you they own you, at least to some extent. The school and its externship faculty, not to mention the student, have less leverage or control of the substantive learning, mentorship, chance to observe and reflect, &c that the student gets. Second, to many of us a raison d’etre of externships is to give students serious exposure to public interest work, whose monetary-to-nonmonetary benefits equation is far different from private practice but which we owe it to our students, our profession and our planet to encourage. Students permitted pay will naturally forgo non-paying learning opportunities, with potentially profound consequences to our mission.

    That’s enough out of me. I’ll be quiet now and listen. I salute you all. –Steve Pershing, Washington Consortium for Law Externships and Exchange, steve.pershing@wclee.org.

  • DeborahMerritt

    Steve, thanks for the very thoughtful comment (as well as for the very generous words about starting the site). I was particularly intrigued by your insight that schools might be able to “double dip” by filling classroom seats with transfer students. Here are a few other thoughts on that. One is that some schools may be able to double dip by filling seats with LLM students. If a school sends an increasing number of JD students to off campus externships, there is room for more LLM candidates. The school may say that it is using LLM students to subsidize overall costs and keep JD tuition down, but it is just as fair to say that it is using externship students (who are off campus and imposing few costs) to subsidize overall costs.

    That leads me to my second, perhaps more important, thought. Rather than enroll more students to replace the externship students, schools may “double dip” by allowing faculty to teach even fewer students on campus. Many educators, I think, acknowledge faculty costs as a major driver of rising tuition. Faculty today demand lower teaching loads, higher pay, and more specialized courses than they did in an earlier era. Until now, schools have accommodated those demands by hiring more faculty, raising salaries, and charging higher tuition. Another way to satisfy some of the same demands is to send more students off campus into externships. This allows on-campus faculty to continue decreasing class sizes and/or teaching loads because a chunk of students are gaining credits off campus. Alternatively, as schools respond to market pressures by freezing or dropping tuition (often in the shape of increased discounts), they may also have to pare faculty size through attrition. But remaining faculty may be able to maintain their current teaching loads because many students have gone off campus to externship sites.

    I don’t mean to suggest that schools have calculated all of that in advance. Many, I think, are responding to both student demand and pedagogical value by expanding externship opportunities. But these courses do cost less than other courses (not just clinics but many classroom courses as well) and they reduce enrollment pressure in upperlevel courses. Schools will have the opportunity to decide how to use that surplus: to maintain low teaching loads for faculty or to reduce costs for students? Your comments on the double dip make that choice even more clear.