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Harvard Transfers Don’t Spell Financial Trouble, But Several Law Schools’ Bond Ratings Do
January 29th, 2016 / By Kyle McEntee
This article was originally posted on Bloomberg.
Is the law school crisis affecting Harvard? Probably not. The school did choose to take 55 transfer students last year, the fourth largest transfer class in the country. In the prior four years the school took between 30 and 34 transfers each year. Its higher than usual acceptance of transfers has fueled speculation that it was compensating for an original applicant pool that wasn’t strong enough. Whether that’s so or not, several indicators that may show a school faces financial duress have each remained steady at HLS between 2011 and 2015.
- First-year enrollment: enrollment ranged from 555 to 568 over the last five years. Applications were down 18 percent and yield declined from 66 percent to 60 percent, which indicates that several peer schools are making more competitive offers. Still, the school netted just one fewer first-year student this year compared to last and three more than in 2011.
- Admissions credentials: the median LSAT score did not change from 173 (99th percentile) and the median undergraduate GPA declined just .03 from 3.89 to 3.86.
- Tuition increased an average of 4.6 percent each year. Scholarship increases did not keep pace with tuition increases, indicating that the school took in more money each subsequent year.
- There’s no talk about trouble with Harvard’s endowment, or any indication that Harvard Law has liquidity issues.
How Student Loan Refinancing Could Undo Federal Loan Policy
January 26th, 2016 / By Kyle McEntee
Originally published on Above the Law.
If you’re a law school graduate with a ton of debt, there are a few companies that really want to talk to you — if you went to the right school and have the right job.
The deal works like this. The bank or non-bank lender pays the federal government the balance of your loan and you pay the new lender instead. In exchange, the private lender charges you a much lower interest rate. Rather than a rate north of 7%, you receive a rate as low as 2.5%.
(more…)
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2016 State of the Legal Market
January 24th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Georgetown Law’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession has released its 2016 Report on the State of the Legal Market. The data-driven study of mid-sized and large law firms repeats many of the same findings that researchers have reported since the Great Recession. The news, unfortunately, is that there is nothing new. In 2015, as in other recent years, demand for law firm services “was essentially flat,” productivity among lawyers at those firms declined, and realization rates “plummeted.” (A realization rate “is the percentage of standard billing rates that is actually collected.”)
In sum, “2015 will go down as another overall lackluster year in terms of law firm financial performance.” Yikes. What does that mean for law schools? (more…)
Arizona Summit Does Still Have Conditional Scholarships
January 22nd, 2016 / By Kyle McEntee
On December 16th, I wrote a column for Above the Law on the ABA’s annual data dump. In it I highlighted nine schools that “reportedly” eliminated conditional scholarship programs. I used the quoted caveat in my column because I was skeptical that a few of these schools had actually eliminated the program.
One school I contacted was Arizona Summit. The school previously operated a very large conditional scholarship program and had a substantial percentage of students who lost these scholarships after the first year. It would have been a substantial budgetary hit to change the program at Arizona Summit in particular. However, the school’s 509 report indicated that it had. (more…)
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Experiential Education and Bar Passage
January 22nd, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Robert Kuehn has written an excellent post about clinical courses and bar passage. He notes that Erica Moeser, President of the National Conference of Bar Examiners, suggested in print that declining bar passage rates might stem in part from the rise of experiential learning in law schools. NCBE’s Director of Testing and Research has made the same claim, noting that: “There has also been a trend toward incorporating non-core courses and clinical experiences into the law school curriculum. These, too, can take students’ time away from learning the core concepts that are tested on the bar examination.”
When Kuehn contacted Moeser to ask if she knew about any empirical research supporting this purported connection, she admitted that she knew of none. Nor did her testing staff. (more…)
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An Influential Person
January 21st, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
I’m proud to announce that my co-moderator, Kyle McEntee, has been named to the National Jurist‘s list of the twenty-five most influential people in legal education. Kyle has appeared on the list every year since the list debuted in 2012. He also remains the only person ever named to the list without holding a position as dean or professor at a law school. That’s quite a run!
Congratulations to Kyle, along with the others named to this list.
“Little Staff Attorneys”
January 21st, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
At the AALS meeting, a friend of mine (and tenured professor) stood chatting with a few tenured colleagues from other schools. Conversation turned to work that another professor had done in a clinic. “Yeah,” said one of the professors, impressed, “and they didn’t even have a little staff attorney to do all the work.” My friend protested this derogatory reference to staff attorneys, and the professor apologized, but the remark was telling.
This is how all too many tenured professors think of clinical work, clinical professors, and staff attorneys; the same attitude applies to legal writing professors. This work, we assume, is simplistic and doesn’t merit our full attention. It can be done by “little” people. (more…)
Law Schools More Transparent Than Ever
January 19th, 2016 / By Kyle McEntee
Since 1974, the National Association for Law Placement has surveyed ABA-approved law school graduates with the help of roughly 200 schools and a nod from the ABA. NALP’s annual survey asks graduates to describe their jobs, their employers, how and when they obtained the positions, and their starting salaries.
NALP checks the data for discrepancies and produces statistical reports of post-graduation employment outcomes for each law school. NALP must keep these “NALP reports” confidential, but individual schools may publish their reports.
Before the law school transparency movement, law schools did not publish NALP reports online for prospective students and others to see. Instead, these detailed, immensely useful reports occupied dusty filing cabinets. I recall when my organization first requested these reports from law schools, several career services deans told me they did not know where they were.
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Why Ranking Law Schools Nationally Is Nonsensical
January 19th, 2016 / By Kyle McEntee
This piece was originally published on Bloomberg.
Earlier this month, at the American Association of Law Schools’ annual meeting in New York, the AALS’s Section for the Law School Dean hosted a panel on law school rankings. During a Q&A, Nebraska Law School Dean Susan Poser posed a series of questions to Bob Morse, chief architect of the U.S. News law school rankings.
I don’t know anything about schools except the one I went to and the one I’m at now. How do you justify asking us to rank the prestige of other schools, and how do you justify giving this component such a large weight?
Blake Edwards, writing for Big Law Business, has more details on the panel here. I want spark a discussion about some ways to improve the reputation metric.
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Peking University
January 18th, 2016 / By Deborah J. Merritt
In August 2012, the ABA’s Council of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar decided not to accredit any law schools located outside the United States. Many observers assumed that action would put an end to Peking University’s upstart enterprise, a School of Transnational Law. Instead, the school, popularly known as “STL,” is thriving.
Philip McConnaughay and Colleen Toomey, STL’s Dean and Associate Dean, explain the school’s success in a recent paper. Their insights are important for anyone seeking to understand the globalization of law practice and legal education. The story of Peking University and STL also offers a cautionary tale about American protectionism.
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