This post argues that recent changes in legal education have harmed rather than helped most students and that legal education needs to change significantly, and predicts that no change will occur until it’s too late.

One significant change in law schools over the past twenty-five years is the bureaucratization of the institution. What were once fairly lean organizations have become bloated, and the increase in administrators is one cause of the greater-than-inflation increases in law school tuition. This increase in administrators, with the concomitant rise in tuition, has created a kind of chicken-and-egg problem.

The high cost of tuition has made many law schools leery of academic attrition (in part because if those former students don’t pay back their loans, the institution may find itself in trouble). You rarely see exclusion of one-third of the student body (I can think of just one school). But especially where bar exam passing rates have ranged considerably, because such rates can readily be compared, academic attrition has increased among a number of law schools in the past decade in order to pump up bar exam results.  One consequence has been the creation and rapid expansion of academic support programs for those students who are struggling. The theory behind such programs is sound. But though such programs can offer students tips on how to organize their study, and offer some study skills, I don’t think they can actually provide “academic” support in practice. 

The front-page, above-the-fold article in the latest issue of the National Law Journal asked whether a legal education makes economic sense these days. The well-publicized recent purge of partners and associates in large law firms, the paucity of jobs (noted in a story in the Chronicle of Higher Education) available to graduating law students, and the massive increase in student indebtedness have generated a flood of articles and Internet posts cautioning would-be law students against entering the profession. This post takes the view that legal education still makes long-term sense for many. A later follow-up post will argue that recent changes in legal education have harmed rather than helped most students, that legal education needs to change significantly, and that it won’t until it is too late.

A paper recently posted on SSRN entitled Momma Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be . . . Lawyers by Vanderbilt University School of Law Professor Herwig Schlunk argues that, whether a law student attends a top-ten law school and does well, is a “solid performer,” or is an “also ran” who attends a third-tier law school, that student will have a negative return on investment. Whether Professor Schlunk’s assessment about opportunity cost (the salary foregone by attending three years of law school) is accurate (I think that a starting salary of a new college graduate today, combined with the insecurity of those positions, makes the opportunity cost lower than he assumes), I believe law school remains, for many, the right decision.