Tag Archives: University of California Hastings

COMMENDABLE CONDUCT AWARD

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Regular readers know that I’m often critical of many law school deans. But when one of them gets it right, let’s give credit where it’s due. As the glut of new attorneys persists, the University of Kansas School of Law Dean Stephen Mazza became the latest dean to announce significant reductions in incoming class size. With that action, he has earned a “Commendable Conduct Award.”

Not the first

The University of Kansas isn’t the first to implement such cuts. Last year, Frank Wu, chancellor and dean of the University of California Hastings School of Law announced a 20 percent reduction in class size for the fall of 2012.

“The critics of legal education are right,” Wu said. “There are far too many law schools and there are too many law students and we need to do something about that.”

George Washington University, Albany Law School, Creighton University School of Law, and Loyola University Chicago School of Law have reduced entering class size, too. In March, Northwestern Law School Dean Daniel Rodriguez said his school would reduce the fall 2013 class by 10 percent. “We can’t ignore the destabilizing forces that the legal industry is facing today,” he said.

KU deserves special praise

All of these efforts to reduce the size of entering classes are commendable. But there are several unique aspects to the University of Kansas announcement that make it especially noteworthy.

First, the reduction as a percentage of enrollment in prior years is large: from 175 students graduating this year to a target of 120 students for the 2013 entering class and for the foreseeable future.

Equally significant, it appears that KU didn’t have to take its laudable step. The dean said that applications were down only about 10 percent — far less than many other schools. Moreover, an impressive 82 percent of 2012 graduates secured long-term jobs where a JD was required or preferred — far above the national average.

As an added bonus, a KU legal education is a relative bargain compared to many other schools: $18,600 tuition for full-time students who are state residents; $31,500 for out-of-state.

Motivations matter; outcomes matter more

Everyone expects that the decline in the number of law school applicants will produce lower average LSATs and GPAs for the entering 1L class. That, in turn, would hit the selectivity component of a school’s overall U.S. News ranking. It’s possible that some deans have reduced entering class size as part of a strategy to protect their rankings. But if the overall net outcome is that law schools as a group produce fewer lawyers three years from now, then the rankings may have helped to mitigate damage that they have caused since their first appearance in 1987.

Ay, there’s the rub. Will there be fewer total law graduates, or will other schools (and new ones in the pipeline) enroll the students that KU and others don’t accept? Indeed, will some schools expand enrollments solely to increase their tuition revenues? Asking those institutions to consider the long-term well being of the marginal students they recruit, or the sad state of the profession itself, would be asking too much, I guess.

One way to counteract the agendas of deans who refuse to do the right thing is to recognize those who do. Even more important is the task of helping prospective law students make informed decisions before they apply to law school. Over time, perhaps more of them will take advantage of increased transparency to assess realistically their own suitability for a satisfying and successful legal career. But at any age, encounters with confirmation bias are never easy.

Meanwhile, kudos to Dean Stephen Mazza and the University of Kansas School of Law. He’s been dean only since April 2011, but he’s already making a profound difference in the way that matters most — one person at a time. (And thanks to one of my regular readers who brought Dean Mazza’s announcement to my attention.)

THE LAW SCHOOL STORY OF 2012 — DEANS IN DENIAL

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Doubling down on a losing hand is rarely a good move. Case Western Reserve University Law School Dean Lawrence E. Mitchell generated a flurry of criticism — including my earlier post, “The Lawyer Bubble” — for his November 28, 2012 op-ed in the New York Times. On January 4, 2013, he took to the airwaves in a Bloomberg Law interview. It made me wonder whether he hears his own words as he speaks them.

Mitchell has made himself the poster child for deans in denial — the law school story of the year. It emerged in a big way last June when, for the first time, the ABA released meaningful jobs data. Nine months after graduation, only about 50 percent of the law school class of 2011 had full-time, long-term jobs requiring a legal degree. Deans everywhere began dissembling, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Sometimes offense isn’t the best defense

As the growing lawyer bubble made headlines, a handful of wise deans followed the lead of University of California Hastings School of Law Dean Frank Wu, who had previously acknowledged, “The critics of legal education are right. There are too many law schools and too many law students and we need to do something about that.”

In contrast, Dean Mitchell went on offense, most recently in a 15-minute interview with Lee Pacchia. To his tenuous op-ed points, Mitchell added a few more.

What oversupply?

For example, he said, “It’s not clear to me that there’s an oversupply problem at all.” As support, he cited low-income people who go without legal services. Pacchia asked him how debt-ridden graduates paying Case more than $40,000 in annual tuition could take on such work full-time.

It’s a mistake, Mitchell responded, to “measure the worth of higher education by the dollar return on the investment.” Perhaps he has a point, but it’s not really an answer. Earlier in the interview, Mitchell said this about high tuition cost: “Ninety percent of my class receives financial aid. The mean offer is $25,000 a year.” Critics focus on the sticker price, he said, “but law schools discount fairly heavily.”

What proportion of those financial aid packages is grants, rather than loans that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy? Mitchell didn’t say, but here are two clues.

In his op-ed, Mitchell reported accurately that overall average private law school student debt is $125,000. In his April 3, 2012 blog post, he boasted that Case graduates have “almost 22 percent less debt than graduates of other private law schools.” The resulting arithmetic implies that Case’s financial aid packages result in average student loan debt of about $100,000 for its law graduates.

Cost spiral

In another defense of soaring tuition, Mitchell argued that, in 1985, medical school was four times more expensive than law school. So what? In the intervening 25 years, law school tuition has caught up with and, in some cases, surpassed that of medical school. Does that make sense to anyone other than Mitchell?

He also said that schools must pay top dollar for law professors because their opportunity costs are high: they could be making big bucks in big firms. But the only relevant question is, do they want to?

Mitchell’s own experience may provide a partial answer. His CV lists six years as an associate at three different New York law firms from 1981 to 1987. Sometime during that period, he said, it became “hard to get out of bed in the morning and I didn’t like going to work.” So he “took a two-thirds pay cut and went into teaching.”

How about decent jobs?

Throughout the year, Mitchell travels the country, “like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman,” meeting with hiring partners of big law firms. He interviews his students and writes personal letters of recommendation to help them get jobs. Doesn’t the need for such efforts tell him something?

Yet for all of Mitchell’s laudable sales pitches, Pacchia noted, the Law School Transparency Project reports that 38 percent of 2011 Case Western graduates were still unemployed or underemployed nine months later.

“I haven’t myself taken a snapshot a year out,” Mitchell said, “but I’ve talked to my admissions staff about this a lot and I suspect if you looked a year out, things would change dramatically. I’m really confident if you looked a year and a half out, they would.”

Mitchell offered no supporting data, but he “suspects” and is “really confident” that, eventually, things will turn out just fine.

Optimism untethered to reality

Why is Mitchell convinced that things are better than the available facts suggest? Because, for example, most of his 1981 Columbia Law School class took jobs in big law firms. Ten years later, his class reunion book revealed that “almost nobody was at a law firm.”

It’s hard to know where to begin dissecting Mitchell’s anecdote, but start with the fact that his students aren’t graduating from Columbia Law School.

Just another business

Finally, Mitchell observed, “Of course, we’re running a business at the end of the day.” Without acknowledging the destructive impact of short term business-type metrics, such as the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings, he argues that “using business sense in managing law schools is going to help us get some of these problems under control.”

Until Mitchell and many other deans with similar attitudes get past denial over what is happening to the profession, they’ll never reach, much less overcome, the subsequent stages of grief — anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Perhaps another reading of Death of a Salesman will help.