Legal News

The Incredible Shrinking Law School? It?s the Vision of Two NY Deans

By Ashby Jones

A current school of thought about legal education in the U.S. goes like this:

Despite being in the business of education, law schools are entrepreneurial — some might say “greedy” — institutions. They boost their tuitions, grovel their way up rankings, inflate their statistics to attract more applicants, and stuff their classrooms with as many students as they can possibly fit in the doors.

But two New York law schools are doing what they can to distance themselves from this notion.

The deans of the Albany Law School and the Tuoro Law Center say they plan to reduce admissions this fall, yielding to the fact that the job market for newly pressed JDs continues to be rather lousy. Click here for the story from the National Law Journal.

The drop won’t be significant at either school. Both plan to admit 10 fewer students.

Still, the cuts represent an unprecedented acknowledgment among law deans that the product they’re churning out isn’t as highly valued now as it was, say, 5 years ago.

“It is the ethical and moral thing to do,” Touro Dean Lawrence Raful told the NLJ. “I don’t think the [job] placement situation is going to turn around for a number of years and I think we are concerned about the ethics of turning out quite so many students in debt when we know that not everyone can get a job to pay off that debt.”

According to the NLJ, if the Touro board agrees to Raful’s proposal, enrollment in this fall’s first-year class will dip to 270 from the 280 in 2010. Raful is proposing further 10-student reductions in the falls of 2012 and 2013.

Albany Law will admit 240 students this fall, down from the 250 in the current first-year class, Dean Thomas Guernsey said.

Guernsey has argued that there are not enough legal jobs for all the 3,750 graduates already turned out by New York’s 15 law schools.

He’s been an outspoken critic of proposals to create new law schools on State University of New York campuses in Binghamton and Stony Brook as well as at St. John Fisher, a private college in Rochester. Stony Brook and St. John Fisher have shelved their proposals, but Binghamton is proceeding with preliminary planning.

Of course, there’s a silver lining for both Tuoro and Albany. A reduction in students could boost the scchools’ numbers by improving selectivity and the competitiveness of the students.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 04, 2011 (boomark / email).