Cooley’s President and Dean, Don LeDuc, is publishing commentaries on the Law School, legal education, and related topics. This post summarizes President LeDuc’s advice to law school applicants about the cost of attending law school.
In Choosing a School, Consider Cost Before Considering Prestige
Typical potential law students are not sufficiently cost conscious in selecting a law school, tending to place too much emphasis on perceived prestige and not enough on net costs of attendance. For some law school graduates, prestige does matter, but that factor should be considered only after a full consideration of cost, which should be the first consideration. Most law students should seriously consider the lowest cost law school alternative.
1. Be realistic about your chances for admission. Use the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools to determine your likelihood of admission based upon your LSAT score and undergraduate grade point average. Do not waste time applying to schools that are significantly beyond your profile.
2. Comparison shop the cost of tuition and mandatory fees. Compare the cost of tuition and mandatory fees at each school you are interested in. This is very difficult to do because the practices among the law schools vary greatly. Consult the ABA’s Official Guide, but note that these published figures are not fully comparable and report only last year’s tuition and fees.
3. Determine your eligibility for a scholarship at each school. Check for eligibility limits for scholarship continuation, such as requiring a minimum law school grade point average or class rank. These may actually mean that a significantly reduced number of students will retain their scholarships after the first year or even after the first semester.
4. Estimate a net cost of attendance. Compute a reasonably close estimate of the net cost of attendance from the direct costs of tuition and mandatory fees, less scholarships for each school under consideration. Then rank your schools in order from low to high cost. Assume that the lowest cost is your best alternative, absent other factors that convince you that a more expensive choice is better for you.
5. Confirm the cost of living in each location you are considering. This varies significantly, even among law schools located in the same city.
6. Estimate the total cost of attendance and determine how much debt you will need to incur to obtain a degree at each school. With your calculated cost in mind, consider how much you can contribute from personal or family resources toward that cost. Then, determine how much you will need to borrow to attend each school. Various models exist that will allow you to calculate your monthly, annual, and total repayment costs, separated into principal and interest. Seek assistance in doing these calculations so that you understand exactly what your future repayment obligations will be.
7. Now consider whatever other factors that are significant to you in light of the known costs of attendance for each school. Only after you have the cost of attendance in mind, consider location, reputation, or prestige. A school’s performance on bar examinations and its placement records are relevant, but you should remember that it is the individual graduates who take the tests and seek the jobs, not the schools themselves. Don’ t assume that you will automatically pass the bar or get a job simply because you attend a particular school or not pass the bar or find employment because you attend a school with lower bar passage or employment rates.
Consider the prestige factor or speculate about bar results or job opportunities with a good dose of reality. Unlike the fictional Lake Wobegon, the students at American law schools are not all above average. Aside from personal pride, the prestige of a law school matters little to most of the students that graduate from it. For most graduates, the amount of debt each has upon graduation is a reality that lasts for years and matters a great deal.
Summary
The cost of education and its impact on law school debt are closely related. If you are concerned about that issue, and you do not have sufficient resources to pay for law school without borrowing, you should seriously consider selecting the lowest cost alternative available.
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Summary: Enough About the Ills and Evils of Legal Education
According to uninformed critics, legal education is in an existential crisis, law schools must reform, law schools are defrauding the public and the unwary law school applicants, law schools are manipulating their data, there are no jobs for law school graduates, there are too many lawyers, law school graduates have too much debt, law school is too expensive, law is no longer an attractive profession. A relative handful of critics re-circulate the same increasingly tired arguments, thus reinforcing one another’s views, nearly all of which are not remotely objective and without support in fact.
Don’t Believe the Uninformed Critics
The recession hit our profession hard, but not as hard as the critics of legal education say. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Association for Law Placement, lawyer unemployment rates are very low. Legal employment is strong when compared to other professions. The job market for lawyers is in fact already improving. Indeed, the relevant consideration for entering law students is not what the job market is now, but what it will be in 2015 or 2016 when they graduate. With the national decrease in law school enrollment in 2011 and 2012, market forces have already affected the future job market. The result is that a reduced number of students will graduate in 2015 and 2016 into an expanded job market.
The critics who claim that law school education is not worth the investment have likewise overstated the effect of law school cost and debt. Their anecdotal stories of students with excessive debt distort, not represent, the true picture, which is that the default rates for law school and other professional school graduates are far below the national default rates for all other educational programs. They ignore the fact that the overall tuition burden is reduced by about 25% at the typical law school and that 15% of all law students graduate with no debt.
The facts about legal education simply belie the outcry. Those who read the media and blog reports should do so with a skeptical, if not jaundiced, eye. Nearly all that is said is wrong, much of it is intentionally misleading if not purposely false, and all of it is missing in context and perspective. There is no crisis in legal education any more than in other aspects of education. There is no need for urgent reform, only for reasoned progress in making legal education more responsive to the needs of society and future clients and employers. The law of supply and demand will adjust law school behavior to the market, unfortunately following that market rather than predicting it. Legal education is no more or less to blame than anyone else for failing to foresee the recession or in responding too slowly to the glacial economic recovery. Indeed, we should guard against being too cautious now, when the economy is still recovering and the demographics favor enrollment growth in light of increasing long-term demand for law school graduates.
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