March should be a crucial month for law students. Fall semester final grades are released and law students should know their approximate class rank. Tuition refund deadlines have passed. And yesterday, the U.S. News law school rankings became publicly available.
So between now and June, law students should plan ahead. They should think about transferring, and researching firms participating in their school’s summer On-Campus Interview (OCI) program. I have covered some strategies here.
But if you don’t make grades at the end of the Spring semester, you will have little options. Your chances of transferring to a better school will plummet. Your school will not offer tuition discounts. If you march into the Dean’s office demanding tuition discounts and threatening to drop out, she will likely show you the door.
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But if you stay, you will struggle finding employment both during school and after passing the bar exam. OCI will be ØCI and your chances at Biglaw are a big LOL. Your job search will consist of scrounging on Symplicity or the Craigslist classifieds. Meanwhile, your nondischargeable loan-financed tuition payments will subsidize Privileged Pierce’s Biglaw summer vacation.
Unfortunately, that’s the way the system currently works. The people who are least likely to be employed and get respectable jobs will pay the most and bear the biggest loan burden for most of their lives. A sensible but dream-crushing option for these people is to drop out.
But there may be one more opportunity for average law students to negotiate down their tuition bill: Unionizing.
Welcome to the world of collective bargaining. An individual request for lower tuition will likely be ignored unless there is something in it for the school. But if a group of average law students paying full tuition (or close to it) threaten to transfer or drop out, the possibility of a potentially massive revenue drop will force law school administrators to negotiate lower tuition for the entire group.
The purpose of today’s post is not to provide a comprehensive collective bargaining strategy because every law school and its student body is different. I merely want to throw out a couple of ideas to help you think about it. But if you want to seriously consider this, I suggest networking with a labor law attorney or a local union who can help you set up an effective collective bargaining plan.
Establish the bargaining group. The bargaining group will be the law students who will benefit from a bargaining agreement or will either drop out or transfer if bargaining fails. The bargaining group does not need to include the entire student body. But the group should be large enough to be taken seriously by the administration. For example, if your law school has 600 students and you learn that 300 of them are paying full sticker of $45,000, recruiting 100 of them to the bargaining group can threaten to eliminate $4.5 million from the school’s budget.
The bargaining group should set up a means for communicating with each other. If most of the members have Facebook, setting up a Facebook group would be the best way to do it. I would avoid email chains, especially if the group is large and there is frequent activity. Email chains tend to be disruptive and can result in emails going to the spam folder.
The group should enlist the assistance of someone affiliated with the school to serve as an advisor and possibly as a mediator. This person is usually the campus ombudsman or the student advocate. But he or she can also be a sympathetic faculty member with tenure who has a track record of assisting students outside of the classroom. If such people are not available, then I suggest contacting someone who is familiar with collective bargaining strategy and mediation.
Do your research. It is always a good idea to know as much as you can about your adversary before confronting them. What is the school’s dropout and transfer rate for 1Ls? What is the average salary of recent graduates? Has the school experienced a sharp enrollment decline in the last few years? Is the school considering a “merger”?
Establish goals and a BATNA. Establishing a goal for the group should be simple enough: obtain the biggest tuition discount possible for the following year. But the bargaining group will also have to decide what amount of tuition would be fair. The general rule of thumb for student loan borrowing is that the total amount of student debt should not exceed the borrower’s anticipated annual salary for the first year out of school. For some law schools, this means tuition should be less than $10,000 per year. And that’s being generous.
If there is an impasse in negotiation, a “Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement” or BATNA should be available. In this situation, the BATNA for the bargaining group would be to either transfer or drop out.
But setting up BATNAs can be tricky. For example, what if those who agreed to drop out decide to back out or were bluffing? What if transfer and non-legal job offers are revoked? Similarly, what if a group tuition reduction agreement has been reached but some members of the group decide to transfer or drop out anyway? How will any of these scenarios affect the bargaining power of the group? Because this BATNA relies on assuming future events, it can fall apart if the assumptions turn out to be false.
Unionizing and collective bargaining may be the last hope for average law students to negotiate tuition discounts. I am certain that setting up a collective bargaining plan will be hard, especially if you are organizing the effort. But if this is done in a civil manner, there really is no down side. The worst that can happen is that the school will say no. But if you are successful, you will not only pay less for law school, you will also earn the respect and gratitude of your classmates.
Shannon Achimalbe was a former solo practitioner for five years before deciding to sell out and get back on the corporate ladder. Shannon can be reached at [email protected].