Law Schools

Which Law School's Enrollment Has Dropped By More Than 50 Percent?

This law school's dean doesn't think there's anything to be troubled about.

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In case you haven’t heard, while other law schools have been taking a beating thanks to a decreased pool of applicants, the Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School — perhaps better known as Cooley Law — is doing just fine.

In recent years, the school has weathered a class-action suit filed by its alumni as to its allegedly deceptive employment statistics, survived a negative credit rating assignment by Standard & Poor’s, laid off its faculty and staff en masse, and even permanently closed an entire campus. From an outsider’s perspective, it seems like Cooley Law is a sinking ship, but new data essentially confirms that Cooley Law is a sinking ship.

The Lansing State Journal has the details on Cooley Law’s floundering enrollment:

More than 3,900 students were enrolled at Cooley Law School in 2010. That was the zenith. It’s been downhill since. Cooley’s enrollment for the 2014-15 academic year was 1,880.

That’s a drop of 52%, according to data from Cooley and the American Bar Association. In comparison, Michigan State University College of Law, which is more selective, had about 830 students last year.

Law school enrollment has been declining nationwide since 2010, ABA data show. At Cooley, it has declined almost three times as fast.

According to Dean Don LeDuc, however, Cooley Law’s drop in enrollment isn’t a big deal. He says the school’s enrollment has gone up since December, and that because more students are taking the LSAT, it’ll translate into a “return to pre-recession enrollment.” Perhaps if more law school deans were as clairvoyant and optimistic as LeDuc, the rest of the nation’s legal educators wouldn’t be in such a precarious predicament.

In an interview with RJ Wolcott of the Lansing State Journal, LeDuc went on to blame other law schools for causing Cooley Law’s enormous enrollment drop: “One of the things that schools will do is they’ll start taking students that they wouldn’t have taken in good times. [They] reach down further into applicant pool. Well, when they do that they’re taking our students, and we’re adversely affected by that.” Pardon me, but just how deep does Dean LeDuc think other law schools are digging into the applicant pool?

Since 2011, Cooley Law’s median LSAT score had fallen from 146 to 145 and plunged from 143 to 141 at the 25th percentile. No matter how desperate they are to put paying asses into seats, not too many law schools are willing to take a chance on applicants with less-than-ideal stats like that — not if they’d like their U.S. News ranks to remain stable.

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Not only has Cooley Law’s enrollment dropped, but it’s also seen a stark drop in applications. Per the Lansing State Journal, Cooley received 4,032 applications in 2011, and 1,161 students accepted admission offers and enrolled. Last year, the school received only 1,481 applications, and just 445 students ended up matriculating. We know lawyers are supposedly bad at math, but anyone can see that those numbers are horrendous.

The causes of Cooley’s decline go beyond that, said Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who writes frequently about law schools at Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports.

“Schools with weak employment outcomes and weaker reputations have suffered the most in the downturn in applications to law schools,” he said.

And Cooley’s employment outcomes, at least those reported to the ABA, have hardly been rosy.

Cooley Law’s employment statistics haven’t been “rosy” in quite some time. Check out the depressing report from the class of 2014 that was sent to the American Bar Association:

Nine months after graduation, a whopping 30 percent of graduates were employed in full-time, long-term jobs where bar passage was required. Seventy percent of last year’s Cooley Law graduates aren’t working as lawyers, but not to worry, because LeDuc says 2015 will be a “transition year” for the school. The time has come to expect greatness.

All things considered, it bears repeating: Cooley Law is doing just fine — according to its dean, whose job it is to say such things. We hope incoming students who are relying on this man’s words and placing their financial futures in his hands can see through the tripe.

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Cooley Law School enrollment drops 52% [Lansing State Journal]

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