Admissions

Could the Decline in Law School Applicants Mean Tuition Cuts Are On the Way?

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Hot on the heels of the news that administrations of the LSAT are down 16% from last year, we now know that the number of students applying to law school has also declined. But just how bad are the numbers? Let’s just say that applicants and applications for this cycle have “dropped precipitously.”

It would seem that people have finally gotten the message that going to law school won’t necessarily guarantee financial success, much less a job as a lawyer. These days, prospective law students are more in tune with reality, and they obviously don’t like the pictures of law school doom and gloom that have been displayed prominently in the mainstream media.

But that doesn’t mean that people are going to stop applying to law school, or even that they should. So, for these prospective law students, does news of fewer applicants mean that tuition prices will drop, too?

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Inside Straight: An Open Letter To The University Of Chicago Law School

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Dear University of Chicago Law School Admissions Committee:

I write to advise you that you can remove my name from the waitlist for admission to the University of Chicago Law School.

I deduce that my application has posed an extraordinarily challenging decision for you. After all, I applied for admission in the fall of 1978, was placed on the wait list some time that winter, and am still awaiting your final decision. I certainly appreciate the effort that you have invested in considering my application during the intervening decades.

As you might imagine, this has not been an easy thirty years for me, either. Every day, through the changing seasons and changing seasons of my life, I have approached the mailbox with trepidation, thinking that I might finally experience the exhilaration of acceptance or the agony of rejection. But it was not to be; I never heard a word. I’ve decided it’s time to spare you the effort of further deliberation.

I’ve thought about you each fall and winter, as you’ve surely re-opened and dusted off my typewritten application and compared it to the new e-submissions that you probably receive today. How do my accomplishments from the late 1970s compare to the accomplishments of my current competitors? I’m certain, for example, that grade inflation has worked to my detriment, as my grades are stuck at the old levels and younger folks get higher grades with each passing year. It’s just not fair.

And what about external events?

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The Baylor Law Data Dump, Now With Race and Scholarships

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On Wednesday, we reported on Baylor Law School accidentally releasing personal academic information for its entire admitted class. It was a massive screw-up, and on Wednesday, we showed you the GPA and LSAT scores for Baylor’s admitted students (with the students’ names redacted, of course).

But there were other fields available in the accidentally released spreadsheet, including racial categorizations for each student and scholarship information. I didn’t include the race field earlier this week because, frankly, I didn’t want the entire news story (of the screw-up) to be overrun by a discussion about race and affirmative action.

But, look, I ain’t afraid of you people. Getting a complete racial breakdown of the class to go along with their grades and LSAT scores is a look inside the law school admissions process that we don’t often get to see.

So, let’s play our game. Looking at the Baylor numbers, you can see the affirmative action “bump” in LSAT scores, and to my eyes, it really shows how foolish the opponents of affirmative action really are….

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Baylor Law Screw-Up Reveals Personal Data of Entire Admitted Class: Data That We’ve Got

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There are data breaches, and then there are data dummies. The people at Baylor Law seem to be in the latter category.

Nobody was trying to steal the personal information of the admitted students at Baylor Law. But a screw-up by someone at the school resulted in all of the personal information of the admitted class getting transmitted to everybody else in the admitted class.

All of it. Names, addresses, grades, and LSAT scores. Pretty much everything besides social security numbers.

And, we have it….

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Yale to Everybody Else: Stop Scamming People

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I think we should see more of this. I think we should see more professors, deans, and law school administrators outraged by the practices of some unscrupulous law school officials. I think we should see more legal educators who are disgusted by what other money-grubbing deans and officials do to fill up their classes. I think the bad people in legal education have an easy time of it because the good people won’t stand up.

Happily, you can mark down the Yale Law School Assistant Dean of Admissions on the list of good people willing to fight against the unfair practices of other law schools and call a scam a “scam” when she sees one.

Asha Rangappa isn’t just a winner of our law school deans hottie contest: she also writes a good blog about the admissions process. Her latest piece challenges other law schools to stop bullying students with misinformation about their scholarship offers…

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Quote of the Day: Will a T14 Law Degree Ward Off Unemployment?

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I would read these horror stories in The New York Times and The Washington Post about how law firms were no longer guaranteeing jobs. But I always knew I was going to go to one of the top 14 law schools, where employment statistics have remained pretty strong. Most of the bad numbers are coming from the worse-ranked schools.

– Emily Cusick, a senior at Cornell University and president of the pre-law fraternity Kappa Alpha Pi, commenting to the Cornell Daily Sun on doom-and-gloom stories about the legal job market.

(Additional interesting tidbits from the Sun article, including statistics about the declining number of law school applications, after the jump.)

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Admissions Office ‘Keeps It Real’: Except for the Part About the Value of Going to Law School

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In the before times, in the long, long ago, everything about law school was hard. Getting in was hard. Completing the training was hard. Passing the bar was hard. Everything was hard and everything was stressful.

And legal educators and successful lawyers were proud that it was hard. The hardness is what made it mean something. I remember one of the reasons some people in my family told me to go to law school instead of business school was that law school was harder, and thus it intrinsically had more value.

But now, we don’t want law school to be hard. We don’t want thousands of students to break their dreams against high barriers to admission. We don’t want kids to be so stressed out that they spend their first year crying themselves to sleep at night like a new, fleshy prisoner in a penitentiary.

We want law schools to be like a goddamn camp — a goddamn hippie law learning camp where the professors are “down to earth,” and the administrators are there for “encouragement,” and there’s freaking ice cream in the student lounge. Look to your left, now look to your right: all three of you will be getting smiley faces on your transcripts!

This trend to make law schools the “aww shucks” destination for regular folks has made all the way down to Texas, the state that’s supposed to be the balls of this country….

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Law School Fee Waivers: We Won’t Touch Your Children Edition

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Prospective law students always get excited when they’re offered application fee waivers. Law school application fees can run high, and getting tossed a freebie is a nice way to give your bank account a break. Normally, these kind of fee waivers aren’t that out of the ordinary. Offering application fee waivers is standard practice at most law schools.

But what happens when a law school offers prospective applicants a fee waiver after its undergraduate institution is involved in one of the biggest college sports scandals of all time? Talk about bad timing….

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The Life and Death of the Michigan ‘Wolverine Scholars’ Program

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Way back in 2008, I noted with skepticism the University of Michigan’s “Wolverine Scholars” Program. I wasn’t the only one. The initiative allowed Michigan undergraduates with very high GPAs to get into Michigan Law without having to take the LSAT.

The program seemed like a pretty obvious attempt to game the U.S. News rankings. It’s so obvious that the now disgraced former Dean of Admissions for Illinois Law, Paul Pless, who had a similar program at his school, had this to say about it:

I started a new program for U of I undergrads to apply in their junior year and we don’t require the LSAT. We have additional essays and an interview instead. That way, I can trap about 20 of the little bastards with high GPA’s that count and no LSAT score to count against my median. It is quite ingenious.

Pless was talking about Illinois’s iLeap program, which was substantially similar to the Wolverine Scholars program at Michigan.

The Pless quote came out earlier this month, as the admissions director was being ushered under the bus by Illinois Law as the “lone gunman” for its embarrassing admissions scandal.

With the spotlight on a Big Ten school that manipulated admissions statistics for years, Michigan very quietly canceled its Wolverine Scholar Program.

There’s been much less fanfare about the end of the program than there was about its start. In fact, we obtained FOIA documents that contain various emails from Michigan Law Dean Evan Caminker and Dean of Admissions Sarah Zearfoss.

They talk about the program, and the how “the blogs” are covering it….

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Quotes of the Day: Quite Ingenious — and Quite Busted

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I am a maverick and a reformer so I started a new program for U of I undergrads to apply in their junior year and we don’t require the LSAT. We have additional essays and an interview instead. That way, I can trap about 20 of the little bastards with high GPA’s that count and no LSAT score to count against my median. It is quite ingenious.

– Paul Pless, former dean of admissions at the University of Illinois College of Law, in a 2008 email about iLEAP, a program that offered early admission to University of Illinois undergraduates with high GPAs (and no LSAT scores).

(The reaction of the other party to the correspondence, after the jump.)

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