Legal education is its own magical place, exempt from the ordinary economic forces that shape the rest of the world. So it was no real shock last week when Staci Zaretsky observed, picking up on the data compiled by Matt Leichter, that the shedding of significant numbers of full-time faculty members in recent years by law schools has not translated into any concomitant tuition relief for the students.
Today we have more evidence of the bizarro-world nature of the business of law schools. On average, while the typical law school has lost about five full-time faculty members over the last four years, it has gained a teaching administrator or two over the same period. This finding comes courtesy of Derek Muller, a law prof at Pepperdine. Here’s a chart from his blog, Excess of Democracy:
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Muller is careful to note that there are certain issues with this data, including methodological changes by the ABA, and some ambiguity regarding how librarians are counted for these purposes. But still.