Law Schools

Struggling Law School Will Not Accept New Students This Spring

Will more law schools stop enrolling students (or even close) in Thomas Jefferson’s wake?

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Law students, this is your chance…

It’s not a great time to be a law school that’s struggling to survive. We’ve received word that yet another law school has decided not to enroll an incoming class this spring. (Yes, there are a few law schools that have departed from the traditional fall enrollment cycle, offering start dates for incoming students in the fall, winter, and spring.) This is the third fully accredited law school in the country to announce that it will forgo student tuition dollars in an apparent effort to control costs and rightsize its enrollment.

Which law school could it be?

It’s the Thomas Jefferson School of Law. For those of you who are keeping track, TJSL just lost its dean after only a year of service and recently applied to become a California-accredited law school in the event that it loses its ABA accreditation. The law school’s plans to cease enrollment for Spring 2019 have not yet been announced publicly, and sources have told us that any mentions of an incoming class have been removed from the school’s marketing materials. Further, the school’s application for Spring 2019 has been taken down, and students who would have been accepted this coming semester have received personal phone calls letting them know about the school’s decision to hold off on enrolling a new class at this time. According to an inside source at TJSL, “The school hopes to bring back a spring class in future years, but they dont have the funds for this spring.”

We reached out to Thomas Jefferson Law for comment on their decision not to enroll a class this spring. Here’s what Interim Dean Linda Keller had to say:

The Law School is committed to providing the best environment for our students.  We’ve decided to forego the revenue that a spring entering class would provide because a proportionally smaller spring entering class might not provide the vibrant, collaborative atmosphere for our new students that is an essential part of the first-year law student experience.

Class size aside, perhaps what Dean Keller is getting at when she speaks about “providing the best environment for our students” is the fact that construction at the school’s new building continues to this day, with only a few permanent classrooms having opened last week. Current students have asked for tuition reimbursements for their inconvenience. Some students have had classes held in off-site “classrooms,” which one of them described thusly: “The place stunk like vomit and urine. There wasn’t internet for us to use or even a board for the professors to use.” Why subject an entering class — or any class at all — to these conditions?

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If you recall, TJSL was the first law school to be sued over its allegedly deceptive employment statistics. The case inspired more than a dozen other class-action lawsuits to be filed against law schools for publishing allegedly deceptive employment statistics and salary data in order to bait new students into enrolling, but the Thomas Jefferson case was the only one to go to trial. In case you’ve forgotten, this is a law school that was publicly censured and put on probation by the American Bar Association in November 2017 for being out of compliance with accreditation requirements that it have “sound admissions policies and procedures” and admit only applicants who “appear capable of satisfactorily completing its program of legal education and being admitted to the bar.” The American Bar Association seems to be on a regulatory rampage, and at this point, TJSL is just trying to make it out alive.

Look at it this way: with TJSL deciding not to enroll a class this spring, the school just saved a whole bunch of law students the trouble of taking out hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans for a 23.6 percent chance of working in a full-time, long-term job as a lawyer after graduation. Pay close attention, because we’re about to offer a very high compliment to the school: what TJSL did was highly commendable.

Instead of sentencing those would-be students along with its existing students to a lifetime of seemingly insurmountable debt (91 percent of recent TJSL graduates borrowed an average of $198,962 to pay for law school), Thomas Jefferson opted to fall on its own sword and eat the minimal profits it would have reaped from enrolling a new class this spring. After closing its state-of-the-art campus and moving into an office building, TJSL is working hard to “move foward,” and right now, that means not enrolling any additional students because it’s too much of a burden.

Will more struggling law schools follow Thomas Jefferson’s lead and stop enrolling students (or even close)? Other law schools certainly hope so. There’s a lesson to be learned here for prospective and current law students: If you continuously hear negative things about your school, perhaps it’s time to get out, before it’s too late.

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Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

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