As I write this, it is Tommie Give Day, the cleverly branded annual day of scholarship fundraising for the University of St. Thomas in the Twin Cities. I’m just about to make a small donation to my alma mater.
Making a donation to the law school you went to might seem unremarkable. Indulge me for a moment, though. I think it’s worthwhile to take a look at all the things this school has done right to entice someone like me who otherwise might be a fairly unlikely donor to this particular cause.
How Innovative Legal Teams Are Turning AI From Promise To Practice
In recent years, AI has moved beyond speculation in the legal industry. What used to be hypothetical is now very real.
Now, you might first be wondering why I think of myself as an tough donor to snag, especially considering I had a generally good experience at my law school and think I got an education substantially better than that I saw nearby peers getting at competing schools. Generally I think supporting education is a good thing, and it is even mildly self-serving to support the law school you went to as it helps bolster the profile of your school among potential employers (though alumni giving is no longer considered directly as a metric in the U.S. News rankings, and you should be looking at a better law school ratings system anyhow like the one right here at Above the Law).
All that being said, a lot of justified resentment is out there among law school graduates. Law school is too expensive, law schools allow their matriculants to accumulate way too much debt, and law schools pump out far too many lawyers considering the number of good jobs actually available to graduates.
While I don’t have the same concerns about debt as many of my cohorts, I have a few resentments of my own. You see, my law school is a Catholic institution.
This might have been a plus to me at the time I was choosing a law school, but I’ve been an atheist for over a decade now. I am truly revolted by some of the things school resources have gone to, like advocating to strip people of their reproductive rights.
Pursuing The Pro Bono Story: A Conversation With Alicia Aiken
This Pro Bono Week, get inspired to give back with PLI’s Pursuing Justice: The Pro Bono Files, a one-of-a-kind podcast hosted by Alicia Aiken.
That is a really hard thing to get over, and I’m not over it, and I will never be over it. That being said, every single person I went to that law school with who I am still close friends with has the same opinion as me on this stuff. I was helped by a good scholarship, they were helped by scholarships, and, thank noble Fortuna (she’d be a really appropriate patron goddess for a law school, wouldn’t she?) one can choose within several categories where your Tommie Give Day donation goes, enough of which are comfortably distanced from anything having to do with banning abortion.
So, check, that is one thing this law school has really done right in its donation campaign: allow donors to get their money to some needy students and away from the outright evil wing of the institution. The really big win, however, the thing that gets me onboard more than anything else, is the sense of community my law school has cultured.
More than one of those aforementioned godless close friends has called me on a previous Tommie Give Day to encourage a donation. No institution is a monolith. All institutions are made up of people, and my friends from law school are some of the best people I know. The fact that people I know and respect, people who vehemently reject the most damaging aspects of Catholic dogma, still care enough about the school to solicit a donation speaks very highly of what they felt they got out of their educations, and to what we can help provide to others like us coming up through the ranks.
Then to a far lesser extent, there is the power of raw corporate branding and rampant materialism. Although not all law schools can get away with this one — my alma mater arose from an undergraduate university that now has Division 1 athletics — they should if they can. I now have a stocking cap and a scarf, with leather chopper mittens on the way, all emblazoned with the school logo and colors as little donation incentivizing premiums over the years. Intellectualizing how my donation might help out some young misfit like myself is all well and good, yet, sometimes you also just want a new hat!
While law schools are doing a lot of things wrong, this is an example of one of them doing something right. I actually think alumni giving was a valid metric for U.S. News and should have stayed part of that ranking system in some way. It’s an imperfect measurement that nonetheless gives prospective students a pretty good idea of maybe one of the most meaningful considerations in making a decision about where to go to law school: do a lot of the graduates appreciate what they received there enough to make an annual donation, or is there a high percentage of the graduates apparently harboring regrets?
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].