The Shark

why does law school cost so much?

[dennis]

Are we getting more value for our buck or is this the price of prestige? The CM Law blog has found a government report that answers the question:

According to law school officials, the move to a more hands-on, resource-intensive approach to legal education and competition among schools for higher rankings appear to be the main factors driving the cost of law school, while ABA accreditation requirements appear to play a minor role. Additionally, officials at public law schools reported that recent decreases in state funding are a contributor to rising tuition at public schools.

The report is from the United States Government Accountability Office (and available here as a PDF). The report also focuses heavily on minority access to law school, and the declining presence of African American students:

Since 1994, tuition and fees at law schools and selected professional schools have increased, and trends in minority enrollment have been comparable across types of schools. At law, medical, and dental schools during this time period, Hispanics and Asians/Pacific Islanders increased as a share of enrollment or stayed at about the same level, while African American enrollment declined or stayed at about the same level.

The report links the decline in African American students to education disparities, but maybe it has something to do with the declining rate of return of a law degree?

pay-as-you-go law school?

[dennis]

Oh the irony of law schools charging future lawyers hidden fees! A student from the UVA law school has an interesting idea, the pay-as-you-go law school: 

The announcement that 3Ls planning on attending their own graduation have to toss in $55 for the pleasure to do so has highlighted the Law School’s clever use of hidden fees: You enroll for what seems to be a (relatively) reasonable tuition, only to end up being charged for all kinds of things one would have assumed to have been covered by the initial $150,000 price.

Such hidden fees have been off-putting to users of other products, for example, cell phones. The popular solution? Pay-as-you-go phone plans. Why can’t a legal education be similarly consumer-savvy? Accordingly, I suggest that UVA become the world’s first pay-as-you-go law school.

I personally applaud the new graduation fee: If there’s one thing us lawyers need to learn, it’s how to take money from helpless people who are deep in debt and without any other options. We should be thanking UVA Law for teaching us the valuable lesson that when people have already put a lot of money into something, you can just keep charging them for whatever you want and they’re too financially invested to refuse! As for my ideas about a revolutionizing legal schooling, I hope you’ve enjoyed them . . . because there’s a $15 “column fee” for reading this.

...and we wonder why we are being replaced by Legalzoom.com.

Obviously a law school would never dream of offering students a discount. A gross example is Northwestern's decision to charge students in the two-year JD program for three year's worth of law school:

Less time on campus most likely won't mean a break on tuition.

While Northwestern has not yet set the costs for its two-year program, administrators have hinted that fast-track students will be paying somewhere around the $128,016 that students shell out over the course of three years to get a J.D.

"We generally charge by the degree rather than the time served," says Van Zandt. "The real savings will be the extra year of salary students make by getting out into the marketplace faster."

That's around $150,000 and up for most Northwestern Law grads working as first-year associates at top law firms.

The Time article was obviously written by a non-lawyer who doesn't read ATL.

I have not experienced any hidden fees at UMN Law School. My school smacks us with a huge tuition bill and then spends the rest of the year mitigating our horror with an aggressive regime of free muffins and pizza. This is a pretty effective tactic so far...

more rankings, more problems: us news to blame for high tuition.

[cynthia]

According to a study released by Government Accountability Office, we can all gather 'round and blame US News (and its less popular siblings) for the rapid clip of tuition increases in the last few years.

According to my much-loved Tax Prof, the study (which came out Monday) pinpoints rankings, not accreditation, for your big bills.

From the GAO:

"According to law school officials, the move to a more hands-on, resource-intensive approach to legal education and competition among schools for higher rankings appear to be the main factors driving the cost of law school, while ABA accreditation requirements appear to play a minor role."

Prior to these revelations, the Internet was awash in ABA-blame for the problems modern law schools face. Instead, unsurprisingly, it is not the gargantuan, antiquated bureaucracy that is to blame, but the trend-obsessed and more nimble law school administrations that have subjected their institutions to the whims of PR.

A page from the study says it all: 

Of course, to add to the absurdity, as ATL calls it, this last week has seen news that federal loan levels are remaining stagnant even as tuition prices inflate. Where are you all getting the money to feed the US News monster? It's certainly not coming from your state government, anyway.

hastings mid-year tuition increase: not happening. everyone breathe!

[petra]

Hastings students anxious about mid-year tuition increases can relax – at least for now.

I caught up with law school CFO Dave Seward this evening to ask about today’s meeting where tuition was discussed. Seward assured me that there will be no mid-year fee increases at Hastings. He basically said he’d kill puppies before he let that happen. (Well, he didn’t say that, but he agreed something really drastic would have to happen before the school made such a move.)

“We feel very strongly about advanced notice,” Seward said.

A memo did go out to first- and second-years about the fees that were approved in September for the school year starting in fall of 2010. Enrollment fees will go up to $36,000 (not including health insurance and such) – up from $29,383 in the 2009-10 school year. For details, check out the memo.

Petra is a Cal Law reporter.

our favorite stanford-educated hooker, sentenced to house arrest. time to telecommute?

[dennis]

My tax professor breaks our class time up by sharing current-events pieces that he calls “Tax Stories.”

And he certainly started the week off with a bang – “Let me remind you that illegal income is taxable. There’s a Stanford law graduate named Cristina Warthen who failed to report the income she earned as a high-end call girl.”

That certainly woke us up.

Silicon Valley’s Mercury News reports that Warthen was sentenced last week to home detention after she pleaded guilty to failing to pay taxes on more than $133,000 she earned as a prostitute in 2003.

Warthen gained notoriety when she was busted as a jet-setting call girl who sold her services to pay off her Stanford Law School debts. She got her law degree from Stanford in May 2001, but quickly began to run a steamy Web site with offers to jet off for liaisons with clients in cities around the country, including New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C.

According to East Bay News, the salary she earned as prostitute was a little better than many Big Law attorneys can command:

The 31-year-old alum allegedly boasted in an Internet posting that she paid off more than $300,000 in student loans by working as an escort. [Warthen's] Web site listed a rate of up to $1,300 for two hours of work.

Cha-ching!

Things only got better for Mrs. Warthen after her high-income year in 2003. The next year she married Ask Jeeves cofounder David Warthen. She also became a model and (according to some websites) posed for magazines including Maxim and Playboy Lingerie. There really is no end to what you can do with a law degree!

Her website (not school safe) suggests that she plans to go on tour, after her home detention of course.

Read more here. Or, check out a link to the complaint over at ATL.

hastings looking to raise tuition. again. always?

[petra]

Public law schools across the country are barely done talking about bumping up the cost of a J.D. for the upcoming academic year.

UC’s Hastings is looking even farther out.

In a finance committee meeting yesterday, school CFO David Seward said California residents might be looking at a price tag of about $36,000 in academic year 2010-11, while out-of-state students might be paying $47,000. That doesn’t include health insurance and other fees, he said.

A third of the revenue from the latest fee increases would go toward financial aid.

Seward said the school is reacting to state budget cuts and fee increases at other UC law campuses. The goal is to fall just under the fees charged by the law school at UC Davis.

It seem like just yesterday that Seward prepared first- and second-years to pay $29,383 in enrollment fees in 2009-10 (.pdf).

“The good news is, we are the lowest-cost highest-value law school in California,” Seward said. “The bad news is, we’re not as low-cost as we used to be.”

The full board of directors will consider the proposal Sept. 11, after students have had a chance to weigh in.

All of the law schools in the highly regarded University of California system are raising tuition — called professional degree fees — by 10% or more.

Petra is a Cal Law reporter. 

help give $10,000 to a fellow law student

[julie anne]

What would you do for a $10,000 scholarship to (help) fund your legal education?

Would you channel your inner film noir detective? Would you rap about what inspired you to go to law school? Would you unveil your deep dark secret Billie Mays fetish?

Law students who submitted videos for and made the top 10 of Access Group's "My Inspiration" contest did.

In the contest, law students were asked to submit videos describing what inspired them to attend law school, and 10 finalists were selected from 113 eligible videos. Voters now have the opportunity to vote for their favorites through Aug. 21.

The creator of the video with the most votes gets $10,000 for school, and up to five other videos, voted on by Access Group judges, get $1,500

Sounds like an easy 10 grand, right? Just slap together a video with a family member’s camcorder of you reading your law school admission essay, and you’re golden.

Not so fast there, Mr. Demille.

Turns out, law students – surprise, surprise – went above and beyond the YouTube quality vlog and put together some pretty elaborate, professional-looking videos

Here's the list of the finalists - and their respective schools, courtesy of Access Group - from my least favorite to the one that gets my vote:

why are public law schools so expensive?

[cynthia]

The National Law Journal has a great piece up, with lots of depressing nuggets in it, about the increasing costs of a legal education at a public school. 

As we've chronicled before here at The Shark, tuition increases for the upcoming school year are largely a result of cuts to government funding and private endowments, and those cuts are being passed on as costs to the students.

"We face a cut in state funding, like many other schools, and a decline in the revenue that our endowment produces," said Kenneth Davis, dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School. "Our tuition differential will account for some of that cut funding."

The biggest exceptions to these rules? University of Virgina and University of Michigan, that rely very heavily on private funding and therefore have not seen such huge holes appear in their budgets. Those schools are increasing their tuition rates by 5 and 4%, respectively.

One possible upside to this tuition increase trend is that it may deter students from going, lessening some of the pressure on an already over-crowded job market that is struggling through the economic downturn.

"If law schools are so much more expensive, maybe people will think twice about going," [Indiana University 3L Amir Ali] said.

Maybe so, but what about all the students already locked into the legal career path? Those students who applied during the talent gluttony and are now heading into their second or third years, wishing they'd known it would cost so much to make the "investment" in their futures? I know life's not fair, but this certainly isn't, either.

Check out some sample tuition increases across the nation, after the jump.

one-step ways to get $1M to pay for law school.

[julie anne]

So, you're a law student, and you have to figure out a way to pay for your next year, two years or three years?

Sure, you can get state and federal aid, ace the LSAT to attract scholarship offers, enroll in a work-study program, or fight your way to the top of your class, but where's the fun it that?

Here are two ideas of how to pay for law school, courtesy of your fellow law students:

Appear on Who Wants to be a Millionaire. According to the New York Post, Cardozo School of Law 2L Dave Johnston used a lifeline for a question asking in which movie was "one woman writing a book, while another woman was reading the book, and yet a third was living the book." The person on the other end of the line was TruTV (formerly Court TV) personality Ashleigh Banfield, who correctly answered The Hours. Because of Banfield, Johnston won $16,000 and continued on to win $50,000.

To thank Banfield for her help, Johnston took her out to lunch. Banfield told the Post, "He took me to Gus' Place in the Village today and brought along friends from the office where he's a summer intern. But since he's using his winnings to pay the nearly $40,000 tuition for next semester, I picked up the check."

Call a lawyer on his $1 million bluff. According to the Orlando Sentinel, South Texas College of Law grad Dustin Kolodziej is suing Orlando defense attorney Cheney Mason for breach of contract.

"At issue is a statement Mason made about the state's theory of how Nelson Ivan Serrano was able to kill his former business partner, a prosecutor and two others at a Polk County manufacturing plant in 1997."

The prosecution stated that Serrano's murder plot involved buying airline tickets under three names from Orlando and Tampa airports so he could appear to be in Atlanta the afternoon of the slayings. The route involved Serrano flying from Atlanta to Orlando, driving to Bartow, where the murders occurred, and then catching a flight back to Atlanta.

The Sentinel said that Mason was confident his client couldn't have gunned down four people in the time prosecutors said he did, and told Dateline NBC he'd pay $1 million to anyone who could show otherwise.

Kolodziej took the challenge literally and videotaped himself following Serrano's route and doing so in the time Mason said couldn't be done.

Now, he wants to collect, a move that Mason says is "ridiculous".

hastings escapes budget slashing relatively unscathed.

[cynthia]

Cal Law reporter Cheryl Miller (out of Sacramento) is tweeting that Hastings will not lose its $10M annual contribution from California to cuts that were proposed by Governor Schwarzenegger last week. Instead,  budget committee voted to cut the state's contribution to the school by $1M.

For more information, check out Cheryl's full story here (free reg. req.).