Real estate tycoon gives law school $55 million; school’s grads hope to get jobs as lawyers some day

Even in the grim context of contemporary American legal education Chapman University’s law school has catastrophic employment numbers. Only 65 of the school’s 178 2012 graduates purportedly had jobs as lawyers (full-time jobs lasting at least a year requiring bar admission) in February of 2013, but even this number is seriously inflated by various factors.

Breaking it down:

Five of these 65 graduates were holding themselves out as solo practitioners (It’s somewhere between extremely difficult and almost impossible for a new law graduate to maintain a viable solo law practice, so graduates who report themselves as doing so are usually in a state of de facto unemployment).

Another 29 listed themselves as employed with firms of two to ten lawyers. This is too is a highly suspect classification. An unknown but significant number of these jobs are hourly contract positions, eat what you kill office sharing arrangements, and otherwise tenuous forms of quasi employment.

15 were with firms of 11-25 attorneys. At least most of these jobs are probably real (although almost invariably quite low-paying) legal jobs.

A lucky 13 graduates got jobs with mid-sized firms. Not a single graduate in the whole class got a big firm job.

So that accounts for 62 of the 65 legal jobs for 2012 grads, with perhaps half of those 62 jobs representing real positions with law firms.

Note this means that every other form of legal employment — every type of government legal job (DA, PD, regulatory agency positions etc.), all public interest jobs, all in-house positions with private companies, all judicial clerkships — yielded a total of THREE jobs for Chapman’s 2012 class.

So, realistically speaking, 20% of the class got real jobs as lawyers. The 88% of the class that took out law school loans took out an average of $133,700 in such loans, which means that with accrued interest average law school debt for those graduates was over $150,000 at graduation (this figure does not include other educational debt).

I have been told by a member of the school’s faculty that, despite its sky-high tuition (nearly $45,000 annually), Chapman balances its budget by admitting a couple of dozen young Saudi nationals into its “international” LLM program each year, even though many of these students have extremely marginal English skills.

In a word, this is exactly the kind of school that wouldn’t be accredited by the ABA, if the ABA considered “whether the school’s graduates are able to actually get some sort of legal job” a relevant criterion of accreditation for a law school. But it doesn’t, so here we are.

Or rather here we were, because Christmas has come early to Orange, California, in the form of a $55 million donation from a real estate tycoon. Chapman shall henceforth be known as the Dale E. Fowler School of Law.

It’s maddening that the U.S. tax code enables and encourages this kind of thing. Chapman’s 2012 graduating class racked up $24 million in law school debt, almost all of it in federal student loans, a very large percentage of which will never be fully repaid. Dale E. Fowler would be performing a public service if he gave Chapman University a $55 million bribe to shut down its law school, as opposed to spending that much to have his name stamped onto it. Indeed he would be doing far more social good if he dumped suitcases full of cash into random Orange County alleyways.