Law school update

This post is going to be something of a humblebrag with the humble part left out, so be forewarned.

A dozen years ago I started publishing pieces in various venues about how law schools were ripping off their students, via a combination of phony employment stats and other forms of propaganda regarding the future prospects of law graduates. Some of this work got a certain amount of attention: for example, John Grisham wrote an entire novel based on a piece I published in the Atlantic, about the predations of three particularly egregious for-profit law schools (They’re all dead now).

Anyway, the initial reaction to this work from other legal academics who noticed it was, with a handful of honorable exceptions, shrieks of outrage that I was daring to impugn the purity of essence of their noble life work, with occasional calls that I be fired for telling such reckless and cruel lies.

My own law school did in fact try to fire me, and a dozen years later its current administration is continuing to harass me in various petty and not so petty ways, as a consequence of hurt feelings, which, as any academic can attest, are things that outlast the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome.

Now one thing that anybody who does genuinely critical work that leads to things like your employer trying to fire you naturally wonders from time to time is, was all or any of this worth it, especially when the subsequent harassment motivated by that work is basically unending.

This morning I discovered some data that cheered me quite a bit in these troubled times, related in no doubt complex ways to all the foregoing.

Six years ago I published an article focused on two trends:

(1) The almost incredible rise in law school tuition between the mid-1950s and the beginning of what I called the law school reform movement around 2011 or so; and

(2) The striking decline in effective tuition — that is, the tuition that law students actually pay — that began to take place a couple of years after the law school reform movement had gotten underway, and that by 2017 had reduced the effective tuition students were paying at all law schools with the exception of the handful of elite national institutions by around 10% to 25%.

Now back in 2017 this latter trend was still pretty much brand new, and it was difficult to determine both its genuine prevalence, and especially its future trajectory. But now we finally have some striking evidence that things have changed in American law schools over the past decade, in a way that has greatly benefited those students who enrolled in law school after the reform movement began to have an effect on things.

That evidence is this: The average amount borrowed by law graduates declined by 25.5% in constant dollars between the graduating classes of 2012 and 2021 (the latest year for which data are available). Specifically, the average amount borrowed by law students, including students who didn’t borrow anything, declined from $113,720 for the class of 2012, to $84,710 for the class of 2021, in constant 2021 dollars.

Relatedly, over this same time frame, the annual number of graduates from ABA-approved law schools has declined from about 47,000 to 35,000 per year, and the employment statistics for new law graduates have improved in a way that almost precisely mirrors that decline.

So progress does happen, as hard as that can be to believe sometimes, and even in academia an windmill or two is occasionally knocked down by people who somehow never quite got their minds right.