Can you lend me 50 pounds to mend the shed?

The Scalia Law School at George Mason University got a whole bunch of embarrassing publicity last month when it was revealed that the university was threatening to crack down on the profligate spending practices of a unit that prides itself on its sophisticated analyses on the relationship between law and economics (irony alert).

So somebody convinced the university to issue a press release, written no doubt by the law school’s administration, noting that there’s no shame in being on welfare as long as it doesn’t create a lifetime of dependency:

Recent media reports about the Scalia Law School budget deficit do not take into account the full measure of what is required to operate a highly competitive, top-ranked law school under current conditions. 

The tuition-discounting practice is common among top-ranked schools that compete for highly credentialed students. Most law schools, including the Scalia Law School, make up the difference with revenue from other programs (including LLM programs), private donations, and university support. More recently, George Mason University has been exploring additional financial support for the law school. 

Public law schools discount JD tuition in order to provide greater access to legal education, especially to first-generation attorneys. For the past several years, the law school has offered generous financial aid to support increasingly selective, and smaller, cohorts of JD students.  

The Scalia Law School budget is a reflection of the fact that, like for most public law schools, operating expenses cannot be covered with JD revenue alone. Most law schools would show similar deficits if they were to use only JD revenue.  

As it would do with any of its schools or colleges experiencing fiscal challenges, the university is working with law school leadership and the Board of Visitors to find solutions that will result in additional support to help offset the school’s operational expenses and to position it for long-term fiscal sustainability.   

The Scalia Law School remains one of the nation’s leading law schools and one of the highest ranked schools at George Mason University, with a US News ranking of No. 28 nationally and 11th among public law schools. In addition, its part-time law program is ranked No. 2 among public law schools. The Scalia Law School is one of the jewels of George Mason University.  George Mason University is committed to providing the law school with the resources it needs to remain one of the nation’s leading law schools. 

(1) “Under current conditions” means that a lot of other law schools are being run in a similarly reckless fiscal manner, so why focus on us? I mean just because we talk a lot about economics and efficiency and The Wisdom of the Market doesn’t mean we’re actually committed to paying our own bills or anything. This is theory not practice!

(2) The claim about tuition being discounted at public law schools to create greater access to legal education is just a total crock. George Mason, just like every other law school not named Harvard, Yale, or Stanford, hands out almost all of its discounting on a pure “merit” rather than need basis, meaning that tuition is discounted for students with high test scores and undergraduate grades. Financial need doesn’t come into this equation, except in a perverse way, since for extremely mysterious reasons people from high SES backgrounds tend to have higher test scores and grades than people from low SES backgrounds. So tuition discounting — which Econ 101 will tell you really means cross-subsidization, since students paying full boat are in effect paying the tuition of their fellow students who are getting discounts — is a straight up steal from the poor to give to the rich kind of wealth transfer.

(3) That law schools also get money from non-JD tuition and gifts, i.e., endowment income and annual giving, is just irrelevant to the fact that George Mason’s own law school is dead skint on its uppers, and the great Scottish poet Ewen McTeagle might put it. Law schools are at least in theory supposed to cover their own bills from their own self-generated sources of income, which all those things are. That JD tuition revenue usually doesn’t do this is neither here nor there (In fact at the really rich schools JD tuition often covers less than half of operating expenses, but these schools run surpluses because of their enormous endowments, wildly lucrative LLM and masters programs, usually for rich foreign students, etc.)

(4) When a law school is being supported by its home university, this bland observation disguises a very unappetizing reality, which is what this means in practice is that some of the tuition revenue being generated by other departments, and most particularly the “useless” humanities and social science departments that produce surplus revenue via giant introductory level undergraduate classes, is being redirected to a professional postgraduate program, that putatively produces lucrative careers for its graduates. Why undergraduate students and their families should be subsidizing the tuition of law students is a question to which I’ve never heard anything resembling a cogent answer, beyond the obviously mendacious argument that it’s crucial to keep legal education “affordable.” Legal education could be vastly more affordable than it currently is if law schools didn’t spend ungodly sums in the often self-consciously fraudulent pursuit of idiotic rankings, but I guess they don’t give out Nobel prizes for attempted economics.