Things for legal educators seem to be going quite well right about now. According to the National Jurist, during the latest decade law schools increased faculty by 40% on average, in stark contrast to what’s happening to Humanities faculty these days (they’re being fired a lot). This is good news for law students, as it raises the student-to-faculty ratio and gives the lecturers more time for legal scholarship. But this is also sort of terrible news for students of the law, as this increase is what accounts for nearly half of the tuition increase witnessed in the last decade. You win some, you lose some…
So, would the average law student (or pre-law student) prefer a more intimate setting or a lower price tag? I, Jodi Triplett, walked around and surveyed about eight people, who coincidentally all work in the Blueprint office, and in this very representative sample the answer was a resounding “lower tuition, obviously. Is this a trick question or something?”
Consider this: I swap my thirty-person graduate school class for an identical class, but with ten times the people, and in return I get a grand off my loans. Would I go for it? Jodi Triplett says: definitely. Even if there weren’t a financial incentive, I’d prefer the bigger classes; it’s a lot easier to get away with not doing the reading when you can hide in a gigantic crowd, gchatting the hour away.
But it’s not quite as black-and-white, as it turns out. The National Jurist reports that the increase in faculty is made to satisfy two very different goals. First, there is more and more specialization in the law, and you need more specialists to address and teach the corresponding concepts. Makes sense. But the other big goal they’ve had in mind is to increase their rankings with USNWR. By lowering the student-to-faculty ratio they get ranked higher. That added prestige leads to a higher sticker price for your education. Once again, USNWR is making the world a much better place.
By Jodi Triplett
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