Career Salaries High At Law Schools

Another Week, Another School Revamps Its Program

Change is bubbling from the ground up for law schools. In this allusion, the ground is the bottom-dwellers of law school rankings. Elon University School of Law, unranked in U.S.  News‘ 2015 rankings, announced a few weeks ago they would be slashing tuition like Wal-Mart and creating an accelerated two and a half year JD program.
Raleigh, North Carolina’s Campbell University School of Law was the most recent to offer alternate law degrees, introducing their Campbell Flex program. It is designed to give part-time students up to six years to earn a JD.
The objective of these schools is obvious—compete with other lower tier schools to attract candidates. It is these schools that are being hit the hardest with a growing cost for a JD and an unstable (at best) job market. In fact, according to an article from the Raleigh News & Observer, in 2015 there will be about 500 job openings for attorneys in North Carolina. And about 1,000 recent JD grads will take sit for the North Carolina bar. Like those odds? I didn’t think so.
The problem for these smaller schools is obvious. But a set of stats show just how dire the situation is in the trenches of the bottom tier. From 2001 to 2013, the number of accredited law schools jumped from 183 to 201. From 2009 to 2013 the amount of people taking the Law School Admissions Test dropped from 171,500 to 105,500. In other words, more schools are chasing fewer students. And someone has to lose.
Elon’s School of Law has been a perfect example of this. The school, which opened in 2006, saw applications peak in 2012 with 898 but saw just 604 applicants this year and had the lowest first-year enrollment in school history at 112. As a result, they are one of the schools to revolutionize the law school game the most drastically. Along with introducing an accelerated program and dramatically cutting tuition, Elon introduced a residency program akin to medical schools that would provide each student with a four-member life coaching team that any middle-age crisis experiencing man would be jealous of.
If competition leads to such legal education innovation, perhaps flat law school applications might not be a bad thing for a few years.
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Source: Raleigh News & Observer