Law schools like to talk about their value. In this day and time, when most law schools cannot manage to keep tuition under control, there is no such thing as intrinsic value to a legal education with the exception of bar passage rate and the overall cost of a legal education. All else is extrinsic and it should be ignored as little more than hucksterism on the part of law schools to otherwise justify the princely price on criteria that is just not that important.
Even lists, such as The National Jurist list of Best Value Law Schools, have to be taken with a grain of salt, for a good part of the list is made up of state supported law schools that only offer lower rates to their residents, or religious-based law schools that offer the best rates to those of their faith. But, mainly these lists are being perverted by all law school raising their tuition through the stratosphere, making those that are merely slightly less unreasonable seem to be a value.
A website homepage today is the place where a law school presents what it believes are the values it possesses to the world. So, what are those values? In my mind, a law school tells you its priorities not only by what it makes easily available on its website, and espeicially its homepage, as what it does not tell you or makes difficult to find.
For most law schools, it is certainly not about providing its graduates with an affordable legal education.
Case in point (but there are many more) is the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law of Faulkner University. It is on the National Jurist List. Yet, when you go to its homepage it lists its Mission Statement as the defining reason anyone should attend. Its mission is to (1) provide an "excellent legal education"; (2) "promote a Christian environment"; (3) obtain and retain a competent faculty; (3) attract a "diverse student body"; (4) provide students with "meaningful resources"; (4) "contribute to discussion of the relationship of faith"; and (5) "regularly reassess the program of legal education".
Nowhere on this mission, or on its homepage, does the law school provide a prospective law student with with the cost of its legal education. No link on the home page makes clear to the student to what the cost of its legal education is or might be found.
Only after a great deal of searching do you realize that the law school bunches or hides tuition and fees on a page call "Consumer Information". (Consumers by the way are not people as much as they are statistics). Here, you discover that the great value the law school represents is a present tuition, no counting fees, of $31,000.00 per year.
Another way to look at this is that a costs of legal education, not counting certain tuition increases during the term of education, books and materials, fees, and living expenses will be at least $93,000.00. In reality this is deceiving because with tuition increases and fees alone, the costs will likely be in fare in excess of $100,000.00 by the time anyone graduates.
Most law schools today want to promote their new facilities, either built, in the process of being built, or in the planning stages. Or, the cost of their extensive libraries, even though most what is needed for a legal education is now on a student's laptop. Understand, these are monuments to the law school's vanity and most often results only in outrageous tuition.
While most law schools complain about the difficulty in making ends meet, most of their websites are testaments for spending out of control, spurred on by the thought that their students can simple borrow more and more money in the way of student loans, family contributions and credit cards to scrape their way through.
How do we get this problem under control?
It is hard to say. But, we need to insist that each law school must:
1. Have a large red button on the banner of its homepage for anyone reviewing the the law school online to view its tuition and fees. It should be front and center so nobody can be tricked into substituting all of the other glitz for value until the law school accounts for the costs of its education.
2. Disclose how long on average it will take a law school graduate to pay off his or her student loans if the full amount of tuition and fees are financed and only typical minimum payments are made each month on that debt.
3. Much like cigarette packages must have dire waringing, explain the consequential effect of a graduate defaulting on students loans, as opposed to defaulting on any other type of debt in this country.
4. Disclose all forms and the full amount of compensation paid to the law school dean.
5. Much like Cooley Law, have a calculator that states how much a student is likely to receive in scholarships from the law school should they apply and get accepted.
6. If conditional scholarships are offered, to detail for the student how many students are provided those scholarships, what percentage are capable of maintaining those scholarships and, if based upon maintaining a particular grade point average, what percentage of students at the law school maintain that level of grade point average.
7. Provide a tuition guarantee program ensuring each entering student the same cost for their education for the full three or four years of study.
8. Required to present a realistic estimate of living expenses while attending law school.
9. Require that any law school building program be paid for without any contribution from tuition and fees.
10. Get rid of the paper, including most text books, which cost too much and rely primary on published cases which are already available over the student's computers and their WestLaw subscription.
11. Do not allow law school professors to profit off their student by creating course packs or texts that primarily rely on published cases, including outlines or syllabi that primarily refer to case law.
12. Require liquidate damages to be paid for any information used or disclosed that is not absolutely accurate by a law school.
I would suggest that these requirements, and others, could be enforced as requirements for accreditation by the ABA, if either the law schools or the ABA actually cared about their law students as opposed to the amount of money to be made off the student.
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