Well, it’s hard to see where the end of the crisis is. But some trends in legal education are emerging and there's been a lot of talk about this the last couple months by faculty like Michael Cahill under the heading "legal education bubble."
Let’s start with the big possibilities. We often hear that law schools are counter-cyclical; during economic down-turns, when there are fewer career opportunities, people will choose to go to law school, waiting for the economy to turn around. In three years, the economy will be better and they’ll have some more skills and presumably job opportunities. But that relies on a certain optimism–that in fact the economy will be better in shape and there will be more jobs. That may not be where people’s minds are now. That is, people may be pessimistic and want to save their money. We’ll get some better sense of this in a short while, when we see what law school enrollment looks like in the fall of 2009. I had a conversation of late with someone who’s knowledgeable about applications at a lower tier law school (I’m intentionally being vague here to preserve the anonymity of that person and his/her law school). The news is not good. Applications are way off from this time last year. That may not be representative of all law schools, or even of lower tier, private law schools. But early returns are not promising.
For schools that are really tuition-driven, this could be a real problem and maybe the problem will emerge pretty quickly. Will many schools close? We haven’t seen many schools close in recent years, but I’m worried about this. And of course at this time last year I wouldn't have thought that Lehman Brothers was going to bite the dust....
Before schools close, there will be some serious restructuring. That restructuring will be about saving money, obviously. What will that restructuring look like? There are some obvious cost-saving measures. Schools can increase the number of students in their courses, so that there less need for teachers. A property class could go from 80 students to 160 pretty easily. (I wrote some about how cheaply you could run a law school back at Madisonian last spring.) This new cost-consciousness is going to crunch those parts of the curriculum that have low enrollment particularly hard. My great fear is that some of the best parts of teaching (working with students in a practicum and in writing-intensive classes) will be cut back significantly because those classes are too costly. Adjuncts are relatively inexpensive ways to staff courses and bring in some really terrific specialty courses in particular. So we may see an increase in adjuncts; they also give a real flexibility down the road, because schools are not locked in to long-term contracts.
What are some other ways to cut costs? Well, have faculty teach more. I’ve thought for a long time that teaching loads are likely to go up. A modest increase in course load may not have a huge effect on the quality of teaching–-it possible that teaching quality might even improve, because faculty will be more focused on teaching. (Rob Vischer has some apt toughts of late over at prawfs.) But a significant increase in teaching loads (more than three courses per semester) will almost certainly have a negative impact on teaching quality.
We’re looking at smaller faculties and bigger and more classes. We’re in tight times, so there’s going to be belt tightening in lots of places. How do we get to the smaller faculties? Well, well .... We’re already in the furlough stage and more of that is coming. It looks like hiring is down this year (no surprise) and I suspect next fall will be an even tougher market for faculty. I’m hoping that people who already have jobs will be able to keep them. As schools decrease their need for faculty, they will be reluctant to fill slots after retirements. But because the economy’s in such tough shape the people who might otherwise retire are likely to stay on for a while. In good times, lots of faculty left for other opportunities. I’m not sure how much of that’s going to be happening, either.
Will some of the cost savings be passed on to students? Perhaps. In an effort to keep students and stay open, some schools may cut tuition (or offer more discounts off the sticker price). But tuition-driven schools are constrained by how much they can cut tuition if they're going to keep operating.
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