The University of LaVerne School of Law announced that it will reduce its tuition to $25,000 per year for full time students, guaranteed flat for three years, with no other discounting for incoming 1L students. (Part time tuition will be similarly reduced and all current students will receive the benefit of this drop.)
While this is great news from a transparency point of view, the success of this approach really depends on the number of applicants in the California market and LaVerne's willingness to admit high risk students. The good news is that LaVerne has a track record of accepting high risk students and getting them to overperform on the bar.
What we are seeing with this strategy is some insight into the cost of operating an ABA accredited law school. This pricepoint suggests that if LaVerne - and perhaps many other private schools - can't fill a class with bar-passable students paying an average of $25,000 each, the school can't survive as an ABA accredited institution.
Which brings us back to Roger Dennis' prescient post, from 2011, The No Frills Law School, in which he suggested that a school might be able to run on a $20K tuition. His model assumed 167 students per class, however, which achieves an economy of scale unlikely at LaVerne.
As I've mentioned previously, in the context of Thomas Jefferson's repricing approach (which is the opposite of LaVerne, relying instead entirely on transparent discounting), these repricing strategies must be putting pressure on the stronger non-ABA, California-accredited law schools. If I'm committed to to paying $75,000 to get a JD either way, I'll take an ABA-accredited degree any day.
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