This is newsworthy, but hardly the big news some people initially suggested. Thomas Cooley Law, a school with five campuses in two states, has announced that it will not matriculate any 1L's this fall to its Ann Arbor shop. Students admitted to Ann Arbor are welcome to attend Cooley at one of its other four campuses. The school has also announced faculty and staff layoffs and other cutbacks. The school does not have a present plan to shutter the Ann Arbor campus.
In 2013, Cooley had a total of 2,334 students enrolled. It had 907 1L's last fall with a median LSAT of 145. The school's total size has dropped significantly over the past few years. In 2010-11, the school enrolled a total of 3,931 JD students.
This announcement will have very real implications for faculty and staff who lose their jobs, and it may change the overall Cooley environment. But for people watching closely to see a law school close, keep moving. I suspect that several other schools have been even more aggressive than this in their efforts to reduce costs.
Cooley has actually been smart in its faculty hiring. By hiring faculty members who, mostly, could not get jobs at other schools, they can fire faculty members without fearing a mass exodus.
Cooley will remain standing because it is well-run and has a unique model. Given the high cost and poor outcomes, IMHO it is a model that really harms the overwhelming majority of its graduates, but it is a unique model. It will survive.
I admire and respect what schools like Iowa, and even Case Western (despite the scandals) have been doing. I suspect that we'll see 10 to 20 schools close by the end of the decade and many more revisit reality with enrollments that are much smaller than the go-go 2000s. If federal funding gets revamped in that time frame, I could envision many more closing — and federal funding will be revamped at some time.
2014 will begin the lean times for law schools. The historically huge (read: over-subscribed and unsustainable) classes have left, leaving somewhere in the order of 110,000 total JD matriculants. This is the normal and sustainable number of matrics, and I can envision as few as 100,000 JD students in the law schools by decade's end. Again, that's not a bad thing. That's still no shortage of lawyers. It just means that within 10 years, a substantial majority of law degree holders might have an actual shot of doing something with it.
I'm wondering if the prospective Cooley faculty layoffs will be precedent setting for other schools that are eying a reduced faulty size.
I doubt it, Former Editor. Most other schools see Cooley as a constant example of what not to do. However, other, more respected schools have already, supposedly, engaged in faculty layoffs, so law schools will not have to rely on Cooley for justification.
I was thinking more along the lines of legal precedent, not incentive to perform the layoffs themselves. I don't know what the faculty handbook at Cooley looks like, but if it is similar to that in many schools, the layoff of a tenured or tenure-track professor could, arguably, be a violation of the handbook's language. I've seen faculty members make that argument, and, on the theory that the handbook is part of the faculty employment contract, reference the possibility of legal action were layoffs to happen.
So, what I was speculating about is whether any of the Cooley faculty let gos might sue, and, if so, whether we might get a court ruling on that issue.
Former Editor, That would be interesting. I have heard through the grapevine that a couple of schools have claimed the financial out in the handbook (e.g., schools are allowed to fire tenured faculty if the school if the school is in such bad financial shape that it has no other choice). But I don't think those actions have been challenged yet. Pre-tenure faculty usually don't have much protection other than fear of negative press.
Cooley "peer" schools have been reducing faculty, right and left. Cooley is not really ahead of the curve in that respect. If anything, they are lagging just slightly. Most such reductions have not made the news (that I have seen).
I put peer in quotes because I was referring to relative admissions numbers (LSAT etc.) and not necessarily business models or practices.
JayA, yes, financial exigency as a means for getting rid of tenured faculty exists most everywhere I'm aware of (though I'm certainly not familiar with anything close to a majority of schools). It is one of the things that made some of the arguments for getting rid of the job security part of the ABA standards so disingenuous. Regarding the lack of challenges to such a move and only negative press being a major deterrent to letting pre-tenure faculty go, you are spot on as far as I can tell.
ATLProf – mind sharing which schools those are? I have heard of John Marshall (Atlanta), Oklahoma City, Vermont, Florida Coastal…
Appalachian can be added to that list. There was an article on TaxProf a while back. I think Charlotte, but I can't remember for certain, and I don't think it made the news. Albany (buyouts a year or so before the brouhaha, although I have that very secondhand). I'd be shocked if Arizona Summit (nee Phoenix School of Law) wasn't also reducing if their enrollment numbers called for (same ownership as Charlotte and Florida Coastal). I know one other that has elected not to replace a significant number of voluntary departures, but I can't mention the name due to promises made.
Given it's the sort of thing most schools want to keep very, very quiet, I'd assume there are ones I haven't heard about. My grapevine is far from universal.