Is The Moment Ripe? Notable Increase In Law School Applications

Dr. Pangloss, where are you?

This posting ignores so many issues.

First, the astonishing lengths that many law schools have been going to in their desperate efforts to get applications. Most tier 2 and tier 3 law schools are waiving (outright) application fees, postponing application cutoffs and contacting unlikely applicants with "apply now" "come-ons" akin to time-share hucksters (for example GMAT and GRE test takers.) Of course these activities have scared up some extra applications – but the big question is how many will of these no risk, no commitment applicants will matriculate? Remember, one effect of recent "negative coverage" as well as the many law suits, is that law schools are this year being effectively compelled to finally make semi-honest disclosures about outcomes – and it does not look pretty. It would seem that any sensible student, who had made multiple applications to law schools, for free, and secured an offer from a low ranked school, would, on seeing the hiring and salary data have second, third and fourth thoughts.

Second, the applications at issue were mostly for those who took the LSAT last year – when the economy looked pretty poorly. All the data shows hiring is up and a recovery underway. A stronger economy has a big negative impact on all graduate school matriculations.

Third, many law schools, especially those in the second and third tier (and many by all accounts in the PA area) are filling seats by offering massive tuition discounts to most of the class – " very, very low tuition" equates to a huge drop in revenue – and I take it from Prof. Filler's posts that Earle Mack is one such school. How are schools going to cope with collapsing tuition even if they do fill the seats. It might be worth reading this posting to get a sense of what may happen:

http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202600579767&slreturn=20130423060818

Fourth, if law schools "bomb" their admission standards, there will be a bar exam "crisis" three years down the road (even for the notoriously easy PA bar), which might raise accreditation issues. Some of the students schools like Drexel and Widener are now admitting based on current anecdotal reporting would have serious trouble passing a bar exam. Of course a 159 LSAT will go somewhere in PA – Drexel's median last year was 157 with a quarter of the class under 154!, Widener's media was 153! Villanova (if you believe them) was letting in students at 155. Temple is so desperate it has established:

"an alternative discretionary admissions process which avoids over-reliance on the LSAT or any other arbitrary and abstract measuring factor in the admissions process called 'Sp.A.C.E.'"

which as far as anyone can tell consists of check for a pulse, can he/she sign the financial aid application.

But what is really astonishing is the suggestion that Philadelphia is the place to go to law school. The Philadelphia area has six law schools, Penn, Temple, Villanova, Rutgers-Camden, Widener, and Drexel – Pennsylvania also has Pittsburgh and Duquesne and another Widener campus – and that is before you consider the impact of law schools in Maryland and Delaware and the many "national" law schools situated an hour or so away. It is massively oversupplied with law school capacity. Admittedly as the examples above show, PA law schools are scraping the applicant barrel hard, but that too reflects outright desperation.

We are a few months away from seeing what actually happens. I predict that it will not be pretty.

"Third, many law schools, especially those in the second and third tier (and many by all accounts in the PA area) are filling seats by offering massive tuition discounts to most of the class – " very, very low tuition" equates to a huge drop in revenue "

From what I've gathered, law schools play a 'bait and switch' game here; their offers guarantee that most of the scholarship winners will lose them for 2L and 3L. That means that the real discounts are far less (for most students). I would also guess that these schools will raise 2L and 3L tuition quite a bit, to make up for the shortfall, since they're taking painful 1L cuts.

Does anybody know how much schools are raising their 2L: and 3L rates this year? It'd make sense to treat these people like the captive market that they are.

To paraphrase Winston Wolf, let's not start rubbing each other's shoulders just yet.

If my math is right, there's still a drop in applications from January 2013 to May 2013 compared to 2012 — it's just that the drop isn't as severe as the preceding period.

In any event, I'd be really interested to see when the new applicants who popped up this period took the LSAT. There's a plausible story to tell that the late applicants are the college grads who realized that they weren't going to land an attractive job after graduation and decided to just go to law school instead. One would expect that their numbers would be affected less by the crappy legal job market than would people who have a legal career as a longstanding goal.

Anecdotal stories are suggesting that many are making the tuition discount permanent and not based on a so-called scholarship with class rank conditions. It seems that many applicants have wised up. Also, while some law applicant bulletin board- blogs are extremely puerile, they serve the role of getting out details of tuition breaks, discounts, application fee waivers, etc. The result is a much more informed applicant pool than in recent years. And if the law students themselves don't look, their friends and family are looking.

Law school applications ≠ bums-in-seats (matriculating students)
bums in seats (matriculating students) ≠ full tuition

I would add that the 2L and 3L transfers for this year and next will be interesting to watch too.

Thanks, MacK. One of the things which interests me is that much of this data wasn't really available even a few years ago. For example, from what I gathered schools would count all employed students in their employment percentage, and then calculate mean salaries only for the subset of students with permanent, full-time jobs.

In the long run, it looks like this information getting out will lead to major changes within a few years, and radical changes within the decade.

I wouldn't call this "good news," more "less bad news."

Of course there are still several hurdles for an admin at Widener, Drexel, Temple, or Nova. You have to get admitted students to matriculate, they have to do so at prices significantly higher than what the degree is worth for the median student, and you have to retain them after the first year.

Given the common wisdom on the forums MacK mentioned, all three of those are less likely propositions now than they were in 2009 when I decided to go to school.

Temple's Sp.A.C.E. program is over 30 years old … as is easily discoverable on the school's website. Good research, MacK!

"applications are up. Of course, they're not actually up compared to last year"

Are things so bad that law professors feel the need to lie?

Judging by his poor command of facts, I'd say Mack did not take legal research & writing at my alma mater Temple Law. My LRW professor would have laughed me out of class if I had been so careless in my research.

Steven, to which facts are you referring? Please be more specific with your criticism.

Steven Freedman – did I say Sp.A.C.E. is recent? Did your legal research and writing instructor teach critical reading skills.

Sp.A.C.E. and programs like it are now being used to try to deal with the fall in applications from candidates with decent LSAT scores, GPAs and undergraduate degrees – trying to make a voracious money grab seem somehow virtuous. It will look that way until the Bar exam and job search looms.

"Temple is so desperate it has established:

"an alternative discretionary admissions process which avoids over-reliance on the LSAT or any other arbitrary and abstract measuring factor in the admissions process called 'Sp.A.C.E.'" which as far as anyone can tell consists of check for a pulse, can he/she sign the financial aid application."

This could be taken to suggest that the "desperate" action was in response to what the post and thread are talking about– the current collapse of applications to law schools. I've never heard of Sp. A.C.E, but if it's 30 years old, the desperation is of much longer duration.

Nitpicking about whether or not the Temple program is of recent vintage seems a remarkably superficial objection to an otherwise cogent set of issues raised by MacK. If that's the best opposition that can be mustered, can we assume MacK has won his point?

For my part, I was not nitpicking or speaking in opposition to Mack's overall point. As I said, I had never heard of Sp. A.C.E., and but for the intervention of SF, a reader might think the program an example of a recently thought up attempt to deal with the current crisis. You wouldn't want someone to rely on that and repeat it. If you want to say Mack "wins" some point, go ahead. Fine by me. But "the case" can be made without saying/suggesting things that are not right.

My comment was not addressing yours specifically, but more that it was the third of a string of comments relating to one minor, tangential comment in MacK's set of issues that might have been misleading, the other two of which attacked the quality of his research in general and his "poor command of facts," without addressing more than that very minor point.

It may be worth pointing out that the program is not a recent development, but that fact does not mean it isn't now being used to admit an applicant pool that Temple would not have admitted in the past. In any case, whether or not MacK may have been misleading in that single statement does not appear to undermine his broader arguments, which none of the comments about the Temple program address.

My tongue in cheek statement had a dual purpose: 1) to praise the fine legal education I received at Temple Law School, and 2) to encourage posters to refrain from hyperbole and shoddy argumentation.

The only hyperbole and shoddy argumentation that I have seen in this entire thread has been your attack on MacK for a "fact" that you have yet to name. Everyone else seems to be engaged in a constructive debate.

Steven, please elaborate the specific argument of MacK's that you found to be "shoddy."

Dan,

Can you explain how it makes economic sense to spend $150,000-$200,000 on a legal education in today's market?

You keep using that word, "increase." I do not think it means what you think it means.

I meant to ask,

is it your contention that applications = matriculations?

Colm MacKernan really ought to have better things to do with his time then pretend his wish that law faculty lose their jobs constitutes a "prediction" in any meaningful sense.

Let's assume that your hypothesis is correct, and these 58,000 rational maximizers are applying because they are attracted by lower effective tuition and a wide selection of schools.

What happens next year if law schools can't afford to offer the same or greater discounted tuition to students in their selected GPA/LSAT stratum, or the year afterwards? My understanding of this phenomenon suggests that law schools spend every dollar they take in from students, and so a minority will live off their endowments or state support while a majority is forced to accept students previously beneath their cutoffs to pay full freight (or closer to it, anyway) for the "good" applicants. Awareness of real effective tuition is something that is unlikely to change in the near future; the same can be said of awareness that the closer one pays to sticker price, the more one subsidizes someone else's tuition. Even if we have reached a floor for applicant numbers for the next five years, why would that matter to law schools unless it also sets a floor from which law school incomes may stabilize or rise?

How many central administrations care if their law school makes money? It used to be that law schools were set up as money-making divisions. Now they don't seem to care. The answer to this question will have a lot to do with how many schools shut down.

Brian Leiter really ought to have better things to do with his time than trawling about on the net trying to identify commenters whose opinions he doesn't like. But he doesn't. Because he's a law professor.

Of course no one can predict the future. I recall on some other site people confidently predicting that dozens of law schools were going to close by the fall of 2011 or 2012. Others talked about about a smaller number. Predicting how many and what laws schools will close is the least productive part of this important discussion. But it seems to satisfy some need.

With respect to the above posting. A few months ago I received an e-mail from Brian Leiter, that was an implied threat to disclose my name if I continued posting on legal fora. Triangulation with others that received similar e-mails at the same time led to a clear conclusion that name data had been obtained from this blog – the Faculty Lounge. Many here will recall the controversy at that time. Initially Dan Filler "blew off" questions as to whether he had given names to Brian Leiter, or made them available to him in any other way. Very belatedly he denied it.

When this posting was made yesterday I contacted Dan Filler, informed him of it, and asked him to take it down. His response was flippant and indeed dishonest "I have not taken down all the unproven claims about Leiter from the earlier fray." In a Leiteresque manner this is of course true – he did not take down ALL the claims – just many of them. Now people can choose to believe Dan Filler's denials, but his willingness to abet Brian Leiter's activities (I notice that Leiter lacked the guts to use his own name in the post above), would tend to lead any reasonable person to regard his denials as false. To put it simply, he agrees with Leiter's conduct, he allows it, who thinks he does not assist it.

I also contacted the Dean of Drexel Law School. His response was along the lines of the internet is a wild and crazy place. He also said for the record that Drexel University hosts the faculty lounge on his servers, but at the same time seemed quite happy with the controversial conduct at issue. Of course since as the "Founding Dean and CEO" of a recently established law school, he too may not like criticism and certainly could be expected to endorse Dan Filler's post starting this thread.

In any event, for the future, everyone ought to associate this and other episodes with Dan Filler.

With respect to MacK's comment at 4:57,

I try to stay out of these kind of disputes and I think it probably a poor use of everyone's time to revisit the alleged leak of ISP and email addresses of anonymous commentors last March. But I do not want to let this most recent comment pass without some kind of response because there are a lot of assertions in MacK's comment that he passes off as established facts.

I said "alleged leak" because there were other possible sources of the information. MacK posts comments all over the place. His identity could have come from a number of blogs — or indeed from a diligent search of the internet — I should imagine. Until there is proof — not the assertions by an anonymous commentator — that Dan leaked information, it is a mistake "to associate this and other episodes with Filler."

I hope and expect that our readers are discerning enough to resist the mob mentality. Sometime soon I may post a little on what that episode last March says about law and norms on the internet. I think it's a really telling episode of how communities on the net — even legally trained communities that should be more discerning — decide "facts" without a whole lot of investigation.

I would have hoped that Dan Filler possessed the good judgment not to allow a post he put up on the The Faculty Lounge to be employed by Brian Leiter to out a formerly pseudonymous commenter, in the pursuit of one of Leiter's many obsessive and sordid little cyber-grudges.

Filler's refusal to put any limits on the increasingly disturbing behavior of his mentor can't give observers much confidence in his denials that he didn't out MacK to Leiter.

Dan had his chance to show that he did not intend to facilitate Leiter's activities. It was given to him. He chose to do nothing. That may not be proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but it establishes for me and for many other that Dan supports, abets and allows this activity. Why Alfred do you think he does not also assist.

In any event, Dan Filler has done nothing to clear this up, Leiter has boasted of receiving leaks – someone did it and it was someone at this forum – a fact established by the triangulating the other leaked names. It is disingenuous to pretend that you do not know of the other people who this was done to.

Dan can live with the widely accepted view that he was the leaker. I certainly have no sympathy for him, nor do numerous others.

I was one of the people who received emails from Brian Leiter in March, at an email address that was only known to 3 blogs: Faculty Lounge, Volokh, and Lawyers, Guns, and Money. The responsible blog would have remained a mystery if not for the stories of MacK and dybbuk, who experienced something similar at the same time. The connection between all three incidents was this blog.

The standard of evidence for "proving" that Brian Leiter and The Faculty Lounge conspired to do this is whatever you want it to be. This isn't a criminal trial. Genuine proof beyond all doubt is obviously impossible to acquire, so it makes sense for certain people to present that as the relevant standard. Ultimately it comes down to whether you find the word of Paul Campos or Brian Leiter more credible. Filler may or may not have played a role, but somebody at this website did and Brian Leiter knows who that is.

I think BLRT says something absolutely correct above, and one thing that's incorrect. It is quite right that there is no specific standard of proof involved here, and thus that absent general agreement on such a standard, it is likely to become "whatever you want it to be." I think it's inaccurate, however, to say that "ultimately it comes down to whether you find the word of Paul Campos or Brian Leiter more credible." One might reasonably doubt the word of both. Moreover, and this was my objection earlier, treating this dispute as one between those two parties alone does not give adequate agency to Dan Filler, ultimately treats his own reputation as little more than collateral damage, and discounts the possibility that one might find Dan himself more credible than either of the other two parties.

Both those reasons, Dan, lead me to suggest that you either close comments on this thread or require that they actually be germane to the post. If the only alternative were total silence on an issue some people, perhaps understandably, want to continue pursuing, I'd encourage you to let it go on. But it's not the only alternative; there are many other places people can have this discussion, or indeed they could start their own websites.

You all have done some good, if contestable, posts on law school issues here recently; you seem to have done a good job of keeping people on point and civil without forbidding strong disagreement; and clearly even some people who worried about the disclosure of their identities before the Faculty Lounge clarified its policies felt that those discussions were valuable enough to keep commenting here. I know it's a holiday weekend, but I encourage you to exercise a stronger hand in keeping the discussion on the rails.

This thread was used by Brian Leiter to out a pseudonymous commenter. Discussion of that act, and more precisely of Dan Filler's decision to allow the thread to be used for that purpose, is very much "germane to the post."

The following facts are not in question:

(1) Several weeks ago, Brian Leiter sent threatening emails to MacK, Dybbuk, and BLRT.

(2) The only blog from which Leiter could have gotten the email addresses of all three of these posters was The Faculty Lounge.

(3) Leiter's co-blogger Dan Filler had access to the three email addresses someone gave to Leiter — an act which made Leiter's subsequent cyber-harassment possible.

(4) Filler allowed Leiter to out MacK in the comment thread to this post, and continued to do so after being asked by MacK to remove Leiter's comment.

If Dan Filler is now suffering further "collateral damage" to his professional reputation, he has only himself to blame.

"The following facts are not in question." LOL! All the "facts" are in question, and were questioned and denied by posters here and elsewhere.

Paul,

As far as I can tell the clarified policies regarding disclosure of identities has not in fact been published – promised, but not published.

As for Dan Filler – he made the choice to expose his reputation, when he decided not to delete a post transparently made by Leiter – and took it. Dan Filler is a grownup, he has to live with that choice and the impact on his reputation, for good or ill. He has transparently at least allowed and facilitated Leiter's campaign – and I am convinced he leaked.

I provided Dan Filler and indeed his dean with the evidence of Leiter's threat – so Dan Filler could easily see that the posting at issue was a fulfilment of that effort at blackmail. Dan Filler chose to allow it – and indeed made a flippant and disingenuous reply.

As for Alfred's comments, they too are somewhat disingenuous. Leiter launched an outing campaign over a few days, contacting multiple previously anonymous people over e-mail addresses that were private. It was evident that after years of bugging people at various blogs for identity information, someone had, in a single act, made available to him the e-mails and identities – and when challenged Leiter bragged that he had been provided the information. SImple triangulation led to a single blog of 3 candidates that could be the source – this Blog – not Prawfsblog, not Volokh (where Leiter would be pretty unwelcome (as perhaps both myself and Campos), but the Faculty Lounge. Thus it was one of those with access at this Blog that gave Leiter the information. Dan Filler by his conduct, his relationship with Leiter, the manner in which he has allowed Leiter to conduct himself at this blog had put himself firmly in the frame. Unless someone else with the requisite access admits to being the leaker, Dan Filler looks very very guilty.

Paul,

On further considering your post. How is Dan Filler supposed to reconcile taking you suggestion of closing their thread to off-topic posts, in order to protect himself, with his decision to leave Leiter's Anon post up.

I really think you need to address the intellectual and ethical inconsistency of this proposal?

With respect to Paul Campos' comment at 7:49,

Thank you for the concise comment, because I think you have gone to the crux of the issue.

Without re-litigating the entire March dispute again — everyone can go back and read the comments there — I want to make clear that we're dealing with unsupported allegations here. This is now a guess based on an inference from Dan's support of a free speech principle. And from his refusal to be bullied into responding to the demands of a self-appointed investigator a while back. Dan allows more latitude on comments to his posts than I typically do on mine. To take one related example, Dan left up two of MacK’s comments that named every permanent blogger and every guest blogger at this blog as potential leakers. Dan left those posts *by MacK* up. Having a robust free speech regime is different, however, from giving information on ISP and email addresses of commentors to anyone else.

As to the repeated references to disclosure of email addresses by the faculty lounge. (Such as Paul Campos’ point 2 on his 11:24 am comment.) Where did we supposedly get these email addresses? Certainly MacK did not give us his email address, did he? Where did he do that?

I ask readers to keep in mind the difference between a guess based on association and more direct evidence. I'm not going to be responding point-by-point on this. The burden is on the people making allegations to come forward with substantial evidence demonstrating that the "leak," if one even occurred, came from Dan or from this blog. Are we really going to take the assertions of someone whose moniker “BLRT” is short for “Brian Leiter’s Rotting Teeth”? Are you guys being serious here?

We should see the emails, then they should demonstrate that the email addresses and ISP addresses they used were posted here and never posted on other blogs. Such evidence – not assertions based on anger towards Brian Leiter — has never been produced, to my knowledge.

If everyone would pull their heads out of the rabbit hole (or elsewhere) for a moment, you might realize how inconsequential this Campos v. Leiter v. MacK v. Filler stuff is to anyone not immersed in your internecine Internet warfare.

Actually, it's by far the most interesting thing on this site.

Alfred,

Your blog requires commenters to leave their email addresses. The three commenters Leiter harassed used email addresses when commenting here that they collectively used on just one blog: this one. Furthermore your blog collects the ISP addresses of anyone who comments. One of Leiter's harassing emails included the ISP address of one of the TFL commenters.

I've seen the emails Leiter sent to these three commenters (as well as several from other targets of his harassment). All three of these people contacted me independently. A simple process of elimination makes it certain that Leiter received the emails they used to post here (two of the email addresses were throwaways which the commenters had used almost nowhere else) from someone at this blog.

Didn't BLRT and MacK say that there were three blogs that could have had their email addresses?

Want to agree with 3:52 pm. For love of God, close this thread and save MacK, Campos, and the others from embarrassing themselves further.

Leiter and Filler are the ones being embarrassed, or at least they should be. Plus Alfred Brophy, who evidently doesn't have a clue as to how his own blog works.

In rereading this thread more carefully, I see that I owe one major apology to MacK, and one important modification of what I said earlier. On the first point, I must confess I read the thread so quickly that I did not even see (what I assume is) his full name used; I assumed when I wrote that if there had been such a post, it had been deleted. That's a big error on my part, for which I apologize. It may come as some slight comfort to him that it was so easy for at least one reader not to see it (and that even now I have forgotten his name), but if it were my name being used I sure as hell wouldn't miss it, and others didn't, so I doubt it's much comfort.

I'm ambivalent on what the exact ethics of naming anonymous commenters are, and that ambivalence might be added to slightly in instances where someone uses a screen-name that is so close to his or her actual name. But I don't want to make too much of that ambivalence. As I've said on my blog, I think the appropriate response, as a general rule, to comments or commenters one thinks don't belong on one's blog is to block comments or commenters, not to reveal the identity of the commenter. (More than that, I think blog administrators *ought* to block some comments and commenters, to keep their comments threads from becoming cesspools.) I wouldn't reveal the name of a commenter in ordinary circumstances, and if I ever thought extraordinary circumstances applied I would do it under my own name so I could take personal responsibility for doing so. So I disapprove of the anonymous commenter's action here. I do continue to think most of this comment thread was not germane to the main post and should have been cut. But that definitely goes for the "outing" comment as well, and I would have deleted it swiftly if it were my own blog.

The modifications above are important ones, and my apology to MacK is sincere. Beyond that, I don't think there's anything else in my comment I would change.