Because of a series of transitions in my life — especially I suppose moving from UNC to Alabama — I've been thinking about transitions a lot more in recent months than usual. I have been reflecting a lot on my twenty-three years in the legal academy. And I've been thinking a lot about the future, as have tons of other people in this business. I have been thinking a great deal about the career trajectories of my former students and about the trajectory of law schools.
First, I little background. I usually like nothing better than to say "I told you so." Those who witnessed my twitter rant over President Trump's victory can attest to this. But in the case of my predictions about the future of law schools back in the grim days of 2009, I'm not going to take a lot of pleasure in talking about how many of predictions came true (or are coming true).
Instead, I want to talk about what I think the near and medium term future of law schools will be.
First, as to law school budgets. I was talking with a friend who's very knowledgeable about legal education recently and he said that he thought the vast majority of law schools are running a deficit. Then came a simple question, "Why?" Why are universities allowing law schools to cost them money? I guess there are a couple of rationales — one is that for so long law schools have generated money, central administrations will repay the favor and carry them for a while. And then there's the inertia of it all. I suppose one might call this the Sears rationale. Then there's the luxury good aspect. Some schools are willing to spend money on their law school because they have some excess money and see the law school as a prestige center. There can't be that many law schools for whom the extra expense is a rational expenditure forever.
How will schools get costs into alignment? First off, faculty salaries will come down (or not rise with inflation and so effectively come down) and faculty teaching loads will rise. When law schools returned more money than they cost to their parent institution, it made sense (or maybe I should say, could be justified) to pay law faculty more than arts and sciences faculty. But when law schools cost money? What's the justification for paying faculty more than your typical social sciences professor? I'm not seeing it — and neither are a lot of law schools. I'm hearing a lot of stories of pay cuts. Another de facto pay cut comes in the form of increased teaching loads, which I'm also hearing a lot about.
Then there's the matter of tuition. As I understand tuition, the "real" price of law schools has come down dramatically. As I understand it, private schools will routinely offer scholarships to students who want to get their price down to what students will pay at the local public school. This is erasing a lot of the traditional distinction between public and private schools — and I suspect that the historical distinction meant a lot less than we've often thought, in that non-elite private schools often charged about what the public schools in their regions charged. The extra state subsidy was used, I suspect, to have more programs, more faculty, and better-compensated faculty.
Second, there is the matter of the composition of faculty. We're seeing the number of faculty decline to bring them into alignment with the new, smaller size of schools.