<p>This is long overdue. Too many kids think there’s going to be a job waiting for them when they complete law school.</p>
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<p>Bay, I think your two points are inconsistent. “Access” includes financial access and it loans go away, so do many/most of the students, at least low income students. If so, then the Law would be only populated by the wealthy.</p>
<p>I think Bay is theorizing that without the current loan system, tuition would come down. I think that it would come down, but not by enough to allow people to work their way through as they used to in the '50s.</p>
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<p>Exactly. Law school applications are down sharply. The schools mentioned in the article as planning to cut back on their class size aren’t bottom-tier law schools cranking out unemployable graduates on borrowed money. They’re good law schools worried about erosion of their applicant pool and what it means for their ability to maintain their all-important US News rankings, and they admit as much in the article. Schools at the very top of the heap aren’t so worried, because they’ll always get the cream of the applicant crop. But schools like George Washington and UC Hastings—big law schools with pretty good reputations, but not the top tier—are going to have a hard time keeping up their GPA and LSAT medians in a shrinking applicant pool, as the people with the top stats gravitate to the top of the pecking order and they find themselves needing to fill big classes from a pool that is both shrinking in size and faltering in quality. Cutting their class size allows them to be a bit more selective in admissions, keeping up their median GPAs and LSAT scores; it’s a defensive move, not an offensive one, but it could help them in relative terms if other schools don’t follow suit. It also means a stronger s/f ratio and possibly (at least at schools with substantial endowments and strong annual giving) more resources-per-student (though the loss of tuition revenue cuts against that). It also means they’ll have fewer unemployed grads coming out the end of the pipeline, which also helps their rankings. </p>
<p>They aren’t doing this because it’s a “moral thing to do” or because they believe it benefits their students or society at large; they’re acting out of self-interest. It will operate to make the students they do admit slightly better off as the result of less competition for jobs coming from their own classmates, but there’s still enough of a lawyer glut out there that I don’t think it changes the overall job picture that much. Besides, if it has the desired impact on admission standards, it means that some people who would have been in the top quarter of the class will now be in the top third, and some who would have been just barely in the top half of the class will move to the bottom half, so those people’s individual credentials are hurt somewhat (even while everyone’s credentials are strengthened a bit by the school’s ability to maintain its ranking). But if it works, it’s hard to see why it wouldn’t set off a domino effect among similarly situated schools, with those most able to afford to lose the tuition revenue making the deepest cuts, and further separating the wealthiest schools from those less financially well off.</p>