Law Schools Slash Tuition—But Will They Come?

The NLJ also gives us a very helpful synopsis of other recent law school bargains:

Pennsylvania State University Dickinson School of Law announced it will offer $20,000 annual tuition grants to all admitted Pennsylvania residents starting next fall. That grant will cut tuition costs almost in half for recipients. The school has also seen enrollment tumble, particularly at its campus in Carlisle, Pa. It maintains a second campus in University Park, Pa.

The University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law; the University of Akron School of Law, the University of Cincinnati College of Law, Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law have also announced tuition cuts in the past year.

Sadly, however, tuition sales are not happening (yet) in more glam locations. So far, it’s mainly the big farm and Rust Belt states that are trying to lasso you to their law schools.

Hope you like the taste of corn or the smell of coal.

2. What?! LSATs might not be necessary to get into law school? The law school at Rutgers University at Camden has been admitting students who had not taken the LSATs, and the ABA is not amused. In fact, the ABA has fined the school $25,000. Reports the NLJ:

From 2006 to 2012, Rutgers-Camden ran a special program that admitted students using scores from other graduate tests—including the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE), the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) and the Medical College Admission Test (MCAT), according to the censure issued by the ABA’s Accreditation Committee.

The school did not obtain the ABA’s permission to do so, and did not evaluate or provide evidence that those alternative tests are valid and reliable predictors of success in law school.

So why did Rutgers-Camden use this ruse? You guessed it–it has to do with its ranking:

The censure notes that the alternative admissions program helped the law school to increase the size of its new classes and improve its acceptance rate without hurting its LSAT percentile scores, which schools must report annually to the ABA and which factor heavily into U.S. News & World Report’s influential law school rankings.

I am not a fan of standardized tests but substituting LSATS with GMATs or GREs (much less MCATs) seems unfair and a bit ridiculous. I mean, why stop there? You might as well use the SATs or the ERBs (that’s the test for private school kindergarten applicants) to select the future lawyers of America.

3. Portrait of Nelson Mandela as a law student. Interesting interview with George Bizos, Mandela’s lawyer and law school friend. (Al Jazeera; hat tip—Above the Law)

Click here to vote for the Careerist as Top ABA Blog in category of Careers/Law Schools. (Voting ends December 20, 2013)

E-mail Vivia Chen: [email protected] Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/lawcareerist