Obama – make law school two years instead of three
The president is just overflowing with ideas for fixing the problems of higher education lately.
Jacob Gershman of the Wall Street Journal reports.
President Obama Backs Two-Year Law Degree
President Barack Obama on Friday said he supports the idea of shortening law school to two years, taking sides on one of the most divisive issues confronting the legal education world.
The president floated the idea in an apparently off-the-cuff remark at a town-hall meeting at Binghamton University during an upstate tour to promote education tuition reforms.
The idea of lopping off a year of law school has gained currency with practicing lawyers and some scholars as law schools struggle to convince students that getting a law degree is worth the burden of debt.
“This is probably controversial to say, but what the heck? I’m in my second term, so I can say it,” said Mr. Obama, a graduate of Harvard Law School. “I believe, for example, that law schools would probably be wise to think about being two years instead of three years.”
The president added: “In the first two years, young people are learning in the classroom. The third year, they’d be better off clerking or practicing in a firm even if they weren’t getting paid that much.”
The accreditation standards of the American Bar Association’s section on legal education require law schools to have an academic program that typically lasts three years. The ABA has resisted changing those standards.
Law students who graduated in 2012 entered the job market shouldering an average of $108,293 in law-school tuition debt, owing tens of thousands of dollars more than the median starting private-sector salary, according to U.S. News.
Comments
This comes to mind:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4
🙂
This proposal only (and I REALLY mean ONLY) works if the ABA is going to reduce the number of accredited law schools by 1/3 or more, from around 200 to 130 or less, much like Canada limits their number of law schools to prevent over-supply.
Reducing the financial burden on law students is a worthy goal. However if you do so in such a way which it further expands an already flooded market, and encourages even MORE schools to open in the process, all you have done is make it impossible for those in the “lower tier” schools to be able to ever obtain a position which will be able to service even that reduced debt.
I’ll speak from experience. I’m a solo-practitioner. It has taken me a year from getting my license to practice in Texas to get to the point where I’m AVERAGING $300 per week from my law practice (gross, not net). Fortunately I’ve had other employment opportunities due to a nearly unique skill set which have given me enough income to scrape by. I’ve had to spend thousands of dollars on “practice manuals” and the ones I couldn’t afford, I had to spend countless hours in the local Law Library reading and copying notes from largely by hand, as copies cost $.10 per sheet.
Now, in time, my income number will get larger, as I become more well known and start to gain clients, but the initial marketing is expensive, time consuming, and largely of low return value. While I work in a large population area (El Paso, TX), the vast portion of the community (60%+) classifies as “living in poverty.”
So, without some artificial barrier, all this proposal will do is increase an already strained market by making a “commodity” of the legal service.
[…] accreditation regulators open the door to two-year law-school programs, which are currently impeded by federally approved law-school accreditors. (“The accreditation standards of the American Bar […]