Law schools are increasingly relying on less-qualified applicants to fill their classes, but according to a new analysis, those people are getting the worst deal on their education.
The data, presented this month at the Association of American Law Schools’ annual meeting in Washington, suggest that people who did poorly on the Law School Admission Test didn’t just pay more than everyone else, they also got less for their money. Low-performing students tended to go to lower-ranked schools, “where the bar passage risk is higher and the employment outcomes are less inspiring,” says University of St. Thomas School of Law professor Jerome Organ, who conducted the study. In other words, the students shelling out the most are often in the most danger of leaving law school with the bleakest prospects.
“We say law school is expensive, but it’s not expensive for everybody,” says Organ. For high-achieving applicants, tuition was often determined by the rank of the law school they chose. Organ's estimates show that in general, if you do well on the LSAT, you can save on tuition by choosing to go to a school that falls lower on U.S. News and World Report’s rankings. People who scored 165 or above on the LSAT, where the best possible score is a 180, paid $40,000 or more each year to go to a school ranked an average of seventh. That's a total of at least $120,000 for a typical three-year program. Meanwhile, some of their peers, who got the same scores, paid $10,000 less per year—$30,000 less in total—to go to a school ranked 16th, on average.
People who scored less than 150 paid an average of $32,000 a year for law school, and attended programs ranked 153rd. That's the highest average price tag and lowest average rank among all students. That high-cost, low-value scenario matters because it's affecting more people now than it did in the past. Law schools are taking in weaker students to make up for a shrinking application pool. There are fewer first-year law students this year than at any point in the past four decades, and people who do the worst on the LSAT made up about a quarter of first-year students in 2013, up from just 14 percent in 2010, according to a separate analysis by Organ. In the study, Organ assumed that bigger scholarships generally went to students with higher exam scores, acknowledging that schools give some smaller portion of aid on the basis of diversity or college grades, among other factors. He then estimated how much students paid by distributing the aid money each school said it gave in 2012 across the different LSAT categories of its entering class. To calculate average rank, Organ evaluated 146 ranked schools, and assigned a rank of 170 to an additional 49 unranked schools.
People who got the highest scores did not necessarily pay the least, partly because they paid a premium to go to more highly ranked schools. They paid $29,600 per year for a school that ranked 23rd on average. Applicants with the second-highest overall scores got the best deal of anyone, paying $26,100 per year, 18 percent less than the worst performers.
It wasn't just low-quality candidates who subsidized the tuition of high performers. Sometimes, Organ found, students at the lower end of the top-performing group missed out on savings when they chose elite schools.
As a business model, making lower-quality applicants shoulder much of the tuition cost burden may be risky, Organ says, as law schools increasingly rely on these students to fill enrollments.
“Is there a point in time where some of those students who are still coming to law school right now maybe decide that the investment risk is too great?” Organ asks. “We’ve lost the top end of the market and the bottom end has grown. What happens if the bottom end begins to shrink?”
In the meantime, people who do well on the LSAT but don’t want to pay an overwhelming amount for law school could lower their standards slightly. People who scored 165 and higher on the test paid $10,000 or less, per year, if they went to a school that ranked an average of 52nd. Those who don’t ace the LSAT have less of a choice in the matter. The lowest scorers either paid less to go to an unranked school, or way more to go to a moderately better one.
