W I T N E S S E T H:

Save law students tens of millions of dollars: opt out of new casebook editions

Two years ago I blogged about my decision to use an older edition of my Contracts casebook instead of the newer edition. This saved my contracts students about $200 each which totaled about $10,000 for the class. The law of Contracts changes only glacially, and the students miss out on little by using an older edition. Although the cost of casebooks is only a fraction of the cost of tuition, the students appreciated the gesture that put some money back in their pockets.

This year I am doing the same thing with my Corporations class, although I'm not buying all the books myself as I did in my Contracts class. (The expense was minimal but keeping track of hundreds of pounds of books was a nuisance.) Corporations changes a bit faster than Contracts, especially to the extent one teaches securities regulation as a part of the class. Still 90%+ of the material hasn't changed since the 2010 edition date.

This practice does not work well for all subject areas. For example, I do not assign older editions in Securities Regulation class, which changes a bit too fast. 

I hope other law school professors will follow this lead and assign older editions, especially for 1L classes such as Torts, Contracts, and Property. Such a practice adds little to the professor's workload (and may actually be easier as there is no need to update a syllabus for a new edition), and would save law students tens of millions of dollars in the aggregate. There are many ways to lighten a law student's financial load, if only we take a moment to put ourselves in their shoes from time to time.

POSTSCRIPT UPDATE: Several commenters on Facebook and Twitter have suggested developing one's own materials instead. Although that solution is right for some professors, it is not likely to appeal to a wide swathe of them as it takes a great deal of time. Unless one teaches a highly customized course, that time is likely redundant of the efforts already expended by others and could be better deployed elsewhere. Moreover, a commercial casebook already through several editions is likely to be higher quality than a new free one a professor puts together. Finally, many students will print out the "free" materials, costing them more than simply buying the old edition for $5-10. Thus, using the older editions is a better approach than developing one's own materials in most cases. Thanks to the commenters for these important points.

Law school admissions and college majors

It is no secret that law school students are drawn disproportionately from humanities and social sciences, with only a small proportion coming from science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. Indeed, the political science major alone accounts for far more law students than all STEM fields combined.

There are many reasons for the paucity of graduates in STEM fields in law schools. The reason often given is that the job market is more robust for STEM graduates than for humanities graduates without a law degree, perhaps leading them to avoid law school. Another reason some give is that some STEM graduates may lack the verbal reasoning (as opposed to quantitative reasoning) skills necessary for success in law school. Some argue that people choose certain majors (such as political science or criminal justice) specifically in preparation for law school, even though law schools generally advise against such choices.

Another reason, which is probably the most significant, is the influence of US News rankings on law school admissions. For US News purposes, a GPA is a GPA, whether the GPA comes from a B.A. in French or a B.S. in Electrical Engineering. Conventional wisdom suggests that GPAs in humanities disciplines may not be equivalent to GPAs in STEM fields, but there is little data that compares the two.

In looking at this question, I recently came across this Law School Admission Council resource that provides admissions data by college majors for 2014-2015 and 2015-2016. The report contains the mean GPA and LSAT score for over 100 college majors, along with acceptance rates and "yield" rates. I collected this data and made the following chart that shows the relationship of undergraduate GPA and LSAT for dozens of college majors. Undergraduate GPAs are along the left axis and LSAT scores are along the bottom axis. The size of the circles represent the number of applicants.

(You may need to widen your browser window to see the full chart).

The chart makes a strong case supporting the conventional wisdom that the GPAs from different college majors are not equivalent. Although French majors and mechanical engineering majors have the same average LSAT, the average GPA for French majors is more than 0.3 higher, which is an enormous difference in the tightly stratified world of law school admissions. The applicant with a 158 LSAT and a 3.25 GPA in mechanical engineering likely has similar prospects as an applicant with a 158 LSAT and a 3.55 in French, but the latter is probably more likely to be admitted to law school and receive a scholarship.

This bias toward higher-GPA college majors creates several problems for law schools. The schools may end up admitting students who will not perform as well as others who were not admitted. In addition, schools miss out on students with science backgrounds who have strong employment prospects in areas such as patent prosecution. 

Law schools can easily adjust for the differences in GPAs by scaling applicants' GPAs to their LSAT scores and then normalizing by undergraduate major. US News could easily adjust its formula to take into account the grading differences of different majors (as well as different undergraduate institutions). Either or both of these changes would go a long way toward diversifying the pool of law students and reducing the incentives for law schools to manipulate GPA medians in unproductive ways.