The decision to close Whittier Law School has been widely reported and debated throughout the law school world as it's the first fully ABA-accredited school to shut its doors in recent memory. Whittier has served an important role in the Southern California legal ecosystem for 50 years, and its disappearance leaves a void. That being said, given the performance of Whittier's grads on the bar exam in recent years as well as the drop in applications, closing Whittier is probably the right decision.
The unfortunate truth of this story is that none of this needed to happen. As applications to more competitive (but not elite) schools began to decline around 2010, the number of applicants in Whittier's traditional applicant pool remained relatively strong. The response of these more competitive schools to the decline in applications was to lower admission standards and enroll weaker and weaker classes, enrolling the students who would have otherwise chosen a school like Whittier. This caused a cascade downstream that left less competitive schools with too few applicants to operate sustainably as they traditionally had.
The story could have turned out differently. When the contraction began, law schools should have reduced class sizes to maintain their traditional standards for admission. In some cases, that would require a reduction of close to 50%. In other cases, it would require much less. If the law schools had simply maintained existing admission requirements, all schools could have contracted in size in response to market pressures. This would have prevented the cascading degradation of admissions that tumbled down the hierarchy of law schools. Of course, reducing class size would entail a decrease in revenues that would require a reduction in expenses. Normally, such a reduction would be hard to find.
But law schools had a unique opportunity during this contraction, which many of them squandered. The number of retirement-age faculty was (and is) enormous, likely larger than it has ever been. If faculties had looked beyond their own personal financial self interest they could have easily contracted to meet the market demand and avoided the disastrous effects that have afflicted law students and now law schools. Sadly, the very faculty members whose institution provided them an outrageously rewarding career over many decades seemed the least likely to "pay it forward" by helping to reduce expenses. Indeed, many decided to foist all the sacrifice of layoffs on junior faculty or staff, who truly had the most to lose from losing their jobs.
Thus, the story of Whittier is a story of generational wealth shifting that is seen throughout tuition dependent law schools, and indeed throughout our country. The Millennial generation is expected to go deeply into debt to subsidize a population that is already (comparatively) wealthy. Because the Millennials do not yet, for the most part, have the clout to stop this, it is up to the rest of us to develop a conscience and start making hard decisions to provide our students with a plausible financial future.
UPDATE: Brian Leiter is unhappy with what I've written. Unfortunately he misunderstood the point of the argument, as I detail here.
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