Financial peril by law school

Paul Campos, whose long-defunct blog Inside the Law School Scam inspired our name, has just published "Is Your Law School Going Broke? A field guide for interested parties". Conclusion: all but a dozen or so of the ABA-accredited law schools face substantial peril, in most cases grave. Presenting data and estimates derived from 184 of the 195 ABA-accredited law schools open today, Campos finds that 14 are at low risk, 29 at moderate risk, 66 at high risk, and 75 at severe risk of financial difficulties that could lead to drastic restructuring or outright closure.

Operationally, Campos takes $700k of effective tuition per faculty member (meaning actual tuition received, so excluding discounts passed off as "scholarships") as the approximate amount needed to pay for a law school's operations. He admits that some law schools do function on considerably less but also points out that many spend a great deal more: toilet Brooklyn, for instance, spent twice as much ($1.34M) in 2024–25. He also considers such factors as the size of the law school's endowment, to the extent that this information can be found or estimated, and the change in effective tuition per faculty member between 2010–11 and 2024–25. That change, incidentally, is slightly positive at 23 law schools and strongly negative at the great majority: the average change for all schools was –33%, a decline of one-third.

Of the 14 that appear safe for the near future, the most surprising is Montana. How did this über-toilet-tier establishment secure its financial position? By hiking tuition greatly, increasing enrollment slightly, and slashing faculty by more than a quarter. Perhaps its location in a large, relatively empty state enabled it to jack tuition higher than could the typical miscellaneous mediocrity or toilet school in a state or region abounding in comparably bad law schools.

At the other extreme, those at severe risk include several sub-élite poseurs that pretend to be in a league with Duke and Cornell even though everyone knows that they're not. UCLA in particular, by his estimate, spends about three-quarters more than it generates; no doubt it survives at the expense of the rest of the university and therefore represents a large drain on the university's budget. Twelve state flagship schools—Alabama, Colorado (where Campos works), Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio State, Utah, Wisconsin—congratulate themselves on being in the "first tier" by bullshit US News nomenclature (they are in the fourth tier or lower by Old Guy's ranking); all have long posted large annual deficits that, again, must be made good from the parent university's budget, to the detriment of other programs that are arguably much more deserving. (Campos points out that law professors are frequently paid a great deal more than their counterparts in arts and sciences, for no clearly justifiable reason.) Although these are hardly likely to dry up and blow away in the manner of the InfiLaw scam-schools and thirteen others in the past decade, their days of lavish allowances from the administrative sugar daddy are rapidly ending.

Some severely endangered law schools don't generate enough revenue to cover payroll, never mind their other expenses. Campos convincingly estimates that more than 90% of the budget for Michigan State's toilet law school comes from the central administration. No doubt the university can find better uses for its money than the maintenance of a discredited law school in a region housing two dozen other law schools within a four-hour drive.

The new cap on federally guaranteed student loans for professional programs will bring additional pressure to bear on law schools ranging from the near-élite to the über-toilety. A few law schools have offered to make the difference up with discounts, but only a handful can afford to. 

Campos points to one potential source of savings: abandonment of the ill-fated campaign to secure a higher ranking from bullshit rag US News. It is well known in and around legal hackademia that elevation outside the top 14 or so doesn't matter and that entry into the top 14 is practically out of the question. As Campos shows, those absurd "rankings" brought about the wave of discounts grandiloquently styled "scholarships", which were only ever bribes for applicants with high LSAT scores (and, secondarily, high undergraduate GPAs) that could help to push an inferior law school up a position or two. By giving up the bribery and charging full fare, law schools could generate more revenue, at least in principle. Increasingly schools have been refusing to take part in the US News circus; perhaps they will also stop cutting deals for high scorers.

Several law schools now fill their classes primarily with people not pursuing a JD, be they foreign students seeking an LLM, administrative workers foolishly seeking advancement by means of another Mickey Mouse master's degree, or undergraduates majoring in law. No such school existed a decade ago, yet now several are trying to sustain themselves with this transition away from professional qualification. Whether they will succeed remains to be seen. 

Campos's analysis suggests that the law-school scam merely caught its second wind a few years ago but remains financially precarious—and, Old Guy would add, ethically and academically bankrupt.