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.
Notwithstanding the numbers crunching done by Campos, the scam exists in a world well outside fiscal responsibility.
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It his highly unlikely that any state-supported law school(eg Michigan State) will be allowed to fail. The alumni network for all these schools would be too strong, and it would be a major embarrassment to the state government(in other words, the politicians). So while adjustments will be made(eg jacking up tuition), the schools won't be closed even if they are huge financial black holes(eg UMinnesota).
And regarding the private trash schools? Well, as OTLSS has recently pointed out, Appalachian received a grant of $3.4 million...all taxpayer money. So while many of the smaller private law schools are under financial pressure, once again it's the politicians who will come to the rescue.
Yes, some schools will fail, but it will be few and far between. There's just too much ready access to taxpayer funds to bail out these schools. Unless and until elected officials say "enough!" the scam will survive, using government grants to keep the scam going.
And yes, it's a lot of politics; it's worth highlighting that politicians are adding to the scam(egU of North Texas, a publicly funded law school).
I'm not so sure that schools like Michigan State won't close. Sixteen law schools have closed in the past ten years. Admittedly "closed" isn't quite accurate: three of those were campuses of Cooley, two were schools that survived with state accreditation in California after forfeiting ABA accreditation, and one merged with another law school. Still, that's a lot of outright closures, when during the previous 60+ years only one ABA-accredited law school had closed down.
DeleteMichigan State, by Campos's calculation, is in grave peril, with only some $30k in annual tuition per faculty member. That doesn't come close to covering payroll, never mind other expenses. Jacking up tuition won't work: tuition would have to be multiplied by a factor exceeding 10, and the new cap on federally guaranteed loans will keep that from happening. The best hope for Michigan State is perhaps some sort of merger that will amount to its elimination under more polite cover.
Minnesota sub-prestigious law school has been soaking the parent university for years and has received ominous warnings that that state of affairs cannot continue. My forecast for Minnesota: sharp reduction of the faculty, possibly also of salaries. A key advantage is the potential to absorb the paying jetsam of South Dakota, North Dakota, and some other law schools in the general vicinity.
We condemned that stupid grant of $3.4M to Appalachian. But even it was only a third of what Appalachian claimed to need for long-term survival—and it cost the county 6% of its annual budget. There just isn't going to be public funding enough to sustain this unnecessary, underperforming über-toilet. The twenty thousand residents of that county just can't afford even the wasteful grant already made, still less more.
Some law schools will be restructured; this is already happening, with outright marginalization of JD programs as several schools have moved into questionable BAs in law. A handful can survive for a few years by slashing faculty, lowering salaries, hiking tuition, dropping discounts, and increasing enrollment. Many, however, are quite precarious, already overextended on subsidies that are unlikely to continue. Expect more closures.
Well, I hope that I'm wrong but it seems that politicians are now the sugar daddies of local law schools. It was politicians who created North Texas and bailed out Appalachian. And Michigan State-well, based on admittedly anecdotal evidence(conversations with Michigan attorneys), while Michigan may have the national name, it's MSU law school with the local political power, which will come in handy when MSU comes to the legislature for $$$. The point: for a variety of nonsensical reasons, politicians of all stripes and in all locations seem to think it's a good idea to fund local law schools.
DeleteThe graft cannot go on forever, even with local politicians behind it. Earlier this year, the county dropped 6% of its annual budget just to maintain Appalachian for a few lousy months. Just exactly how much more money can the county wring out of its 20,000 low-income residents for short-term funding of a hopeless über-toilet that sometimes makes Cooley look good?
DeleteWhen money goes to Appalachian, it goes to the law school alone, because that's all that Appalachian is. When it goes to Michigan State, it goes to the university, which then has to allocate it to the law school and all other constituents. It seems that the law school at Michigan State isn't paying 10% of its operating expenses. However scam-loving the administration may be, it will struggle to justify paying 90%+ of the expenses of a toilet law school when so many other interests will be clamoring for that money.
What does all this mean in practice? Appalachian can be expected to close down. Michigan State may survive in altered form but is likely to close.
The reality is that law school simply does not need to be that expensive. As Old Guy says, what the hell does a law school require? It’s a couple of chairs in a lecture hall and some books. Have some actual practitioners teach law instead expensive “academics”. These practitioners would teach on a contract basis similar to adjuncts in other fields. There is no reason why it costs so much to operate a law school.
ReplyDeleteLaw schools generally became predatory pigs, paying fancy salaries for little work. Campos pointed out that professors of law are often paid twice what their counterparts in arts and sciences get, for no good reason. We've written before about the widespread practice of having professors teach only one or two courses per semester and spending the rest of their time either sitting around with their thumb up their ass or scribbling asinine scholarshit. Then there are the junkets to Italy and other fluff.
DeleteThe Campos paper is a concise, stunning indictment of the whole scam. It states precisely my experience and conclusions.
ReplyDeleteFollow-up to OG's previous post; it's now (semi-) official-
ReplyDeletehttps://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/21/trump-administration-recommends-stripping-american-bar-association-of-law-school-oversight-authority-01045391
There was never a reason for a private entity allegedly representing lawyers to manage the accreditation of law schools.
DeleteJust don't go to the law school. It's a scam!!!!
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