Summary: Loyola Law School will be giving more scholarships and reducing class sizes to combat the decline in applicants.
With law school enrollment at a five year low, new ideas are being implemented to attract students. Loyola Law School is using this decline in students to restructure and refocus the size of its program.
With approval from Loyola Marymount University, a $20 million special payout has been set aside from the University’s endowment to be used for student scholarships at the law school. The $20 million will be reviewed each year during the budget process to ensure its usefulness. Offering really good scholarships while simultaneously cutting enrollment should keep the applicant pool strong. LLS also offers scholarships to students that are interested in public interest law or to those from underrepresented ethnic groups.
While scholarships will help attract the best applicants, cutting admission numbers will help the law school remain competitive. The school plans to cut their numbers by 25 percent in two years. LLS is not planning on cutting funding for professors or faculty salaries but will slowly reduce their size to match the smaller student size.
University President David W Burcham believes the law school enrollment decline to be an opportunity to reinvest in the law school, turning a bad situation into a good change.
While $20 million may seem like it would have a big impact on the university campus, the numbers presented are small and will have minimal effect. No money received as donations goes into the payout and instead comes from accumulated earnings of the endowment over several years. The payout amounts are included in the financial statements that are open to the public.
While enrollment may be down in many law schools, law firms are reporting an increase in revenue and demand for lawyers. Loyola Law School reports that 71.9 percent of its 2014 graduating class is employed in full-time jobs requiring or preferring a J.D. degree, 11 points higher than the year before and 11 points higher than the year before that. The school says that it works hard to help find jobs for all graduates by exhausting its faculty’s networks and by supporting graduates that want to start their own practices through an incubator program.
Law school photo courtesy of Loyola Law School, Los Angeles Facebook page.
Burcham photo from Wikipedia.org