Summary: Who is responsible for the closing of Indiana Tech Law School?
In this era when getting a law degree is not as desirable as going into tech or healthcare, law schools are struggling and looking for someone to blame for their lack of enrollment. While the mature thing would be for schools to look at their own foibles, it’s easier to blame the students, which is what the soon-to-be-shuttered Indiana Tech Law School did.
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Earlier this month, Indiana Tech Law School announced it would close down in June. The four-year old law school had lost $20 million in its short run, according to WYFI Indiana, and its president Dr. Arthur Snyder said low student enrollment was the cause of the closing.
“We are not experiencing or projecting enough of a corresponding increase in demand by prospective students for the law school to remain viable into the future,” Snyder said.
3L students may finish their degrees while 1L and 2Ls may transfer schools in January.
In 2012, the school had been approved to give juris doctorates, despite the waning enrollment of other schools in the state. According to WYFI, “The school was built to accommodate 350 students, with 100 anticipated for the first class in 2013. However, only 28 students enrolled. While that number has gone up over the past few years, demand for the program still isn’t where Indiana Tech wants it to be. Currently only 71 students are enrolled.”
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Students told WYFI that they chose the school because of its aggressive recruitment, promises of a quality education, and affordable cost. They said they felt let down and that their time and money was wasted.
“We feel betrayed in a lot of ways, because we were promised,” student Genna Hillgenbrink said. “We were promised that the school would be open, we were promised we would have a place to learn, and that was all yanked away from us.”
Besides low enrollment, the school was plagued with unacceptable bar exam passage rates. A few months after it received provisional accreddition, only 25% of its graduates passed the bar. Other schools such as Hofstra Law School have also suffered from low bar exam passage rates, and they too blamed their students for the failure.
While the shuttering is surely devastating to its students, the closing is not a surprise to insiders who had been wary of its initial opening.
“Indiana Tech Law School was a fool’s errand from the beginning,” blog Outside the Law School wrote in 2014. “Anyone could see that. With over 200 accredited law schools in the country, and four already in Indiana, Indiana Tech Law School was a transparent cash grab disguised by pledges to do “legal education differently.”
Source:WYFI
Do you think it is fair to blame students for Indiana Tech’s closing? Let us know in the comments below.