The law school at the University of Arizona is throwing some fuel onto the fire when it comes to the law education tuition battle, according to The Arizona Daily Star.

The school will drop tuition a second time this fall as it tries to undercut the tuition rates of nonresident students of more than a dozen peer law schools across the country. The school is going to provide students from other states with large tuition discounts.

“The drastic decrease in law school applicants nationally since 2008 means a much more competitive environment for attracting the best students from Arizona and beyond,” said the proposal from the school. It has been approved by the Arizona Board of Regents.

Students who are not residents of Arizona who paid over $42,000 to study law at the school last year will pay just $29,000 per year. This equates to a 30 percent drop in tuition. The in-state rate will remain the same at $24,400 per year.

The new tuition rates will leave the law school as the school with the cheapest nonresident tuition rate out of its 15 peer schools in the country. The rest of the schools in its peer group charge anywhere from $10,000-$30,000 more per year.

“We’re responding to the market in changing times,” the dean of the James E. Rogers College of Law, Marc Miller, said. “We’re not trying to undermine other schools. It will have more students looking at us more seriously early on.”

This is the second straight year that the law school has dropped its nonresident tuition. For the school year ending in May, the rates were dropped by eight percent for nonresidents and 11 percent for residents.

The price reduction comes after a 32 percent decrease in freshman law school enrollment since 2010, according to data from the American Bar Association.

“The longstanding criticism is that law school tuition is too darned expensive,” Miller said. “We’re doing our best to help students graduate without crushing levels of debt.”

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Necessity being the mother of invention, law schools have considered how their enrollment is down 15 percent these last two years (according to the American Bar Association,) and come up with the solution that they will start offering master’s degrees. Such programs used to belong only to a few schools like Arizona State, which has an eight-year old Master of Legal Studies program, but now nearly 30 law schools are offering a Juris Master program and are testing the waters on whether this type of degree will float or sink.

Those interested in the advanced degree will not qualify for the bar, but they will gain some legal knowledge that may make them marketable. At this point it is unclear what markets they will fill and how valid the degree will be, so determining a tuition on it is somewhat guesswork – but generally a master’s in law costs the equivalent of a year in a JD program.

“The catalyst has been economic,” said Douglas Sylvester, dean of Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, as reported by law.com. “I would expect that we will see more of this in the future, unless the legal economy improves.”

Having lost about $200 million in tuition these last few years, such programs may or may not bring a boon to law schools. The programs are experimental, but then they could change how law is taught and sold in the U.S.

Frank Wu, dean of the University of California Hastings College of Law, says the degrees mean more than a supplement for lost JDs. He thinks it opens the door for those who want some legal education but don’t want a J.D.

How much a market there is for such students, and what sorts of jobs they will procure, may change the face of law in the U.S. Or, alternatively, it might turn out to be a bad idea that dries up: time will tell.

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