Friday, July 31, 2015

One of the key claims of critics of legal education in general, and of ABA-approved law schools in particular, is that accreditation requirements drive up the costs of legal education without improving quality. If only we could deregulate law schools and unleash the creative power of free market competition and the awesome technological potential of online learning, legal education would become cheaper without any loss of quality. Or so the story goes.

Fortunately, deregulated law schools exist alongside regulated law schools, so we can get a sense of what deregulation might look like. And while unaccredited California law schools are less expensive than their accredited counterparts, their completion rates and bar passage rates are much lower than those for even the lowest ranked ABA approved law schools, as revealed by a recent Los Angeles Times investigation.

This is likely due at least in part to the incoming academic credentials and life circumstances of the students who enroll in unaccredited schools, and not simply due to differences in quality of education. But there is no law preventing unaccredited law schools from competing with accredited law schools for the best students who want to stay in California, a large and prosperous state where many lawyers will spend their entire careers. If accreditation is really an inefficient waste of time and resources, the unaccredited schools should have substantial advantages in the competition for students, and those students should have advantages in the competition for jobs.

At first glance, deregulation hardly looks like the panacea its advocates have made it out to be. ABA accreditation also looks pretty plausibly like standard consumer protection--a paternalistic attempt to eliminate low quality, low cost, and high-risk options--rather than a self-serving scheme to inflate prices.

There are usually tradeoffs between cost and quality. It's not surprising that as goes the world, so goes legal education.

https://leiterlawschool.typepad.com/leiter/2015/07/what-deregulated-law-schools-really-look-like-michael-simkovic.html