Queen’s law school is floating plans to increase enrolment by almost a third over the next three years, according to a memo sent to students last week.

The eight-page report drafted by the strategic planning committee of Queen’s law school proposes two options: an increase of either 35 or 50 students per year over the approximately 165 currently accepted.

The school says it requires more revenue to hire additional teaching staff, and in lieu of additional government funding, it has turned to accepting more applicants to reach those ends. Students have been invited to comment on the plan at a meeting Oct. 8, but some are already making their opposition known.

“If it’s between an enrolment increase and a tuition increase, I’d take a tuition increase,” said third-year Queen’s law student John McIntyre. “I would rather spend another ($1,000) or ($2,000) a year and keep our job prospects the way they are.”

The plan comes as a surprise to many in the law community as only last year the Law Society of Upper Canada was forced to make reforms to their licensing process to tackle a growing glut of graduates attempting to enter the profession.

After finishing law school, graduates in Ontario must complete 10 months of paid on-the-job training, called articling. But in recent years, the number of applicants has grown faster than the articling positions available, leaving an increasing proportion of graduates saddled with student debt and without a path to becoming licensed lawyers.

According to statistics compiled by the Ontario Universities’ Application Centre, two law schools in particular have been expanding enrolment. The University of Ottawa’s faculty of law more than doubled its first-year enrolment to 377 in 2012 from 165 in 1997. The University of Windsor went to 214 from 151 over the same period.

Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, which opened its new law school this month, will eventually add 60 more graduates into the mix each year.

These students will join the current 12 to 15 per cent of total graduates unable to find articling positions per year, said Thomas Conway, Treasurer of the Law Society of Upper Canada.

In order to deal with the excess law students, the Law Society is launching a three-year trial called the Law Practice Program (LPP), which will involve additional training and a four-month job placement, with no guaranteed pay. Critics of the program say it will create a second-tier of lawyers, those who were unable to secure articling positions.

“There’s an unchallenged assumption that articling is the best way to provide practical training,” said Conway. “The public will be better served by lawyers who have been trained in specific programs.”

After polling its students, Queen’s has said it will not be offering graduates the LPP and stands behind its reputation as the law school where highest percentage of graduates find articling jobs.

“It’s not necessarily our preference to expand enrolment, but the pressures on us have pushed us to consider it,” said William Flanagan, Dean of Queen’s Faculty of Law.

Flanagan denies that increasing enrolment at Ontario law schools is driving the articling crisis and instead points to the numbers of foreign law school graduates, many of whom are Canadians who study law in Australia or the U.K. because they cannot get into a local law program.

Foreign-trained law grads must apply to the National Committee on Accreditation for an equivalency certificate, and if they want to be licensed in Ontario, they must then article in the province.

In the past five years, the number of certificates issued by the NCA has almost tripled to 730 in 2013 from 260 in 2009.

“The largest law school in Canada is the NCA process,” Flanagan said. “A modest admission of very strong candidates” at one of the smallest law schools in the country won’t affect their job prospects.

“I wouldn’t be proposing expansion if I didn’t think we could place an extra 35 students per year,” he said.

Law isn’t the only profession that has had to cope with too many graduates and not enough jobs.

Faced with a chronic oversupply of qualified teachers, the province stepped in last June and mandated that teacher’s colleges reduce enrolment and double the length of training from one year to two.

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But the government does not wield the same control over professional schools like law and medicine, which were deregulated at the turn of the century and are free to set their own enrolment.

At the time of deregulation, the Queen’s memo says law schools in Toronto aggressively increased their tuition fees before they were frozen from 2004-2006. When the freeze ended, annual tuition increases were capped and nothing was done to address the disparity in fees between schools.

The unequal tuition framework has left Queens in a position where increasing enrolment is its only effective tool to increase revenue, Flanagan said.

“It’s outrageous that the province continues to absolutely refuse to deal with this highly inequitable situation that ultimately, over time, means that there’s going to be one calibre of education available in Toronto and another for the rest of the province,” he said. “That’s just not right.”