While many pundits argue that law schools are doing a disservice to their students and graduates by training more lawyers than ever before for a job market that has taken a nosedive in recent years, a handful of colleges are taking steps in the opposite direction.
At least three law schools — Touro Law Center and Albany Law School in New York and Creighton University School of Law in Nebraska — have announced plans to shrink the size of their incoming classes over the the next few years. Creighton will drop from 155 students in the fall 2010 class to 135 next year and stay there. Albany will go from 250 in the fall 2010 class to 240 next year and 230 the following year. Touro administrators are seeking approval to shrink the class by 10 students a year for the next three years.
The announcements come at a time when law schools are facing the nearly constant refrain from outside observers, as well as students and grads, that they admit too many students at too high a cost for the job market to sustain, leaving many students with massive debt loads they cannot pay off. They also fall on the heels of several colleges and universities announcing that they would not move forward on proposed plans to build law schools. Both decisions buck a trend of the last decade, in which colleges and universities catered to more and more would-be lawyers.
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