With most ABAaccredited law schools facing dwindling applications, news about free-standing private (FSP) law schools has begun to appear more frequently. The Boston Globe, for instance, reported in January on New England Law’s highly paid dean along with his Boston school’s high prices and low employment outcomes. At around the same time, New Hampshire’s Valley News reported that Vermont Law School had arranged buyouts for 10 employees and was in the planning stages for buying out an unspecified number of faculty members next year.
Neither article drew significant attention to the fact that these schools are not attached to a larger university. Those were missed opportunities because the overall nose-dive in law school applicants places such law schools at particular risk since they lack substantial endowments to fall back on. How they react to the fiscal problems they face offers clues about what goes on at other private law schools as well as some expensive public ones. In fact, Education Department (ED) loan volume data show just how willing students at FSP law schools have become to take on extremely large sums of debt in the form of Grad PLUS loans, which they have been able to use since the program’s creation in February 2006 to pay for living expenses and any tuition costs remaining after they’ve used up their Stafford loans.
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