Interesting FindLaw op-ed by Scott Moss (Colorado), Lawyer Salaries versus Law School Tuition: Are Law Schools Nearing the End of a High-Tuition Era?:

Falling tuition at non-elite schools, though, would change the law school world substantially. Today, most law schools today provide an essentially similar education and essentially similar faculty conditions. For example, with only minimal differences, I have done my teaching and research the same way, with the same materials, and with the same technology at 97th-ranked Marquette Law School and 36th-ranked University of Colorado Law School. While some lower-ranked schools have less to offer — worse student-faculty ratios, lesser research resources, or inferior faculty compensation — the differences usually are minimal. Aside from a few elite schools providing stratospheric faculty salaries, most law schools vary only mildly as to student-faculty ratio, faculty salaries and teaching loads, and course offerings.

Non-elite schools can afford about the same offerings as elite schools because they charge similar tuition — but those days may be coming to an end. Non-elite schools forced to charge less in tuition would be less able to provide quality facilities (including expensive libraries), to maintain a low student-faculty ratio, to attract and retain faculty with competitive salaries and teaching packages, and to keep up to date with ongoing advances in educational and research technology.

In short, if we are nearing a "breaking point" of too-high tuition, that breaking point would not arrive simultaneously for all schools. There could be no tuition drop at all at the many elite schools that would still able to draw highly talented students despite a tuition-driven application drop. There might be a mild tuition drop, and therefore a mild resource loss, at middle-of-the-pack law schools with plenty of talented students but also with some trouble filling up the last quarter or third of their classes with qualified students. The largest tuition drop would be at the schools already struggling to find enough qualified students; those schools can only hope that the drop in tuition helps them maintain student quality more than the resource loss hurts their educational quality.

This article paints a dark picture, but one with a few silver linings.

First, unless I am horribly incorrect about market forces, law school tuition will not rise forever; once it gets sufficiently out of line with lawyer incomes, it will level off or decrease.

Second, the resulting disparities in law school tuition might make law school more affordable for many; after all, can we really defend the status quo of similarly high tuition at elite law schools (whose graduates overwhelmingly pass bar exams and often find high-paying jobs) and non-elite law schools (whose graduates have 50/50 shots of passing bar exams and extremely low odds of earning six-figure incomes)?

Third, perhaps legal academia has been stagnating with a status quo of similarly-funded and similarly-operated schools. Law schools forced to survive with much less money might respond with innovative educational reforms, much as several law schools recently rebounded from low bar passage rates with innovative educational measures. If law schools’ need to economize drives them to experiment with ways to make do with less, then some of those experiments may well lead the way to improved legal education everywhere, to the benefit of all law schools and the legal profession.

(Hat Tip: Mitchell H. Rubinstein.)