TaxProf Blog

NACUBO, NACUBO Study Finds Private Colleges and Universities Are Offering Record Financial Aid to Students:

Private, nonprofit colleges and universities continue to significantly discount their published prices for undergraduates, a new study from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) finds.

In the 2024 NACUBO Tuition Discounting Study, 286 private, nonprofit colleges and universities across the U.S. reported their tuition discounts for the 2023-24 school year and estimates for the current year. For 2024-25, estimates show that the tuition discount rate among these schools reached 56.3% for first-time, full-time undergraduates and 51.4% for all undergraduates. This means that for every dollar of undergraduate tuition and fees that these institutions could have charged, they awarded roughly 56 cents in grant aid to first-time undergraduates and 51 cents to all undergraduates who received institutional grant aid.

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Joseph Kearney (Dean, Marquette), Overregulating Legal Education:

[T]he Council’s proposal would mandate a startling redirection of resources. Given the integrated nature of a program of legal education, the proposal would constitute an unprecedented invasion into the upper-level curricula of law schools, diminish substantially the schools’ appropriate autonomy, and impair their ability to innovate and to adapt their programs to local needs and institutional missions—all at a time of other extraordinary pressures on legal education. More succinctly and concretely: The proposal ignores the curricular tradeoffs that will necessarily result for schools and students and dismisses the likely financial costs of the new requirements.

The proposal’s apparent general animating philosophy—which has scant regard for the precept that accreditation standards are intended to establish minimum requirements for “adequate” education while protecting each school’s leading role in defining its own educational program—is regrettable enough. More specifically objectionable is that the proposal to double the current minimum requirement of experiential-learning credits lacks adequate evidentiary support. Valuable though experiential education is, a “more is better” approach to its requirement is not adequately supported in the proposal—notwithstanding the observation that other, very different professions, with different educational pathways, have more experiential education. Given the weak evidentiary basis for increasing the number of mandatory experiential-learning credits, the absence of a rigorous (or really any) cost-benefit analysis should prompt the proposal’s withdrawal.

Brian Leiter (Chicago; Google Scholar), Another Penetrating Critique of the ABA Proposal to Double the Number of Experiential Credit Hours Required:

If the Council does not withdraw this ill-considered and inadequately justified proposal, then it really will be time to seek alternative accreditation agencies for law schools, ones that respect both law students and the academic freedom of law faculties to plan different courses of study.

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The Recorder, Lawmaker Seeks Two-Year Pause on New California Bar Exam:

California's bar exam would be written by the National Conference of Bar Examiners, not state bar-contracted Kaplan Exam Services, for at least the next two years under newly amended legislation.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Tom Umberg, D-Santa Ana, included the effective mandate in amendments to the annual state bar licensing fee bill, SB 253. The new language would force the committee of bar examiners to give two years' notice before "changing the vendor or creator of the multiple choice questions" from the NCBE, which writes the widely used Multistate Bar Exam.

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ABA Journal Op-Ed:  BigLaw’s Manufactured ‘Arms Race’ For Talent Recruitment Harms Us All, by Jamie R. Abrams (American):

BigLaw has manufactured an “arms race” for talent that is hurting employers, students, recruiters, career counselors and legal educators alike. Like most arms races, the action of one law firm has triggered the reactions of others, all seeking to cultivate the impression of superior strength while instead imposing enormous (and often-absurd) costs on everyone.

This arms race pushed BigLaw hiring for 1L summer into October of the 1L year and leapfrogged BigLaw hiring for 2L summer into March to May of the 1L year while collapsing diversity-centered recruitment portals into this murky process, abandoning on-campus recruitment and blurrily suggesting that 1L summer applicants are simultaneously being “precruited” for summer 2L. If you found that prior sentence to be a dizzying time warp of poorly sequenced chaos, then you understand precisely.

This timeline fosters a fictitious scarcity mindset absent any evidence that the talent pool is smaller or harder to assess while undermining the exact educational processes and professor-student relationships seeking to cultivate robust future talent.

“Talent” is not preordained at 1L orientation, and to adopt this mindset is myopic and exclusionary. Rather, talent develops from inquisitive growth mindsets, thoughtful feedback and adaptation, resilience and persistence, problem solving, creativity and self-reflection. Premature hiring processes perpetuate deep biases that arise from rushed decision-making with incomplete information.

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Following up on Monday's post, New York Times: Turmoil At University Of Florida Law School After Adjunct Professor Federal Judge Gives Book Award To White Nationalist Antisemitic Student For His Racist Paper:  Statement From University of Florida Law School Dean:

Dear Alumni and Friends,

Many of you may have seen the recent New York Times article about a student at the law school.  The article stated that the student—who told the Times it “would not be manifestly wrong” to call him a Nazi—received a recognition through a “book award,” which is given to the highest overall grade in a law school class.  The paper he wrote, which counted for 65% of the final grade in the small seminar course, argued for constitutional “nationalism” based on an understanding of the Constitution that excluded non-white people from legal and civil participation in America.  Although the law school is limited by what it can say about these events under federal and state law that protects the privacy of student record information, that student has now disclosed some information publicly.

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