Friday, December 19, 2014
Law Schools Have Shed 986 Full-Time Faculty (11%) Since 2010
Matt Leichter has published the 2014 edition of Which Law Schools Are Shedding Full-Time Faculty? The nation's law schools have shed 986 full-time faculty (11%) since 2010, and 719 full-time faculty (8%) since 2013.
134 law schools have shed full-time faculty since 2010, with 10 law schools shedding 20 or more full-time faculty:
| Full-Time Faculty (Fall) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rank | School | ’10 | ’13 | ’14 | '13 v '14 | '10 v '14 |
| 1. | WMU Cooley | 101 | 115 | 49 | -66 | -52 |
| 2. | G. Washington | 106 | 93 | 72 | -21 | -34 |
| 3. | Florida Coastal | 69 | 51 | 36 | -15 | -33 |
| 4. | Vermont | 55 | 33 | 26 | -7 | -29 |
| 5. | McGeorge | 63 | 43 | 36 | -7 | -27 |
| 6. | Texas | 103 | 80 | 80 | 0 | -23 |
| 7. | Seton Hall | 59 | 47 | 38 | -9 | -21 |
| 8. | Hamline | 34 | 24 | 14 | -10 | -20 |
| 8. | Albany | 46 | 36 | 26 | -10 | -20 |
| 8. | Villanova | 49 | 38 | 29 | -9 | -20 |
45 law schools have added full-time faculty since 2010, with 11 law schools adding 10 or more full-time faculty:
| Full-Time Faculty (Fall) | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rank | School | ’10 | ’13 | ’14 | '13 v '14 | '10 v '14 |
| 1. | Columbia | 107 | 154 | 167 | 13 | 60 |
| 2. | UC-Irvine | 0 | 27 | 32 | 5 | 32 |
| 3. | Charlotte | 35 | 66 | 64 | -2 | 29 |
| 4. | Stanford | 68 | 81 | 90 | 9 | 22 |
| 5. | UMass | 0 | 15 | 17 | 2 | 17 |
| 6. | Belmont | 0 | 17 | 14 | -3 | 14 |
| 7. | UCLA | 86 | 99 | 98 | -1 | 12 |
| 8. | Denver | 62 | 84 | 73 | -11 | 11 |
| 9. | Ohio State | 42 | 53 | 52 | -1 | 10 |
| 9. | N. Carolina | 42 | 51 | 52 | 1 | 10 |
| 9. | Wm & Mary | 39 | 53 | 49 | -4 | 10 |
Update: Chapman has subsequently filed a corrected Form 509 with the ABA, so I have updated this post to remove references to data in Chapman's original Form 509 filed with the ABA. Matt Leichter has also updated his post with the corrected Chapman data.
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2014/12/law-schools-have-shed-.html
Comments
"What exactly am I missing here?"
That nobody wants to replace the lost faculty with new faculty. Since this year's entering class is 25% smaller than the class 4 years ago, we don't need as many faculty as we did. Also, law school is too expensive. Reducing the faculty headcount should make it easier to reduce tuition (assuming management doesn't just pocket the savings).
Posted by: Nathan A | Dec 19, 2014 4:51:38 AM
You're not missing anything. That's the point. You've benefitted greatly from exploitation of young folk through slick advertising and statistic manupulation. We live in such different worlds, Professor.
Posted by: LawSchoolCustomer | Dec 19, 2014 5:49:58 AM
"What exactly am I missing here?"
To emphasize what Nathan A said, also an 11% decrease in faculty is still a 14% slower decrease than the drop in class size. Even assuming that student-faculty ratios were at a reasonable and sustainable place before the applicant crash (they weren't), there's still an imbalance.
Posted by: Former Editor | Dec 19, 2014 6:13:14 AM
11 of schools adding 10 or more faculty should really be 8, as three of them are new schools.
Posted by: JDESq | Dec 19, 2014 6:24:50 AM
I can't speak for anyone else, but our law school encourages people to retire, and at the same time hired a half dozen new faculty in the past three years. If law schools actually reduced the size of their faculties substantially, this would make some sense. But I don't see much evidence this is happening. Rather, as the last sentence of the previous comment suggests, they seem to be using the "crisis" as an excuse to do things they wanted to do, anyway. As usual.
Posted by: mike livingston | Dec 19, 2014 6:46:13 AM
Mike, I am firmly on your side. As a relatively recent grad (last five years), I can attest that the older professors are just better. They care about the law more, and they have a stronger presence and they are harder workers. Young professors are just using the law school as a platform to support niche research interests (abortion, gay rights, international law, international development, race issues, childcare policy, capital markets, etc.).
Stay on as long as you can. Eventually law schools will stop hiring new faculty. It seems to have happened this year. I anticipate only 30-40 new tenure track hires per year through the end of the decade. As older faculty members retire voluntarily, the schools can “right size” which will mean, for example, adjusting to support classes of 150 instead of 300. Once costs are reduced, they can actually be more selective in admission standards.
There is no reason to feel bad for the younger generation of aspiring professors. They should all have no trouble getting big law/ in-house jobs. So they have to be lawyers—tough luck.
Posted by: JM | Dec 19, 2014 8:33:48 AM
To corroborate what JM has said a bit, the hiring threads over on Prawfsblawg would seem to indicate an unprecedented dearth in new hiring, despite ever-more credentialed candidates.
Posted by: Unemployed Northeastern | Dec 19, 2014 9:53:43 AM
More Faster. We still have too many law schools and too many law profs.
Posted by: Walter Sobchak | Dec 19, 2014 10:28:03 AM
@mike livingston - " If law schools actually reduced the size of their faculties substantially, this would make some sense. But I don't see much evidence this is happening."
For evidence, I submit this blog post, which is titled "Law Schools Have Shed 986 Full-Time Faculty (11%) Since 2010."
Posted by: Nathan A. | Dec 19, 2014 10:35:39 AM
@ JM. I guess this depends on the law school. I've great professors who were young. Great ones who were older. And the only reason young professors spend so much time on niche research (that no agency/law firm deems worth funding and no one in the real world deems worth reading) is because that is what they've been asked to do (in order to get tenure).
However, I agree, we should shed no tears for aspiring professors out there. They'll be fine.
Posted by: Nathan A. | Dec 19, 2014 10:46:48 AM
Just noticed that the info for UMASS is incorrect. It is listed as having no faculty in 2010. While that is technically true because there was no UMASS Law in 2010, it would be more accurate to give whatever number of faculty that Southern New England School of Law had in 2010, as Southern New England SOL was given to UMASS and renamed UMASS Law School.
Posted by: Unemployed Northeastern | Dec 19, 2014 1:54:53 PM
One should note a slight inaccuracy here. #5 in addition of fulltime faculty, UMass Dartmouth, used to be Southern New England school of law. Their faculty became the faculty at UMass Dartmouth. So it is possible that the number of faculty there did not increase at all. Only the name changed. You would need to check the statistics for 2010 for Southern New England.
Posted by: Bert Lazerow | Dec 19, 2014 2:32:35 PM
Let me get this straight: 1,000 experienced faculty have retired, but we owe it to retire faster, so a group of ambitious young nerds, almost none of whom have practical experience, can displace us? And this will somehow solve the crisis? What exactly am I missing here?
Posted by: mike livingston | Dec 19, 2014 4:25:31 AM