If law schools fail to make a price adjustment, applications will plummet. ...
But they can lower price only if they reduce their costs. The problem is that by reducing costs, they reduce demand, because the perceived (though not real) value of a legal education is dependent on those costs as refracted through the lens of U.S. News & World Reports, which publishes a highly influential ranking of law schools. That magazine gives weight in its rankings to factors that actually bear no relation to the quality of a legal education...
If law schools were permitted to cartelize, they might well embrace the downsizing that I have described as a solution to their economic dilemma. But they are not permitted to cartelize, and this creates hesitancy. The first law school to downsize will attract unwanted attention and, if none or only a few follow suit within a short time, its rankings in U.S. News and World Reports will nosedive.
His conclusion is that we're likely moving to a new equilibrium of lower-cost law schools, but the roadblocks he points out are precisely why the critics of the scam are so wrong-headed. Costs, including faculty salaries, HAD to be high to move up in the US News Rankings. So tuition went higher and higher and to get you idiots to pay for it we had to make things look as rosy as possible. See? We were just covering the costs of operating a great law school!
Now, are you going to let us cartelize to lower prices or not?
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