Brian Leiter posted some interesting data on law school tuition increases, which indicate the extent to which state law schools are increasingly following the private school model of depending mainly on tuition rather than state support. The UC law schools have been among the leaders in that trend, of which Leiter opines:
The writing on the wall is, sadly, clear: those "state" schools that follow the University of California system model (or, at the extreme, the Michigan and Virginia models) will thrive over the next decade, those that don't, won't.
Leiter's analysis depends on an unstated assumption; namely, that the UC-style law schools are getting to hold on to the bulk of their tuition. In fact, at many universities (including some of the UCs), the differential tuition (the difference between law school and undergraduate tuition) all too often doesn't stay in the law school. Instead, the university is putting those differential funds into the general fund and thus using the law school as a profit center to prop up departments that can't compete in the market (Sanskrit, anyone?).
If we state law schools are in fact going to thrive, the universities of which we are a part will have to let us substantially privatize, part of which will mean that we get to keep the vast bulk of the tuition paid by our students here at the law school. If not, we will be unable to compete with better-funded private law schools for the best faculty and students.
