afc1910 wrote:rocon7383 wrote:they bumped tuition up to 48k from 46.6k. These schools amaze me.
tuition increases about 3-10% each year. it's ridiculous, but it's pretty standard. i was taking this increase into consideration when evaluating my scholarship offer. named full tuition from any school is always the golden ticket, because then you don't need to worry about increases in tuition. alas, BLS does not give out named full scholarships.
I don't think we're going to see the tuition increases continuing for much longer... they have depended on a market that has a high level of information asymmetry, where the people applying to schools have very little access to real employment data. Once schools need to disclose what their graduates do for work, it will be more facially obvious that the value of a program is not worth three years of lost earnings in addition to, in BLS's case, a minimum of around $210,000 in debt. The standard bumps in tuition over the last fifteen years are standard but they need to be reversed to get us back to something that more accurately reflects the opportunities from each program.
Looking at BLS's very best placement year on record (2009), just 27% of the class actually made $70K or more. This is significantly different than how the school presented those numbers. A very large percentage (12.8%) were unemployed and still seeking for a job (any job, not just legal ones). Those of you who are considering attending need to contact the school and ask for complete employer lists for the Class of 2010.
Absent the lists, you should be discounting the '09 data by at least half to account for the significant market decline in hiring. This would mean assuming that you have around a 14% chance of making $70K or more, a 26% chance of being unemployed (whether in a legal or non-legal job), and a less than 50% chance in finding a job in which your JD will be required. Keep in mind that without knowing what those graduates are doing, you have no reason to assume that a JD-required job is something you would necessarily find appealing.
The reason Brooklyn is still increasing tuition is because the market (you guys) haven't yet been able to see exactly what the job market looks like for Brooklyn grads, and the reason for that is that they don't want to tell you. We haven't yet seen any of the major structural changes that will need to happen to adjust tuitions down, but there's no reason to expect that those reforms aren't on the horizon. In the meantime, it is a real challenge to justify full tuition for many ABA-approved law schools unless you will not be relying on student loans and can either afford the sticker price or have someone in your family who can.
For those of you with new scholly offers, try conditioning your acceptance on seeing a full list of where the Class of 2010 went. See what they say: they have the data available, so a decision not to provide you with it should (in my mind) be a pretty good indication that they are trying to hide it until after you're enrolled. G'luck.
Edit: link to the 2009 data I was referencing: --LinkRemoved--