I was wondering whether some schools have experimented with combined B.A. / J.D. programs, which take 5 or 6 years rather than the usual 7. I’d think these could be useful to students who know they want to be lawyers, and who’d rather be spending the extra year or two earning money as lawyers rather than paying money as students (likely a difference of over $100,000 per year, if one counts opportunity costs as well as direct education costs).
Naturally, many students might want to spend more time in college, especially if their parents are willing to pay; but I would think that some students would on balance prefer to cut out the extra year or two. Also, I can see how a year’s worth of growth and seasoning might add maturity, though again that’s one benefit of taking that extra year to be weighed against the substantial cost of taking that year.
More broadly, my sense is that in the ever more competitive world in which we live, there’ll be pressure to cut out the flab — even the enjoyable flab — from many things. And it seems to me that for many students (not for all, but for many) the educational system is full of flab. This is particularly so for lawyers, who I think for the most part rarely use most of what they learn in their undergraduate studies.
But before theorizing, I thought I’d ask for some concrete experiences. Apparently such programs exist, at least at Penn, Rutgers (Camden), and St. Thomas; each is a 6-year program. Have any of you gone through those programs, or known well people (family members, colleagues, students, or others) who have done so? If so, I’d love to hear your comments about them.
Also, I understand that a law degree is basically an undergraduate degree in most countries outside the U.S. Do any of you both have such a degree, and know enough about American lawyers to have a sense of how your educational program has worked for you, compared to how theirs has worked for them?
Texas Lawyer says:
In the past, Baylor has had what they called the 3/3 progam. Might still have it. Your senior year of college was your first year of law school.
I knew some people who did it. In the end, I think they regret it. They thought it just meant that they worked 36 years before retirement, instead of 35. They thought they missed some of the more laid back time of youth. But that’s a pretty individual thing.
I also know that Baylor undergrad had something similar with high school. You could skip your senior year of high school and do it as your first year of college. I know someone who did that program and the law school 3/3. Cut 2 years off college and law school. We used to joke about her not being a high school graduate, though. (Technically, I think she was awarded her high school diploma at the end of her freshman year, or something like that).
My understanding is that up to at least the 50s or 60s, you only had to have 3 years of college to go to law school. I have a vague recollection that changed when they renamed the law degree a JD instead of an LLB. The thought was that since this was now a doctorate, it should be post graduate (i.e., you need to have actually graduated from college). I may be misremembering, though.
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November 9, 2009, 8:02 pmEdward A. Hoffman says:
Columbia has a six-year program, but students are selected in their junior year based upon their performance as undergrads. High school students and other undergrad applicants cannot be admitted directly into the program. The selection process is very competitive; I believe Columbia College is allotted at most two slots per year, while Barnard, the engineering school and the School of General Studies (a liberal arts school for older students) get no more than one per year. In any given year some of these slots will not be filled.
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November 9, 2009, 9:09 pmProf Michael Scott says:
Southwestern Law School (Los Angeles) has a BA/JD program with California State University-Dominguez Hills. It shave one year off the separate degrees. Students are admitted to law school after 3 years of undergraduate school. See http://bit.ly/28EpvT
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November 9, 2009, 9:23 pmJ says:
I didn’t participate in a combined program, nor did my college (a large state university) offer one. However, I did graduate from college in three years and go straight to a T15 law school. I am currently a 3L, and the six years has gone incredibly fast. One interesting aspect of this experience was that I was applying to law schools after only six semesters. After the end of my first semester of law school, it felt like I learned more in that semester than I did in three years of college (which was a breeze). Compared to law school, college was a piece of cake, even though I worked extremely hard to do well.
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November 9, 2009, 9:29 pmEdward A. Hoffman says:
J wrote:
If you entered law school after six semesters of college, you probably applied after only four.
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November 9, 2009, 9:33 pmJ says:
Correction to above: I was applying to law school after only four semesters — not six.
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November 9, 2009, 9:38 pmApu Nahasapasapeemipetilon says:
I would love to have taken advantage of this– maybe I would have gone to UCLA if this program was operative when I was applying.
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November 9, 2009, 10:10 pmBleepless says:
In 1965–1966 at the University of Washington,one of us was doing his fourth year for a B.A. while he also was doing 1L. It must have worked; he now is on the bench.
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November 9, 2009, 10:23 pmstash says:
I was a “3–3″ student at Columbia University. Columbia Law School has agreements with various colleges, including its own, where the college is entitled to nominate one or two juniors for admission to the law school. The program is called AILE (we called ourselves “Aylies”) for “Accelerated Interdisciplinary Legal Education.”
The deal was, at least with my school, that you had to complete your major and college education by taking sufficient qualifying credits in and out of the Law School to count toward your degree. Until those were completed, if you dropped out of law school, you were also without a college degree. Since I spread those credits over 3 years, my college degree, though the same year, was actually dated after my law degree.
One of the reasons I chose the college I did was because the availability of the program was advertised in the recruiting materials. (I decided to become lawyer quite early on, sixth grade, I think.) So, I think one advantage of offering such an opportunity is recruitment.
A major reason (and advantage)for cutting out a year of school was cost. As you point out, you save a year of tuition and are out (hopefully) making money a year early. The financial swing is enormous.
At least for me, another big advantage was that the application process was relatively painless. Take the LSATs, and then run around to your professors getting recommendations. They’ve already got your transcript and I don’t think Columbia has ever turned down a nominee. The selection process was far more personal, and I think, accurate than the normal admissions process. So: no multiple applications (and application fees) or waiting nervously for a response.
(I don’t know how the unified degree programs that you are talking about differ, but I would suspect that there would be some kind secondary internal application process from the general student body. Admitting a high school senior to the program sounds like too much of a risk).
The problem was finishing the college degree while attending the law school. To avoid overwork, the best method was to look for courses where I could “double-dip” and get both undergraduate and law school credit. Since I was an econ major, I did this by taking accounting in the business school, economics of anti-trust in the Econ grad dept., and joint law school B-school seminars on securities and labor relations. Plus, I think I got a trade regulation law school seminar approved as well. It also didn’t hurt to have some AP college credit in the bank. People with other majors might have had a more difficult time.
I was very glad to go through the program and was relatively successful academically. On the other hand I missed my senior year and graduating with my class. I do not feel like I had the entire college experience. And, the fact is, I was way too young to go to law school. Of course, I don’t even know if another year in college would have helped on that front. Maybe five years after college would have been best. Knowing nothing but school, I treated it like more of the same. I am far more intested in the law now than I was then. Perhaps that is just a function of practicing.
In any event, you should be aware of at least one caveat, and that is that some states have, or at least had, a “four years of college and three years of law school” requirement for admission to the bar and that caused some interpretive questions as to the program and eligibility for admission in those states. I am not aware of any formal resolution of those questions, but at least one of my contemporaries had an offer withdrawn because the firm did not want to deal with the issue. I would have thought that because an equivalent amount of credits were earned toward the undergraduate degree, the “four years of college” requirement would be satisfied. But apparently that was an open question in that state.
Lastly, with respect to jobs, I found that potential employers were impressed with “skipping a year of college” to begin law school after the junior year. Of course, grades remained their primary concern. So overall, except for the above caveat, the 3–3 approach was a plus on that front as well.
I suppose one consideration may also be that the quality of student who can finish both degrees in six years may have other options/priorities. The co-nominee from my school actually turned it down, because he decided going to Harvard would make him more successful. He did, and was, at least monetarily. But I have always been a slacker.
Feel free to email me if you think there is any other information I might have that is worthwhile.
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November 9, 2009, 10:35 pmT.J. Chiang says:
I took both: the law/other undergraduate degree in Australia, and then the J.D. in the U.S. Overall, I’d say that I favor the U.S. model, even if it requires an additional two years with the additional cost. It is hard to be really sure you want to be a lawyer when you are 18. Second, as a teacher, having more mature and committed students is a definite boon. One professor tried to use the Socratic method on 19 year old students in Australia. He got told to stop by the administration because of the volume of student complaints.
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November 9, 2009, 11:02 pmMark says:
I was a 3 and 3 student at Gonzaga University and the GU School of Law.
Great program that basically eliminated a year of undergraduate electives and saved a lot of time and money. If you know you want to go to law school its the only way to fly.
I think my school ended the 3–3 program, probably since they lost tuition, sad really since it was a motivating factor in my going to school there.
Go Bulldogs!
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November 9, 2009, 11:22 pmDNJ says:
In New Zealand (where I hail from) some people advocate changing law from an undergraduate degree to a postgraduate one on the US model. Personally I don’t agree.
The LL.B. (our law degree) is a four year degree. Most students (apparantly about 80%) do another degree as well. With cross-crediting, a three year arts, commerce or science degree can generally be completed alongside a law degree in five years. We have open entry into the first year of the LL.B., but competitive entry into second year.
Doing another degree at the same time is widely considered to give a good balance in one’s studies — one has something other than law to study as well. I don’t think the age of the students is a problem. People get weeded out in first year, and academically able and committed students will be fine notwithstanding their age. Another advantage is that New Zealand students are more willing to do postgraduate law degrees. In the US everyone seems to want to get out and start earning money — an understandable attitude after seven years of university study. Here a masters or Ph.D. is recognised as a clear asset.
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November 9, 2009, 11:30 pmY says:
I am a U.S. attorney working in Japan and previously studied law in Germany.
The attitude towards U.S. lawyers in Germany was very negative –I remember being quite bluntly asked “how can you expect to learn as much in 3 years as we [Germans] learn during our 5 to 6 year undergraduate program?” (Note that since the German university system is not a “liberal arts” one [with very few exceptions], it is not necessary to take any classes outside of ones major.)
The difference of course being that during their 5 or 6 years they continue to live the life of an undergraduate — part time jobs on the side, relaxed, etc.
The more convincing argument in favor of the German legal education system is the 2-year “Referendariat” program. After the equivalent of a U.S. bar exam, attorneys must spend 2 years interning — one must work at a court, a public agency (e.g. the DA’s office), and a private law firm during that time — and a final “practical” exam.
Once that period is completed, I would say that the German-educated attorney — all other things being equal — would be better off. Of course, this would actually be adding time rather than taking it away as is being suggested in the 3+3 program.
Here in Japan, the undergraduate legal degree is quite easy to obtain in 4 years at undergrad, but the Japanese bar exam is notoriously difficult, with something like a 2% pass rate. In my in-house position, I work with one licensed Japanese attorney and 5 non-licensed “legal staff.” Of those non-licensed, I find that they have perhaps slightly less “theoretical” knowledge compared to what I would expect from the average U.S. law school graduate. On the other hand, they are much more better at adapting to the business environment and taking “business” issues into consideration than a U.S. law school grad would be, perhaps simply from learning so much on the job.
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November 10, 2009, 12:18 amEcon_Scott says:
UC Berkeley, has a MBA/JD through Bolt Hall and the Haas Business School.
That seems to me to be more appropriate.
As a client would I rather hear ?
“Mr. Econ_Scott, your case will be staffed by myself, Mr. Rainmaker JD, and Mr. NumberCrunch-RegressionAnalysisa, MBA/JD cum laud Bolt Hall.”
OR
““Mr. Econ_Scott, your case will be staffed by myself, Mr. Rainmaker JD, and these two associates, Ms. Twinkletoes, BFA/JD sum ma cum laud UCSB Ballet, and Mr. RadicalSon, UI Circle, School or Education BA/JD cum laud”
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November 10, 2009, 12:39 amyankee says:
Econ_Scott—does knowing that Mr. NumberCrunch is a first-year associate while Ms. Twinkletoes and Mr. RadicalSon have two years of experience change your analysis at all?
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November 10, 2009, 1:41 amTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Combined B.A. / J.D. Programs -- Topsy.com says:
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Matej says:
Here are a few thoughts from someone with a LL.B. degree from Slovenia (ie, continental Europe), an LL.M. from Harvard and some experience from England.
In Slovenia, as elsewhere in Europe, law is an undergraduate study program like any other. Traditionally, after high school you would take your first degree, which took four years of lectures and an extra year to finish with all the exams and write your diploma thesis. Then, should you wish to pursue further research or an academic career, you could do a two-year part-time masters course and carry on with a PhD (which would take anywhere between three and x years).
Now, throughout Europe all fields of study, including law, are grudgingly submitting to a reform of higher education, the so-called “Bologna reform”. The formal gist of it is that the studies are now to be organised in two cycles (the “undergraduate” and the “masters” level) totalling 5 years (either the “3+2″ or the “4+1″ combo), which would lead to a masters degree in a given field but allow for first-level graduates to take on less demanding jobs. Ostensibly, it was introduced to improve the study process in general and promote inter-university and inter-national mobility between cycles, but what it really did was muddle the waters even further and merely artificially inflated the degrees awarded: (a) practically no one is employable after the first cycle alone, so 5 years is now going to become the norm; (b) in many cases, the new “5-year” program is not much different from the previous “4-year-plus” program, just that what used to get you an LL.B. now formally gets you an LL.M.
The Bologna reform, lauded by the national (and some university) administrations, has thus often and largely failed. My faculty only introduced it this year (which was the deadline), so I’ll see how we fare under the new system, but I know of neighbouring cases where the reform has already been reformed (Croatia and Italy both introduced 3+2 models years ago and already switched to 5+0 or 5–2, realizing that the 3-year degree was worthless).
All that said, there’s two other points of comparison that have to be made vis-a-vis the US system:
(1) In general, rightfully or wrongfully, the belief in Slovenia is that our high-school graduates are better educated than their counterparts in the US, and that where we are ultimately surpassed is in your excellent PhD-netting research-enabling postgraduate programs where the intelectual and research elite is honed. While it may not explain the reason the system was set up, it may go some way towards explaining why we are not particularly concerned with the fact that all our fields start off as undergraduate programs in their own right. We feel that the high schools provide enough general education and that the faculty studies should immediately focus on the core issues of one’s future profession.
That said, one 19-year old’s maturity is nothing like another’s, and we do often feel that many students really grasp what law (and their personal aspiration) is all about a little late in the studies. I also remember a professor (who had spent a lot of time in the US) who lamented the fact that we were 20 instead of 25. Still, I don’t see a major flaw or superiority in one system over the other — the good students are good graduates and professionals under one or the other, and likewise with the poor.
(2) As was also mentioned above, the professional formation does not end with the studies. For academic careers, you’re looking at years more of honing your research skills (not so much in legal practice, though, contrasted with your clerking stints); whereas for admission to the bar, you are looking at internships (which traditionally had to span 2 years and include at least one at the courts, but the latter requirement can now be replaced by longer work experience) and another very difficult bar exam at tne end, which can usually take long preparation culminating in a five-month run of non-stop studying. In comparison, the US BarBri-beefed bar exams are very modest indeed.
So, ultimately, it would be wrong to just compare the basic law degrees, and nowadays in Europe it’s difficult to even ascertain what that is in the post-Bologna curriculum. (In Slovenia, the 5-year cycle is currently a prerequisite to be able to pursue a bar exam.) All that said, I found the US law school experience to be somewhere in the middle between the undergraduate and the graduate programs in Europe. If you were to stick bright Slovenian high-school graduates in a 1L course, they would struggle (even ignoring the language issue, of course). If you chose bright LL.B. graduates, they would have no trouble whatsoever. As for the end result — that, I found, ultimately still mostly depended on the students themselves.
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November 10, 2009, 4:31 amcorneille1640 says:
I’m not a lawyer, but I thought I’d bring up something that I’m curious about and that others haven’t mentioned: is it possible that in some scenarios a 3/3 program might actually cost more than the traditional 4 year followed by 3 years of law school?
For example, if one were to go to a state school for undergrad and pay relatively (compared to private liberal arts colleges or ivy league schools) cheap tuition, and then go to law school and pay the greatly enhanced tuition rate, one might actually end up paying less than if he went to Columbia for 6 years.
This, of course, assumes that state schools as a rule don’t offer the 3/3 program and that state schools are also as relatively cheap as I claimed. It also assumes the student got no free financial aid, like scholarships or grants. Further, I have elided the issue of lost earnings during the extra, 7th year. Anyway, my two cents.
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November 10, 2009, 8:38 amSkyler says:
If time spent earning money is the rationale, then let’s just make law school a one year school.
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November 10, 2009, 9:22 amPascal says:
The University of Notre Dame has long had what they call a combination program. Basically, a Junior takes Torts and the balance of his classes in his major. As a Senior he takes 4 law school courses and one course in his major. As a fifth year student he takes all law school courses and gets his BA at the end of that year. The 6th year is all law school courses and his law degree is awarded at the end of the 6th year. I can’t speak to the numbers in the program as no distinctions were made. All first year law school students were equally awed by Dean Broderick who enjoyed teaching that course. I can recall getting C grades and calculating that my prospects were not good given the number of hours I spent on the one law school class. It was many years later that I learned that the C grade in law school had a different meaning than a C grade in college.
My impression was that quite a few Notre Dame students managed the 6 year program and I am sure Notre Dame would be kind enough to share information on that program.
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November 10, 2009, 10:01 amMaryanna says:
I still think that a 3-year law school is excessive. I agree with whoever it was that said that law school is 2 years of education crammed into a 3 year curriculum.
For myself, I got my BA in 5 semesters by overloading and going to summer term (and exempting several freshman classes). I then started law school at my state university and graduated as fast as they would let me, which was one semester early.
Total university time = 10 semesters for a BA and a JD.
I did not do this because I am particularly smart or talented, but because I have always hated school and just wanted to get it over with as fast as possible.
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November 10, 2009, 10:17 amProf. S. says:
I know Hamline University (Minnesota) had a 3–3 program. I’m not sure how many people actually did it. It required that you get started on the program right away, which can be dangerous in light of how many people change majors over time.
My one problem with a 3–3 program is on the hiring side. When I’m looking at resumes, I like to see someone who has some experience outside of college. It lets me know that the person is ready for the daily grind of office life. I also like to see someone who went to a different law school than their undergrad. It shows a diversity of experiences and makes it less likely that they turned law school into an extension of their college days. I think it’s also likely that they had a harder time getting into a different school than just tagging on for an additional few years.
If someone is a 3–3 grad, they’re 24 years old and have been at the same college for the last 6 years. If they came from any affluence (or had a good scholarship), it’s certainly possible that they have not even had a job prior to that point. They also have been hanging out with the same friends (and likely doing the same things) for the past 6 years.
Assuming I’m not stragne in my approach, when you consider the increased difficulty in finding a job (along with the related decrease in expected future earnings), then saving that additional year of school may not be worth it.
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November 10, 2009, 10:39 amUbertrout says:
I did college in 3 years (through AP, summer courses, etc), and law school at a different (t14) institution.
I don’t think it was a mistake per se, but I do kind of wish now that I’d taken a year or two in between — I think it would have changed the law school experience for the better, even though I didn’t have a terrible time.
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November 10, 2009, 10:42 amCraig Niedenthal says:
Back in the late 70’s and early 80’s Tulane had a combined BA/JD program. You applied in your Junior year and then took 1 or 2 students a year. I participated in the program. Completed my education in a total of 6 years. In retrospect, now having practiced over 25 years, it really made no difference except to save my parents a year of tuition (which they have apparently forgot about). I also had the opportunity to go Junior year abroad, but at Tulane, if you were participating in the combined degree program, you could not go Junior year abroad. I choose the combined degree program and yes, at this point in my life I do regret not spending a year abroad. Its a once in a lifetime opportunity and many I have known who have done it had life changing experiences. So bottom line, at the time sounded good, but in the big picture of life, has had no effect on the course of my professional life.
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November 10, 2009, 11:01 amRobert says:
I finished a 3/3 program a few years ago at a public university. I would co-sign most of stash’s comment above.
I think the program worked great for me, but finishing it is a little like threading a needle. At my school the first year of lawschool replaced your electives so unless you started college with a substantial number of AP credits or PSEO hours, you had to fit 90 hours of specific class work into three years of undergrad. If you changed your major, wanted to study abroad, or even if you wanted to participate in an honors program, the 3/3 route was probably not an option. If you did manage to get everything finished in three years, and you had a certain LSAT and a certain GPA, you were in the program. Admission wasn’t even an issue.
As far as law school went, I didn’t feel like I was there too soon or that I was unprepared. I spent my three years of undergrad reading and writing papers and essays, which are really the substantial skills you need to develop in undergrad to prepare for lawschool. The people I noticed who had the hardest transition from undergrad to lawschool were the business majors who couldn’t remember having ever written an essay in college.
As stash said, the biggest advantage of the program for me came during interviews second year. Everyone had questions about the program and it provided a great way to fill up a substantial part of each interview. When an employer sees 20 students with similar resumes, giving the same answers to every question, the students all start to blend together. Having something unique like the 3/3 program at least made me memorable, which got my foot in the door with several firms.
My only real complaint involved some administrative issues. The 3/3 program at my school was rarely used. In the fifteen years they had offered the program, I was only the seventh student and the first male to participate. This created a problem because the financial aid and administrative departments had no idea how to handle an undergrad student in graduate school. In December of my 1L year I had a financial aid director tell me after months of trying to work something out that “we can’t give you an undergrad financial aid package because you’re a graduate student, and we can’t give you a graduate financial aid package because you’re an undergraduate student.” I had the same conversation regarding scholarships. Needless to say, without access to law school loans, I saved a lot of money that year. The Dean eventually worked something out to get me access to my undergrad package but I would advise anyone looking into the program to make sure the financial aspect of the program is in order on the front end.
The caveat I would add is the same one that applies to lawschool in general. If you do a 3/3 program at a public university in a small state like I did, you’re likely committing to practicing in that region. If you want to practice in a different part of the country or you want a degree that will travel, you may have to pass on the 3/3 program and take the traditional route.
I think it’s a great program, but under-promoted. Had I not read a brochure from the poly-sci department during freshman orientation I never would have known it existed.
Feel free to e-mail if you have any questions.
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November 10, 2009, 11:02 amTim says:
I attempted to enter such a program at Illinois Institute of Technology. If accepted, I would have been the first transfer student there to have ever entered the program. Unfortunately, their administration is so corrupt that they never even responded to my application, so I do not know how it would have worked out. There are several problems with these programs, though (in my not so humble opinion):
1. The programs I have seen don’t actually absolve the student of any requirements for the BA/BS. So what you’re really doing is overloading, going summers, and exhausting yourself to finish the same amount of college coursework, sooner.
2. These programs also usually come with caveats. One in particular is that the student must maintain a fairly high GPA (3.5 comes to mind). Combine this with #1 (overloads, summers, etc.) and it appears to me that these programs really aren’t intended to get students out of there in 6 years, but rather, as a hook to get the student to attend there for undergrad over another (perhaps better) option. A student that can keep a 3.5+ in undergrad and finish in 3 years usually will have a pretty competitive law school admissions packet. Encouraging that same student to not take the LSAT, sign up for the LSAC profile, etc. saves the student a lot of money, but also narrows their options to that one school and doesn’t allow them to take advantage of what would have been offered, had they done it. So, although your $100,000 opportunity cost seems large, it quickly diminishes when one realizes that we’re talking about accomplished students who might otherwise have a huge scholarship or a free ride to another law school who have now narrowed their search to just one school either by contract or by not taking the LSAT.
3. These programs do nothing for the students who are otherwise good students, but wash out of the program. Get a 3.48 GPA at the end of your 3 year, exhausting stint in college? Guess what? All of those tremendous, contractually entitled admission offers to that university’s law school are now completely out the window. Like everyone else, you’re stuck in the competitive admission process, which, as you already know, involves taking the LSAT, signing up for the LSAC’s profile, etc. Will your school accept you? Maybe, but maybe not, either. And since your GPA (and probably your LSAT score) makes you slightly less competitive than the students who have the 3.5 and bypass the process, you have more to lose from washing out of the program you set out to complete and take advantage of.
The early law school admission programs like the one at the University of Illinois are the exact same thing. Last year, 80+ students, including myself, applied to the program. Those who were offered admission were students who had very high scores on the ACT, along with 3.9 or higher GPAs in their first 2.5 years at the University. So, the College of Law, though this program, kept students out of the competitive admission process by getting them to commit to attending here during their junior year in college. The other 60 students who didn’t get admitted with this program may be very strong applicants (and, indeed, it may be a blessing in disguise for them to get rejected because now they can seek other offers of admission from other schools) and gain admission here anyway.
I think the 3+3 program could be a great idea for a student like me, if a few changes were made. I knew I was attending law school before I ever set foot on a university campus. I was older than most students, and I already had a decent career-type job, so attending college to gain better employment wasn’t of interest to me. I went because I wanted the opportunity to learn more and attend graduate school.
For these 3+3 programs to work, however, they need to allow students to complete some of the writing/history etc. credits of their undergraduate studies through law school courses. That way they can take a normal 3 year course load. Then, the student benefits as much as the university. Because the student’s bachelor degree is “incomplete” on the day he begins law school, he is obligated to either attend his fourth year of undergrad or complete it through attending his first year of law school. And because that third year student–without a bachelors degree–cannot successfully gain admission to any other school, the university doesn’t have to worry about another law school snatching him away with scholarship offers, living stipends, or whatever other amazing marketing programs law schools come up with.
IIT’s program also came with another caveat if I recall correctly–one had to take the LSAT anyway, and get a score at or above the median for their law school. So even if you attended there, finished your undergrad in 3 years, and somehow didn’t get a 163 or so on the LSAT, you were out of luck. Obviously a student with a 162 on the LSAT and a 3.5 won’t have too much trouble getting admitted elsewhere via the competitive admission process, but the point is that they’re not admitting anyone they wouldn’t have otherwise admitted.
In short, I think these programs are anti-competitive. Schools offer people this idealistic notion of “guaranteed admission” to a great school, and why would the student turn it down unless they were nearly certain that they’d get a better offer elsewhere? Perhaps some don’t even realize just how good their package would be, if they considered applying elsewhere.
I actually have no regrets about not taking advantage of one of these programs. I’ve finished my undergraduate in 3 full time years anyway (plus summers and I went part time prior to transferring to a university) and now with a complete LSAC report, I can apply anywhere I want and allow them to compete for me, which definitely has a value.
I think these programs could work great if they were restructured. But under the current status quo, they have much more to offer the school than the student.
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November 10, 2009, 12:31 pmalittlesense says:
My son, a first-semester freshman, wants to be a lawyer, and is looking to transfer from the community college (good-quality one) where he is going this year to save some money to a four-year school. One university he considered had a program where undergrads who kept up a high grade point average were guaranteed a place in the uuniversity law school class upon completion of their degree. Unfortunately, he has gotten the “if you don’t go to a top-tier law school you are going to have a law career of drek” message loud and clear. I would love to be able to help him make some decisions about his education, but, not being a lawyer, I have no idea what I am talking about.
Any thoughts?
I am posting this because it is at least peripherally relevant to this discussion.
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November 10, 2009, 12:38 pmBill Altreuter says:
If I could change one thing about American legal education I would require that anyone who wanted to attend law school first have two years of work experience following the completion of an undergraduate degree. For far too many law students law school is the terminal liberal arts degree, and far too many lawyers enter the practice with no background or experience in anything except being a student. Work at a bank, be a barista, join the Peace Corps, teach ESL, but do something so that when you have your shiny new law degree you have some idea of how the world works and what it is like to be the client who is sitting on the other side of the desk from you.
I am not aware of any reason that the production of new lawyers should be made more efficient, although a JD does impress me as needlessly expensive.
If I could change two things about American legal education the second would be to de-emphasize law school as a sort of three year prep course for the bar exam prep course. We would have better lawyers if law schools offered more inter-disciplinary studies, and if there was greater freedom to take classes that were more than trade school style training– although probably more of those sort of classes should be available as well. You know what I wish I’d taken in law school? Roman Law. The little I know about it makes it seem fascinating, but my law school (The University at Buffalo), which had and has a reputation for unconventional curricular offerings, didn’t have it, and I wouldn’t have taken it anyway.
If I could change three things, I think I’d like to see a better system of academic advisement installed. In my experience for the most part law schools don’t really offer this at all.
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November 10, 2009, 12:39 pmStephen M (Ethesis) says:
When I took comparative law in law school, the prof pointed out that a guy from up the street from us (the other law school in the state) had finished the entire German program, including all the exams, in 18 months.
Of course he did not skip a year or two of school, read notes and spend the time in the sun either, much like many students are reported to do in the German model’s early years.
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November 10, 2009, 1:17 pmMark says:
Frankly, I see no reason why law couldn’t be a 4 year undergrad degree.
That said, encouraging anyone to become a lawyer borders on insanity these days. Anyone not graduating in the top half of her class from a Top 14 school is likely to end up doing document review in some basement — if she can even find any legal job.
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November 10, 2009, 3:57 pmTim says:
I figure as a current college student (and next year, a law student), my opinion has to be somewhat relevant.
If I were your son, I’d be concerned with keeping my grades up and figuring out what program I wanted to transfer into. It is not easy to transfer schools (I know because I’ve done it twice), mostly because schools don’t want to make it easy to obtain credit elsewhere and then complete their degree program. Their mission is to extract tuition from undergrads. His should be to obtain the highest grades possible and do so in a sufficiently rigorous curriculum that he can transfer to a good university.
With that said, where he is going to go to law school is a product of two things: how much he applies himself right out of the gate in his early college years, and, quite frankly, how smart he is (the God-given kind of smarts that can’t be taught).
If he’s like me and he wants to go to law school bad enough, he will go no matter what. But if he wants to go to a top school, he should start studying now. Tell him to take every class on logic that is offered in the philosophy department. Encourage him to take math and computer science courses. These are the types of courses where the LSAT material is covered most heavily.
I knew I wanted to go to graduate school before I ever saw the inside of a university, so I didn’t waste any time. Keep the grades up, the partying to a minimum, the debt down, and the course selection relevant to that future goal.
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November 10, 2009, 5:35 pmfucius pratum says:
Interestingly, here in Australia, we are the other way around (and upside down?). Our Law Schools have for many years exclusively offered double degree programs for Law (or even in some cases a straight undergraduate Law degree completed in 3–4 years!!).
It is only in the past year that a few Universities are experimenting with the JD style postgraduate law program.
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November 10, 2009, 6:41 pmhappycynic says:
When I went through college (96–00) at Carleton College, you could take advantage of the Columbia 3/3 program. I elected not to (chose Virginia instead) but it was an option. I don’t know how many more schools Columbia has this deal wtih.
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November 10, 2009, 10:26 pmY says:
He couldn’t have finished all the exams — the pre-req for the second exam is 2 full years of practical experience.
And to be honest I am guessing that he couldn’t have finished the full coursework in 18 months either; at least where I went to school there were no means to get done so quickly (have to take Contracts 101 to get into Contracts 102 type of thing). Although if the “guy up the street” was of a certain age, I suppose things may have been done differently back then?
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November 11, 2009, 2:43 amKelly Ann says:
I don’t mind if a BS/JD program caters to the exception crowd, but as a rule it’s a bad idea. While I don’t disagree that gaining basic competency in legal subjects does not require three years, being a lawyer takes maturity that often, but not always, comes with age.
I was 27 when I graduated, and found myself more than a little humbled the first time I held a man’s liberty in my professional hands. Meanwhile, a 21 year-old classmate pronounced in our torts class that the woman who got off the train at Hobo-town should have forseen her rape; I just gotta believe his age played as much a role in his comment as did his dry intellectualism.
Legal practice requires maturity, integrity, and responsibility that is rarely seen in the average 20– something, even the average 20– something law grad. TEACHING law...now maybe a 3/3 would work for future law professors!
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November 12, 2009, 2:10 amohwilleke says:
I wasn’t in a formal combined program, but finished my undergraduate degree in three years and had to drive 80 mph through Ohio and Michigan to make it from my commencement to my enrollment at the University of Michigan Law, which I finished in two and a half years, thanks to their summer starter program.
Pedagogically, this worked well. Although I was a math major, I’d taken Constitutional Law and a 2 credit course entitled “Practical Law” taught by an attorney on the Board of Directors of my college as an undergraduate. I started law school with just 90 students in the building, all in the same single summer class (Criminal Law) taught in the classic Socratic case method style with the all or nothing, time limited, final essay exam. Every administrator and professor in the building focused on orienting us to law school, and we also had time to get used to a new residence and town (and did much better in the housing market in the fall as a result of the head start). This was much less traumatic than starting cold in the first semester of law school and experiencing it all at once. Also, our “section” of 90 students was much better bonded throughout law school with each other than those that started in the fall, where bonding opportunities were more diffuse. The actual class could have been better, but every law student experience some less than ideal instructor in the course of a legal education, it comes with the territory and left us well prepared for the less opaque instructors who followed the next semester.
I doubt that my time would have been better spent that summer working a part-time job or having a last three month party fling (tainted by pre-law school anxiety) before settling into law school. It reduced the total cost of my legal education by about $30,000, which isn’t chump change, and since I finished undergraduate in three years, my family was willing to provide in the long term the kind of economic assistance with my 1L year expenses that they had planned on spending on my fourth year of undergraduate education. But for these factors, I would probably would have had no choice but to a less expensive (and less prestigous) in state institution in my home state.
But, the nail that sticks up gets hammered. Law firms used to hiring plain vanilla 1Ls and 2Ls didn’t know quite what to do with us, the need to take another summer class to fill out two and a half years complicated finding work in the 1L summer, and someone who isn’t paying close attention assumes that you took the part exam in the off season setting because you flunked it the first time, not because you were ahead of the game. It isn’t that we didn’t mostly find jobs. We mostly did find jobs. But, we didn’t fit neatly into the mold that employers expected and the entry level job market for lawyers is not a place for round pegs.
Even if the timing were worked out better by blending law and non-law classes in the first year, given the importance of first year grades as a ranking tool for law review, hiring, etc., I think it would still confuse third parties.
As a model, the graduate school approach taken by the U.S. has pluses and minuses. I’ve lived in New Zealand and known many lawyers educated in undergraduate education rather than a graduate law school. They are no less qualified than American lawyers with seven years of education, and the shorter education period makes it easier for people from modest means to become lawyers and gives women who want to both establish careers and have children at a reasonable time given the biological clock less pressure to be precisely on a certain schedule.
On the other hand, the graduate school approach is salvation for many liberal arts graduates and helps late bloomers who don’t know what they want to do with their lives when they are seventeen years old. I decided to go to law school just days before the deadline to register for the LSAT in my last year of college, knowing myself better than I did when I graduated from high school. I suspect that I am not alone. The graduate school approach also allows prospective law profs to do what they want to do without commiting to writing a full doctoral dissertation with no real assurrance that they will be able to find academic jobs — this is a huge risk since many PhDs have no other marketable value.
Also, while law school doesn’t teach you much more as a graduate student than as an undergrad, age is an asset in practicing law. The middle aged non-traditional students in my class did much better when they started at law firms because they could present as middle aged professionals and were assumed to have more experience and good judgment than they probably did.
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November 12, 2009, 2:50 pmstash says:
I have come across lawyers who practiced for twenty years that do not have those three characteristics. But, snide remarks aside, Kelly Anne is more or less correct. However, I think it puts too much of the onus for this on the law school, and too little on the profession. Now that I am safely grandfathered in, I would strongly support requiring a two-year clerkship program to obtain a license.
Law school, is after all, nothing but an educational institution offering a degree in a particular area of study. Nobody in practice actually believes that law school adequately prepares the graduate to practice law. What further experience–either in the law or life–is necessary, is up to the profession and the choices of individual employers.
On that level, law school does prepare its students for practicing law. You learn the essential language and basic concepts necessary to operate in the legal environment.
I said above that the 3–3 program brought me too young to law school. But at the same time, I doubt that the senior year would have changed much. If that were true, I would have been “ready” for law school as a 2L which was not true. While I did quite well academically, I would have had a far better grasp of what I was learning, and a greater enthusiasm for learning it, if I had more life experience before doing so.
On the other hand, this observation is equally true of my time in college, or high school for that matter. My father, who went to college and grad school as an older student on the GI bill observed at the time that older students such as himself seemed more engaged and serious than the younger ones. So I do not doubt the value of life experience in higher education.
But if that is true, to maximize the benefits, the delay of higher education should start much earlier than law school. Colleges could also benefit from students with experience in the work force. I do not doubt that everything from college binge drinking to higher graduation rates would be improved (by being decreased and increased respectively) by such a policy.
However, the fact is that sooner or later, the experience of actual practice kicks in, and it ceases to matter whether or not you were “mature” enough for law school or college. That is, there seems to be no compelling reason why one should require the experience before rather than after law school. There are pluses and minuses for both policies.
So my conclusion is that a 3–3 or joint degree program is a valuable option, both for the student and the school. Mistakes, both by the individual and school will be made, but that is true in any case, and I do not see the extra year in college as significantly affecting the issue.
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November 12, 2009, 3:59 pmJed says:
In Britain, legal education is quite different. To qualify as a solicitor or barrister, students must complete both an ‘academic stage’ and a ‘vocational stage’ of education. The academic stage is satisfied by either a three year undergraduate degree, or a one year ‘conversion course’ following an undergrad degree in another discipline. The undergrad courses are among the most competitive to get onto, the ‘conversion courses’ considerably less so. The undergrad course is, as I understand it, similar in content (but perhaps not in pedagogical style) to a JD. The conversion course, lasting one year, covers the basic elements of contract, tort, criminal, equity & trusts, land law, EU law, and constitutional & administrative law, as well as a dissertation in a further area of law.
Following the academic stage, prospective lawyers have a one year vocational training course — the Legal practice Course (LPC) for solicitors and the Bar Vocational Course (BVC) for barristers. Here, the curriculum is focused on practical matters such as drafting, advocacy, accounting and procedural rules.
The main difference however is that completion of these exams does not qualify you as a lawyer. Prospective solicitors must have a two year training contract with a firm, which is paid. The minimum salary is about £18,000 per year, commercial firms such as Clifford Chance, Shearman & Sterling etc typically pay about £38,00 per year. Newly qualified solicitors would earn substantially more than trainees; NQ salaries in commercial firms in London range between c. £58,000 and £90,000 (with the highest rates being at the London offices of US firms). Only after completion of a training contract is one a qualified solicitor. Barristers must undergo a one year ‘pupillage’, which is much more like an apprenticeship. Minimum salary here is £10,000 per year, with many offering up to £30,000, and a few very successful chambers offering £40–60,000.
So the English system places far more emphasis on lawyering as a practical art rather than an academic pursuit. In having the training contract/pupillage period immediately after law school, the system also admits what many of the posters above raise: that a newly-minted lawyer straight from law school often lacks life experience, soft skills and maturity. Accordingly, they must be broken into legal practice gradually. The lower salaries for trainee solicitors as compared to 1st year associates in the US also provides better value for money for clients: it amazes me that firms can justify such high rates for what must be very green lawyers.
The leading law firms usually take candidates with undergrad law and those with the ‘conversion course’ in roughly equal proportions. Often, candidates will apply for training contracts two years ahead, and as part of the package, the larger firms will pay the tuition fees for the conversion course and LPC, with some also offering a stipend for living expenses on these courses. It seems that qualifying as a lawyer in England is a far cheaper process.
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November 12, 2009, 9:43 pmstash says:
In my ideal world, I would see a hybrid of the British and American systems. I like the flexibility that the three-year grauduate school model provides in requiring no particular type of undergraduate degree. I know lawyers who were premed, mathematics or engineering majors and of course every possible variety of the liberal arts and humanities. Despite my own early interest in law, I think college should be about (and tried to make it about) a lot more than choosing a career and positioning oneself for the job market.
But, on the other hand, it seems to me that law school alone is not enough, and that it would be a good idea to institute a “training contract” type system similar to the one Jed describes.
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November 13, 2009, 10:24 amstash says:
happycynic:
Hurray for the ACM! (For the uninitiate that is the Associated Colleges of the Midwest). I was at Grinnell, which also has two slots with Columbia.
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November 13, 2009, 10:33 am