Indiana Tech Law School’s future seemed doomed from the time it opened in 2013.
It was the state’s fifth law school and the 26th in the Midwest region, and critics said there was no need for another law school, especially in a time of declining enrollment numbers and fewer legal jobs.
And now, after losing nearly $20 million and graduating one class of students — just two of whom passed this year’s bar exam — the school announced it’s closing at the end of the school year.
The Indiana Tech Board of Trustees voted unanimously to close Indiana Tech Law effective on June 30, 2017.
“Our law school faculty and staff have made commendable efforts in serving our students,” Indiana Tech President Arthur Snyder said a statement. “Despite their many positive achievements, we have not seen enough of a corresponding increase in demand by prospective students to enable the school to continue in operation.”
New enrollments were projected to be in the range of 30 to 50 per year, and the deficit was likely to continue.
The school’s 71 students can either stay through the end of the year — or they can transfer for the January 2017 semester. Those who were planning to graduate in May can still do so, if they want.
Twenty students graduated this past May. The school’s inaugural class started with 27 students when it opened in 2013, but some left when the school failed to gain accreditation from the American Bar Association its first attempt in 2015. The remaining 20 students chose to stay despite the fact that they would be ineligible to take the bar exam if the school did not secure accreditation before they graduated. Fortunately for them, the ABA granted the provisional accreditation in March.
But unfortunately, the majority of those students did not pass the July 2016 bar exam.
Of the 12 who sat for the bar exam, only two passed, for a pass rate of 16.7 percent. (Across the state, 508 people took the July bar exam, and the pass rate was 68 percent.)
In a Q&A, the school said the low bar pass rate was one of the many factors that were under review when considering the future of the law school.
“In the end, low demand for legal degrees, much higher levels of competition for students, and the associated impact on the number of students we projected to attract over the coming years drove this decision,” the school said.
The likelihood of law school closures has been a hot topic among law school professors and bloggers for the past two years.
Jerry Organ, of University of St. Thomas, compared today’s law school environment to what happened to dental schools in the 1980s. Ten percent closed due to a significant decline in the number of applicants. Could 10 percent of law schools shut down, he asked?
Dorothy Brown, of Emory University School of Law, believes a top law school will shut down in the next two to four years.
“Primarily, the law school would have to be hemorrhaging a lot of money over a sustained period of time with no end in sight,” she wrote. “Not just a one-time deficit, but millions of dollars in deficits over a sustained period.”
And David Barnhizer, of Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, said 80 law schools are at risk of closing.
“Just as the legal employment market is over-saturated due to the surplus numbers of graduates law schools pumped into the system over the past twenty years, the productive capacity of the law school ‘industry’ is entirely out of balance with all foreseeable need for law graduates,” he wrote. “Given the direction the traditional employment markets for lawyers are heading no more than 80-100 law schools could easily serve America’s need for new law graduates.”
In a Kaplan Test Prep survey, 65 percent of law school admissions officers thought it would be a good idea if at least a few law schools closed.
