The law school at the University of Arizona is throwing some fuel onto the fire when it comes to the law education tuition battle, according to The Arizona Daily Star.
The school will drop tuition a second time this fall as it tries to undercut the tuition rates of nonresident students of more than a dozen peer law schools across the country. The school is going to provide students from other states with large tuition discounts.
“The drastic decrease in law school applicants nationally since 2008 means a much more competitive environment for attracting the best students from Arizona and beyond,” said the proposal from the school. It has been approved by the Arizona Board of Regents.
Students who are not residents of Arizona who paid over $42,000 to study law at the school last year will pay just $29,000 per year. This equates to a 30 percent drop in tuition. The in-state rate will remain the same at $24,400 per year.
The new tuition rates will leave the law school as the school with the cheapest nonresident tuition rate out of its 15 peer schools in the country. The rest of the schools in its peer group charge anywhere from $10,000-$30,000 more per year.
“We’re responding to the market in changing times,” the dean of the James E. Rogers College of Law, Marc Miller, said. “We’re not trying to undermine other schools. It will have more students looking at us more seriously early on.”
This is the second straight year that the law school has dropped its nonresident tuition. For the school year ending in May, the rates were dropped by eight percent for nonresidents and 11 percent for residents.
The price reduction comes after a 32 percent decrease in freshman law school enrollment since 2010, according to data from the American Bar Association.
“The longstanding criticism is that law school tuition is too darned expensive,” Miller said. “We’re doing our best to help students graduate without crushing levels of debt.”
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