Summary: Thomas M. Cooley School of Law announces they are closing their Ann Arbor Campus.
We’ve seen the legal sector shrink, we’ve felt the pressure of a supersaturated body of JDs in a market that can’t handle them, we’ve witnessed schools scrimp, scramble and scheme on how to bolster tuition by enrolling more students without sacrificing their ranking by permissively letting poorer scorers in. Now we are seeing something new: the first close of a major law school. Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley School of Law announced publicly that by the end of the year they would shut down their Ann Arbor campus, once their creditors approve.
This isn’t a huge surprise, considering they’ve cancelled the 2014 first-year class last summer. But it’s a bench mark, a turning point, and other schools are likely to follow suit.
With law school enrollment slipping continually, and with Cooley being hit especially hard, enrolling 1,583 first-year students across its campuses in 2010 only for that to be whittled away to 582 by 2013, we are likely to see some low-quality, low-ranked schools start to fold.
After all, Cooley students only gained employment in full time jobs requiring a JD 23 percent of the time within a 9 month graduation period. That is especially low.
The Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, Calif., might also possibly fold. They too have poor employment stats for their students, and recently, this summer, they missed a bond payment that they will have to renegotiate.
The nation’s 200 law schools have all done their best to ease into the new market without losing too much staff and too much ranking. As enrollment fails to improve, we should expect a few more schools to fall out of the picture coming up.