Cooley Law School made a lot of mistakes over the years. They postured themselves as Harvard’s rival law school. They tied themselves to an established university only to get publicly dumped. And they still have the worst bar passage rate among the country’s accredited schools — of which Cooley remains one.
For now.
No one understands the school’s history of missteps as well as Cooley Law School’s current president James McGrath. In a fantastic deep dive into Cooley’s journey to its current predicament, MLive spoke with McGrath, who joined the school in 2019, about righting the ship. “We’re going to be [a] smaller and leaner school,” he told the paper.
That’s a radical philosophical break for a school that endeavored to be the biggest school in the country. At its founding, Cooley intended to be a “populist law school,” providing a low-cost legal education to students who might otherwise find the dream of lawyering out of reach.
But there’s a fine line between opening doors to outsider candidates and stringing along students who lack a realistic path to paid legal work. And as enrollment dipped, Cooley strayed further and further toward the latter side of that line in a desperate bid to keep tuition money flowing. And it did, with the school bringing in $100 million annually back in 2019, according to MLive. The school’s retreat from its historic “low-cost” philosophy helped the bottom line too.
But at a significant real cost:
“Our philosophy is just put people in, give them a chance, and, if they don’t make it, they don’t make it,” Cooley’s then-President Don LeDuc said in 2009.
A lot of them didn’t make it. That year alone, 286 students dropped out of Cooley for academic reasons.
The school’s commitment to cashing checks while admitting students hovering around the bottom 10 percent of LSAT scores resulted in a lot of expensive crushed dreams. Worse, the students who might’ve turned the populist law school’s opportunity into a career suffered by association as a Cooley diploma — while physically large — ceased to carry much clout.
Did Cooley have a plan?
LeDuc’s response was to beat the drum for the idea of a coming rebound in the legal market, which he said would arrive once the Baby Boomers started to retire in greater numbers.
Instead of retiring, they stopped making equity partners and continued hoarding resources for themselves.
Since taking over, McGrath has run the school at a deficit — though he expects the school to cover its costs again beginning this year — in a bid to get more selective. The school also closed campuses and slashed tuition. At the time, we didn’t think much of the lowered tuition considering the school still boasted atrocious results, but McGrath saw the decrease as a bid to open the school up to higher performing students who could see Cooley as a cheaper alternative as opposed to a place where they’d spend just as much for more risk.
The school has grown more selective and its LSAT figures have improved. But can the school stave off the ABA long enough for the new class to get Cooley back on track?
That’s the question.
With a tarnished reputation and declining enrollment, Cooley Law School hopes for a comeback [MLive]
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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
