One Law School’s Novel Strategy: Shrink

Faced with decreasing numbers of student applications, the University of Minnesota Law School, one the top two dozen in the nation, has for the last several years been reducing the number of students in its entering class. The dean rejected a strategy that has been more widely employed in U.S. law schools: lowering the standards for admission, as measured by test scores and grades. He also concluded that raising tuition rates wasn’t feasible. The school has managed to make up for the lost revenue by wrangling more public money from the state, a course not open to many schools. Nationwide the number of law school applicants has declined from 88,700 in 2006 to 51,000 this April.