There is no question that the cost of law school, and the amount of debt many students must accumulate, seems daunting right now. (I am proud to point out that, on average, Case Western Reserve students graduate with almost 22% less debt than graduates of other private law schools.) It is critically important for your future, however, to evaluate the amount of money you’re going to have to borrow in light of your future career prospects.

U.S News & World Report ranks all law schools as if they had the same mission. And, in one sense, we do -- educating lawyers. But there is a vast difference among law schools, sometimes even of the same rank, in what that simple mission means.

There are, for example, law schools whose purpose is to educate lawyers for the local or regional bar. Many state law schools pursue this mission, as do a number of private law schools. This is an extremely important mission for the well-being of the communities or regions in which these law schools are located. And if you are pretty sure that you want to practice in a particular place, these law schools are very worth considering, especially those state law schools that will save you money.

But most law students don’t know what they will do after graduation, not in their first jobs, and certainly not ten, or twenty, or thirty years out. After all, while we educate lawyers, we educate them for careers. And the arc of your career is critically dependent on the resources and reputation possessed by your law school that can help you capitalize on opportunities you can’t now even imagine.

Again, using the law school I know best, Case Western Reserve, the story is told by the geographical diversity of our alumni and the geographical draw of our students. Over two-thirds of our alumni live and work outside our region and state. (This is what keeps me on the road so much, and they are great people.) Approximately two-thirds of our students come from outside our region and state. Unlike many law schools that surround us in the rankings, we truly are a law school of national scope.

What does this mean for you and why should you pay for it? First, it means jobs. Wherever I travel, whether in LA with our many alumni prominent in the entertainment industry, to New York with our big firm partners and investment bankers, to Washington with our ambassadors, agency heads, and top government and private lawyers, I meet alumni who have gotten their jobs both because they were helped by other alumni and because of the reach of our reputation. Many of these people started their trajectories right out of law school; others began their practice locally, but later felt the urge to branch out. Either way, they have enjoyed careers that they would have found much more difficult to pursue had they attended a more local or regional law school.

It may cost more to go to a school like ours. But our alumni agree -- it’s well worth it.

 Case Western Reserve and China

I just returned from a two week trip to China with Professor Jon Groetzinger, architect of our China program. And what a wonderfully successful trip it was! First, a few facts about our unique China program, and then a bit about the trip.

CWRU is one of a tiny handful of law schools that allows you (in fact we encourage you) to study abroad for a full semester. Most law schools have summer programs, typically taught by a combination of American and foreign teachers who teach courses that do or could appear in their law school’s regular curriculum. Here’s why we’re different:

Our China program puts you for a semester (or up to a year) in classes at one of the top ten Chinese law schools (ranked by the Chinese Education Ministry). You can study in Beijing at Peking University or Renmin University, in Shanghai at Fudan University or East China University of Political Science and Law, in Hong Kong at City University of Hong Kong, or in the west in Chongqing, at Southwest University of Political Science and Law (from which you can take the high speed train two hours to Chengdu and see the pandas in their natural Sichuan habitat).

Your classes will be taught by Chinese professors, teaching Chinese law, in English, for a full semester’s worth of credit. (Of course if you speak Mandarin, as some of our students do, more courses will be open to you.) And you will be well taken care of. The Chinese, warm and wonderful people, are famous for their hospitality. And when we visited with Case Western Reserve students studying in Shanghai and Chongqing, they couldn’t say enough about how well they were treated and the warmth with which they were welcomed. Chinese students mix easily with our American students, and our significant alumni LL.M. population (who attended our receptions in Beijing and Shanghai) are also there to help.

When you return, your marketability will be improved by conversance with Chinese law and, perhaps even more important, with a new cultural competence that is so important in almost every area of modern law practice. You may even speak some Mandarin (and courses are available to you at our partner universities, as well as at CWRU which will be offering an intensive four week summer Mandarin course for law students, lawyers, and business people). And you will also have experienced life in one of the most fascinating and important countries to the future of the world.

Our semester abroad program will probably affect you the most, but that’s not where our China program ends. We have agreed in principal with all of our partners to build a US-China Law Institute, a multi-university think tank populated with law professors, government officials, lawyers, and business people, to help foster mutual cooperation between our nations. Under the American-side leadership of Jon Groetzinger, and the Chinese-side leadership of Professor Deng Feng of PKU, this institute is designed to be the leading Chinese-American think tank on issues primarily relating to business, trade, and financial law. With the addition next fall of our new professor, Tim Webster, a rising star in the world of Chinese law scholarship, the institute is sure to be a big success.

If you’ve been to China, you know how exciting a place it is and, if you haven’t, you’re in luck if you come to Case Western Reserve and take advantage of our program. I’ve been going to China over the last half-dozen years at intervals of about a year and a half, and am amazed to find the transformations in the cities I know. Skyscrapers grow like bamboo (and supported by bamboo scaffolding), new planned financial and trade centers are rising, restaurants and night life are fantastic, the shopping will remind you of major US and European capitals, and the countryside is magnificent. Beijing, the stately capital city, is the home of wonderful treasures from the Imperial era, from the Forbidden City at Tian ‘an men Square, to the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, the Great Wall, and too many other places to name. Vibrant, exciting Shanghai, with its New York meets Vegas character, is to China what New York is to the US. And Chongqing is charming and beautiful (despite its population of 30 million!), reminiscent in places of San Francisco and Los Angeles with its ever-green flora, palm trees, and hills, cradled by the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. The countryside and smaller cities of Suzhou and Hangzhou outside Shanghai are simply treasures, and the landscape from Chongqin north and west toward the Himalayas (easily accessible from Chengdu) makes you feel as if you’re in a classical Chinese painting.

And, perhaps best of all (and ignoring US-China currency disputes), China remains amazingly inexpensive for Americans. Cab rides of an hour typically cost less than $15 dollars, public transportation within the cities and inter-city trains are cheap and excellent, you can have fantastic meals in nice restaurants for less than $50 for three or four people (or meals of terrific dumplings and buns for a dollar or two), and the shops that line the streets of the cities (where bargaining is the only way of doing business) sell a dizzying array of Chinese goods.

What other law school can offer this experience? None of which I know. Our China program is simply one other reason that Case Western Reserve is truly a special law school.

I think it’s fair to say that the second year of an apparent free-fall in the number of law school applicants is pretty common knowledge. Last year the national average was down about 10%. That figure sticks in my mind because my tenure as dean began towards the end of the application cycle, we at Case Western Reserve were down considerably more than that, and we had to scramble to ensure that we matriculated enough students to make the budget I was handed (and had no time to change) for the succeeding year.

But when the dust had settled, the time for reflection had begun, even before this year’s national average drop (at this writing of approximately 17%) had become apparent. (I’m proud to say that at this writing, we at Case Western Reserve are almost even with last year’s number of applications.) Reflection raised inevitable questions of what these declines meant for now, and for the future. Statistics are, after all, statistics, and it requires some intellectual perspiration to try to make sense of them.

But the universe of possibilities is not unlimited. Certainly the relative dearth of high-paying law jobs in the current economic environment has something to do with it. But that cannot be a complete explanation. After all, in the other two significant recessions during which I’ve taught, law school applications have increased. While the sample set is too small to draw firm conclusions, it does suggest that jobs are not the answer, or at least not the complete answer.

The second variable is the significant attention law schools have been receiving in the popular press and the blogosphere. Some of the accusations are overgeneralized or overblown, but we in legal education do bear some responsibility for failing to be as forthright and forthcoming as we might have been. (At Case Western Reserve, we want to be as transparent as possible. We do our best to give you all the information we think is relevant. But if you want information we have neglected to give, just ask.)

One of the persistent refrains in the law school wars has been that law schools admit too many students relative to the job market they will enter in order to enrich themselves. I have dealt, to some extent, with both of these accusations in earlier posts. I have, I believe, demonstrated the unlikeliness of law school self-enrichment, and I have been careful to show that legal education is uniquely good training for a rich and rewarding career, not just your first job.

And yet . . . . There is a sense in which many law schools may be missing an important dimension of the way their operations potentially adversely affect their students. And the decline in applications may be just the signal we need to wake up. For many years, certainly for as long as I’ve been in legal education, most law schools have had the luxury of admitting as many students as they needed to in order to produce the revenue necessary to make their projected budgets. Now, this is not to suggest avarice or fraud. It simply is to suggest that, as in any business in which demand exceeds supply, many law schools developed the bad habit of living off the fat of the land without much attention to waste or inefficiencies in their budgets. To some extent, this is especially understandable with educational institutions in general and law schools in particular. Most of our costs are fixed; tenured faculty have to be paid, libraries have to run, students must be served in a manner that eases, rather than complicates, their legal education. All this takes money.

What I do mean to suggest is that the robust market for legal education relieved us of the need to be more mindful of what we were spending and where. The current decline in applications has the virtue of forcing us to focus.

That is what I have done since confronting the decline with which I was faced upon assuming my office. And that is what our faculty has done. The consequence, at least for us, is that we have engaged in simultaneous budget cutting and class size reduction. The class of 2015, and all subsequent classes here at Case Western Reserve, will be targeted for matriculation at a number 10% lower than our past practices dictated. This will allow us to focus more intently on the students we matriculate, and have a better chance of assuring that our graduates will find meaningful and rewarding work.

In order to do this, we’ve had to examine our budget in the same manner as a for-profit business. At first glance, there was little we could cut. More disciplined analysis, including a request for zero-based budgeting from all of our departments, has allowed us to cut a couple of million dollars of fat from our budget. I stress that our charge was to cut budget without cutting program. Remember that part of the imperative to cut class size was to concentrate our resources on fewer students in order to improve their experience. And indeed we are building program even as we cut our budget.

How? Creativity and discipline. That mother of invention, necessity, made us more responsible with respect to our expenditures, leading to a diminished need for revenue, and thus a more socially conscious path to educating fewer lawyers. It’s time for law schools around the country to make hard choices.

I’ve already discussed getting into law school and how to use the rankings. So you’ve probably narrowed down your options to a reasonable number of schools to which you might apply. You’ve made some applications, and are preparing others. Soon, you will begin to learn where you are accepted. And this is where the rubber meets the road.