Tuition for next year’s incoming class will be over $30,000. In response, law students have started the Tuition Petition (see TuitionPetition.ca) in an attempt to keep law school affordable.
30,000 is a psychological significant number, but does this represent a tipping point when it comes to student apathy? Definitely not. The Tuition Petition is reasonable and it will never go anywhere.
The Tuition Petition is a far cry from the Quebec student protests. Nobody’s banging any pots, wearing red squares, or demanding that tuition be free. In fact, the Tuition Petition’s requests are insanely reasonable. They’re asking the administration to work with students to create a sustainable alternative to our annual 8% tuition increases, and to hold tuition at current levels (still above $30,000) until such a plan can be reached. How radical. Viva la revolucion.
None of this changes the fact that the administration has no incentive to address these concerns. Most aspiring law students in Ontario still want to go to UTLaw. The few who find it too expensive just go to other schools. If our school can keep raising the price while still maintaining a strong student body, why wouldn’t they? They do put the money to good use.
We’re not a very sympathetic lot either. Most of us want to go into high paying corporate law jobs. If tuition was lower, we’d still want to go into high paying corporate law jobs. It’s not like there would be a massive influx of lawyers into legal aid clinics. Any discussion about law school tuition needs to be part of a broader discussion about the role of the legal profession in our society and the current challenges facing access to justice.
Another problem with this issue is that the effects of increasing tuition are gradual. No single class is that much worse off than the preceding year, and any given student only cares about this issue for three years. Law school, and thereby the legal profession, becomes less accessible to the middle class, but never so quickly that anyone really notices or does anything about it.
My prediction is that tuition will keep increasing, most likely at a slower rate, until it hits about $40,000 per year in the next 5-10 years (any higher than that and you’d just go to the real Yale). There will still be legal aid and back end debt relief for a small number of people, but the average law student will be less representative of the middle class.
Consequently, the legal profession will become increasingly detached from the regular people it is supposed to be helping. This will be bad, but in a vague unquantifiable way that no one really gets upset about.
Student petitions, posters, and pamphlets won’t change any of this. If this bothers you, well, go bang some pots.
