POINT – Queen’s Law: Abandon Your Wayward Plans!
Marita Zouravlioff
Queen’s is tired of playing second fiddle to the big bad Toronto schools. The self-appointed ranking gods are really starting to get to them and the famed Queen’s pride just won’t stand for it anymore. So they’re thinking of going forward with a radical plan. Instead of raising tuition like those Toronto jerks, they’re going to take the last 35 people who got cut from the admissions list, and let them in. This will make the school better. The end.
So the idea is let more people in = more money = keep stride with or, better yet, surpass what Toronto has to offer.
This is a bad idea. Firstly, it will be a blow to a profession that is already overcrowded and add to the glut of new law grads; that much is well established. We have an articling crisis on our hands, folks. But moreover, this plan won’t serve Queen’s as they hope.
The most oft-cited justification behind this new scheme is that this will provide Queen’s with more money to attract the big names in the biz. Not only attract them but assure they stay put. We U of Ters throw our money around and get all the A-listers. It’s just not fair! Bill Flanagan, Dean of Queen’s Faculty of Law, put it best: “It’s outrageous that the province continues to absolutely refuse to deal with this highly inequitable situation that ultimately, over time, means that there’s going to be one calibre of education available in Toronto and another for the rest of the province,” he said. “That’s just not right.” Waa.
But Bill: no matter how hefty a salary you offer, we will always be able to offer more. Just do the math.
In five years, if the faculty wins (and odds are slightly in their favour ) tuition at U of T will be $40,289. Optimistically, the student body will stay under 200 students. In that year alone, the school will pull in $8,017,511 in tuition fees.
Queen’s has 165 students now and they are floating the idea of adding 35 students a year for 5 years. This would mean they will have 340 students at the end of the expansion, which is almost on par with the amount of scholars the University of Ottawa is pumping out nowadays. However, if they are to keep their tuition rates “low”, this will generate revenue of $5,440,000 for them that year. If my math is correct, looks like we’re still up 2 and a half million bucks.
This is all on top of the fact that Queen’s students that were recently polled about this master plan indicated that they would prefer a gradual increase in tuition rather than increase class sizes and stretch already strained resources.
Speaking of Ottawa, let’s give credit where credit is due. Queen’s didn’t think of this idea. Ottawa U more than doubled its class size from ’97 to 2012. How did that work out for them? Well, I’m not positive, but I don’t think you see Ottawa stealing too many U of T professors.
On another level, it’s not really about the money. Well, not just about the money. If Queen’s insists on keeping up with the salaries that U of T is doling out, the question is still going to be do you want to make $200,000 in Toronto, or $200,000 in Kingston? I mean, Kingston’s a lovely place. Not only is the cost of living cheaper, but the waterfront is beautiful. Fort Henry makes for a nice day trip. Hell, with that kind of salary you could probably put a down payment on Fort Henry. But comparing it to Toronto is like apples to oranges. Toronto is internationally renowned as one of the best cities to live in…Kingston is the #2 retirement capital of Canada.
And if Queen’s is worried about the quality of their facilities, they shouldn’t be. We all chose U of T and look at the dump Flavelle was. Granted, we’re going to have a swanky new building soon enough, but clearly it isn’t a deciding factor for potential students or ranking systems for that matter.
The copycat effect that this might have is also cause for concern – if Queen’s follows Ottawa, then who’s next to expand their enrollment? When criticized, Queen’s pointed to the record number of foreign-trained law grads being accredited as the real problem for the articling crisis. It would follow that each law school outside the city of Toronto could up their enrollment and then, once articling Armageddon ensues, each Dean could point to the influx of international students to exculpate themselves. You would hope that someone in our profession would know that two wrongs don’t make a right.
COUNTERPOINT – Mo’ Queen’s Grads are not necessarily Mo’ Problems
Louis Tsilivis
The Queen’s Faculty of Law’s Strategic Planning Committee has suggested raising the incoming 1L class at Queen’s from approximately 165 to either 200 or 215. The backlash to this proposal has been entirely predictable and predictably hyperbolic. Opposition ranges from a report by the LSS (the Queen’s equivalent of Toronto’s SLS) that is rooted in “student opinion” – a mere 37 students who gave their opinion via email and social media – to a Point-Counterpoint point by the normally sensible Marita Zouravlioff, who really misses the boat on this one.
Will this have a negative effect on graduates’ job prospects?
The answer is actually more nuanced than the detractors claim. For graduates of Queen’s Law, it is probably the case that their job prospects will be entirely unaffected – or possibly even improve. Of all of the law schools, Queen’s has the highest rate of graduates who take articling positions. The Faculty’s position in the Maclean’s rankings of law schools is an impressive third – beat only by York University’s Osgoode in second and perennial gold medallist Toronto. Queen’s also takes the third spot (in a near tie with Western) in terms of the percentage of its class that find jobs through the 2L OCI recruitment process. It is likely that another 35 or 50 graduates will have not really affect the hiring prospects of Queen’s graduates.
On the contrary, there are reasons to believe that the increase may even improve job prospects for law graduates from Queen’s. Consider that a larger class can produce a larger alumni base, which may preference fellow alumni in hiring. A larger graduate footprint can also mean that Queen’s will be better known outside of the markets that it traditionally does very well in (i.e. Toronto and Ottawa) and that the school may now have the larger graduate base and faculty size to perform better in the New York market. The logic that an expanded alumni footprint can actually improve all graduate job prospects is what lead the Queen’s School of Business – across the street from the Faculty of Law and ranked first in Canada for six consecutive years by Bloomberg Businessweek – to increase its own class sizes.
A larger class size can also help Queen’s attract more high-profile professors or help retain professors who are being lured in by cash-rich Osgoode and Toronto, which in can maintain or even boost the school’s reputation and rankings spot. Osgoode and Toronto have the highest tuition rates in Canada, and are protected from other schools’ efforts to close this tuition gap thanks to tuition increase caps based on current tuition levels and those schools willingness to raise tuition by the full amount permitted. As a university, Queen’s also has the smallest full-time undergraduate population (just under 15,000) and is in the smallest town (just over 120,000 people) of any law school in Maclean’s top 12; this makes it particularly difficult to attract internationally-acclaimed legal scholars who are drawn to larger cosmopolitan centres and universities that can offer them spousal hires.
This move will, however, hurt the job prospects of students from schools that do worse in terms of articling rates or those who have done their legal degrees overseas. However, the effects of an extra 35 to 50 graduates a year on the entire legal market in minimal. The real offenders of the oversupply of legal graduates: the University of Ottawa, which increased its annual class size by more than the size of the current Queen’s 1L class; Windsor, which increased its class size by 63; Lakehead, which is starting a new school with a planned 1L class of 60; and the NCA program, which increased the number of certificates given to foreign-trained lawyers from 260 in 2009 to a whopping 730 today. To say that Queen’s – which has the highest articling rates – should not increase its enrolment because of oversupply caused by other schools and the NCA expansion is to actually ignore that the failure of other institutions in producing graduates who cannot find articling positions.
When we focus on Queen’s making marginal increases to its 1L class and act like that is the source of the articling crisis, we actually miss focusing out on the real problem: schools with lower articling rates that boost their class numbers without a clear plan and the rapid expansion of the NCA program.
