In March 2012, Dean Moran formed the Health and Wellness Student Advisory Committee (HWSAC) in an effort to help students have a healthy and balanced experience at law school. While, of course, awareness and demystification of mental health issues are important goals and should be lauded, the fact remains that without addressing the consistently rising tuition cost of attending law school, the HWSAC is missing a major factor affecting students.
The thesis of this article is simple: law school is stressful because rapidly rising tuition rates obligate the students to make a massive economic investment in an uncertain future that depends entirely on their ability to give written summary legal advice in a three-hour long session. Which, of course, they don’t know how to do.
No wonder student mental health is in trouble.
Band-Aid Solutions
The administration does not want to address this root concern. When the HWSAC was confronted with the issues of steadily rising tuition costs and 100% exams, the administration consistently stated that those matters are not on the table.
When it is clear that students are terrified that their $100,000 investment in their education could result in little job prospects, Doggy Days, yoga and smoothies offer little solace. The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that there is a problem.
Whither Rising Tuition: What Mischief Is Being Combatted?
Former Dean Ron Daniels created a vision for U of T’s Faculty of Law when tuition for law school was deregulated in the late ’90s. He imagined a world class law school – a “Harvard of the North”- with a world-class tuition rate to match. Since that decision, tuition fees have increased from approximately $4,000 to the current rate of $27,420, constituting an almost 600% percent increase. At its expected rate of an 8% increase each year, tuition fees will have reached 1000% of the 1997 rates by 2017.
When Dean Daniels implemented this change, he warned that UofT Law’s professors may leave our school for more lucrative options on Bay Street or American law schools. Despite consistent increases in tuition fees, Professor Sujit Choudry nevertheless left U of T to teach at NYU. In addition to one other professor, the only other professor to leave U of T was Ron Daniels himself. Sadly, his own initiative was not enough to keep him from becoming the President of John Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Given that professors are leaving anyway, one must ask what mischief is being combatted by consistently raising tuition fees. Are we really worried that U of T Law’s greatest minds like Michael Trebilcock, Stephen Waddams, Ernie Weinrib are going to move to New York in order to make $100,000 more a year? Or is this just a convenient fiction to justify increasing the bottom line for whatever end as it comes up? (Say, perhaps, a redundant new building when modest renovations would have sufficed?) More importantly, is whatever benefit that is obtained from increasing tuition fees really worth the added stress and depression in students.
Students don’t have access to the administration’s budget. We don’t know whether our tuition fees are being funnelled into the new building. We don’t know whether there is a yearly surplus or deficit. Absent that information, students are not able to submit a reasonable alternative. Assuming, however, that the accounts are in order and there is not a massive surplus (as this writer supposes), I submit that professors should not be paid Bay Street hours on the backs of law students.
What Do We Do About It?
The administration’s insistence that tuition rates are not on the table shows that any initiative to improve health and wellness is hollow at best. Through ignoring the root cause of the problem, the administration’s responses of food and puppies are nothing more than platitudes. Sadly, students choose to have little social capital.
The nature of law school prevents any institutional memory – and thus any effective student organization – from developing. 1Ls focus on getting good marks, 2Ls focus on getting a job, and 3Ls are either too exhausted or too indifferent to combat any issue.
When strikes, boycotts or protests seem fanciful, what options are left? I submit that the best option is to demand change is to withhold future donations to the school. When asked in a few years’ time if we would like to donate, we should ask what is being done on the part of the administration to lower tuition rates. We should ask whether the accounts of the school are transparent for the students. We should ask if the administration is even considering the effect of high tuition on its students.
We should make it clear that even though we cannot help ourselves, we want to make sure that law school remains affordable for middle class students in the future.