Two of Northeast Ohio's three law schools are among a growing number of law institutions scaling back admissions as applications continue to drop amid a persistently tough job market for attorneys.
In an effort to preserve the quality of the school's incoming class, Cleveland-Marshall College of Law is cutting the target for its entering class to 140 from its previous target of 200. Likewise, Case Western Reserve University School of Law is reducing its admissions target by about 10%, to 190 from a previous range of 210 to 220.
Cleveland-Marshall's applications are down nearly 30% this year compared to last year, when the school admitted 168 students in its fall class, said its dean, Craig M. Boise. Both Mr. Boise and Lawrence E. Mitchell, dean at Case Western Reserve's law school, are revising their admission targets downward in their first years at the helm.
“Having been here a little less than a year, obviously the first thing you hate to do is say, "Look, my revenue's down, and we need to ... shrink revenue projections for the law school going forward,'” said Mr. Boise, who became dean last July. “But this is something that's not a result of poor management. It's just a catastrophic time in the legal field right now. Nobody's ever seen anything like this.
“We either needed to prepare to admit a lot of students who were likely not going to be successful enough to get a job and pay off their law school loans, or we had to get smaller,” Mr. Boise said.
Nationwide, a number of schools, among them the University of California's Hastings College of the Law and George Washington University Law School, are reducing class sizes, too.
As of May 4, the number of law school applicants nationwide for fall 2012 was down 14.6% from fall 2011, according to the Law School Admission Council in Newtown, Pa. The council also found that 170 of the roughly 200 U.S. law schools have reported a drop in applications this year.
The decline in applicants comes atop a drop of 10.7% in the number of people applying to law school last fall from levels of fall 2010.
Given those declines, it isn't surprising that law schools are cutting back on admissions, said Wendy Margolis, director of communications for the Law School Admission Council.
“It's just beginning to happen, I think, so it's really difficult to predict what the extent of it will be and how many law schools will end up doing that,” she said.
A dean with a conscienceMr. Boise said higher-ranked law schools are dipping into a student pool they previously didn't pursue because there are fewer applicants. That situation leaves lower-ranked schools such as Cleveland-Marshall — ranked 135th by U.S. News & World Report — with less of the applicant pie.
If Cleveland-Marshall continued admitting 200 students, it would have chanced enrolling a quarter to a third of the incoming class at “serious risk” of not being able to pass the bar, Mr. Boise said.
“I think it's an ethical issue,” Mr. Boise said. “I can't sleep well at night feeling that I'm telling everybody who comes, "Yeah, you've got a chance to be a lawyer,' when as a matter of academic and test performance, that's not the case.”
It also isn't a good business model, Mr. Boise said. He said students who don't excel “are not going to be happy with the school, and word will get out.”
“We are measured by outcome,” he said. “You're going to devalue the product that you're offering.”
Reducing student numbers reduces tuition revenue, and to compensate, Cleveland-Marshall has cut $800,000 from its 2012-2013 budget, some of it through attrition. It's expected the school will cut another $750,000 through attrition over the next three years, Mr. Boise said.
The school also plans to raise tuition by 9.5% in each of the next three years, though Mr. Boise noted it's also increasing its scholarship budget and is including for the entering class bar exam preparation courses, which typically run each student roughly $3,000.
Cuts may not be doneCase's Mr. Mitchell, who became dean last June, said he made the decision last December to cut the incoming 2012 class to 190.
Mr. Mitchell said he's motivated to cut more to improve the quality of the incoming class than by declining application volumes. Case's applications have dropped 6% this year, according to Mr. Mitchell, though he noted it's a moving number.
“If we find that we cannot improve the quality of our class at our 10% cut, we will cut further,” Mr. Mitchell said. “Our goal is not to maintain; our goal is to improve.”
Such improvement will be measured by the types of jobs Case graduates achieve, their success on the bar exam and, over the long term, the type of careers they lead, Mr. Mitchell said. The payoff for Case is a potential climb in U.S. News & World Report rankings, he noted. The school currently is ranked 67th.
Like Cleveland-Marshall, Case needed to reduce its budget in line with its lower admissions. To do so, the school cut its budget substantially, in part thanks to a pay freeze for the 2012-2013 academic year that faculty and staff willingly accepted, Mr. Mitchell said. The school also increased tuition nearly 5%.
Unlike Northeast Ohio's other two law schools, the University of Akron School of Law does not plan at present to cut admissions because it expects to meet its enrollment projection of 175 — a number it's held to for the last couple years — without reducing its standards, said Lauri S. Thorpe, assistant dean of admission, financial aid and student affairs.
It's all about jobsThe job market for law school graduates is the worst it's been in decades.
According to the June 2011 Employment Report and Salary Survey for the Class of 2010 by NALP — The Association for Legal Career Professionals, the overall employment rate for new law school graduates was 87.6% of graduates for whom employment status was known. That's the lowest since 1996.
Furthermore, only 68.4% of the graduates for whom employment was known obtained a job for which bar passage is required. That's the lowest percentage NALP ever has measured.
“There is likely more bad news to come,” said NALP executive director James Leipold. “We can expect that the overall employment rate for new law school graduates will continue to be stagnant or decline further for the Class of 2011, with the curve probably not trending upward before the employment statistics become available for the Class of 2012.”
Even so, the local schools' admission cuts aren't necessarily permanent.
Mr. Boise said Cleveland-Marshall's admission plan, known as the “140 plan,” covers the next three years, and school officials will re-examine admissions when its time is up.
Case Western Reserve's Mr. Mitchell doesn't anticipate ever increasing the law school's class size above 190, though long-term market conclusions would be premature, he said.
“We face, I think, permanent structural changes in the job market,” Mr. Mitchell said.
One benefit to the current legal market, said the Law School Admission Council's Ms. Margolis, is it's weeding out those people who go to law school because “they think it's a nice thing to do.”
Someday, the spread of these admission cuts may result in a lawyer shortage, she said.
“It's conceivable that the pendulum would swing the other way eventually,” she said. “But who knows how long that would take.”
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London City Job Vacancies Rose 25% Last Month, Recruiter Says - Bloomberg
Job vacancies at London’s financial- services companies increased 25 percent last month as banks hired in areas such as foreign exchange and derivatives, recruitment firm Astbury Marsden said.
New vacancies in the British capital’s City and Canary Wharf financial districts rose to 4,320 in May from 3,455 in April, the London-based recruiter said in a statement today. The number of jobs created in May is the highest since August 2011.
“Volumes within these areas seem to have picked up over the year,” said Mark Cameron, chief operating officer at Astbury Marsden in London, referring to foreign exchange and interest rate derivatives. “The threat to the euro is now seen as a risk that businesses need to consider hedging against. That has created a lot of activity.”
Barclays Plc’s (BARC) investment banking revenue from currency trading rose 27 percent last year, “benefiting from market volatility and strong client volumes,” the London-based company said in February. HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA), Europe’s largest bank, said in May pretax profit at the investment bank in the first quarter, rose 5 percent to $3.08 billion. It profited from an improvement in trading after the European Central Bank provided unlimited three-year loans to the region’s lenders through its Longer Term Refinancing Operation.
Still, the number of jobs available from a year ago fell 35 percent, Astbury Marsden said.
“Sentiment has improved since the latter stages of 2011 but, to put this recent recovery in perspective, the jobs market is still far lower than this time last year,” Cameron said. “Given that the recent political deadlock in Greece and the banking crisis in Spain have made a swift resolution of the euro-zone crisis less likely, this significant uptick in the number of new jobs is a pleasant surprise for City staff.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Ambereen Choudhury in London at achoudhury@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net
London City Job Vacancies Rose 25% Last Month, Recruiter Says
Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
A pedestrian passes through the Canary Wharf business and shopping district in London.
A pedestrian passes through the Canary Wharf business and shopping district in London. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
Source: www.bloomberg.com
London orchestra to mime Games opening - ABC Online
Updated
There is outrage in London about the decision by Olympic Games organisers to have the London Symphony Orchestra mime its performance at the opening ceremony.
It has emerged the world renowned orchestra will pretend to perform while a recording made six weeks ago blasts out of the stadium speakers.
Considered to be one of the best orchestras in the world, it was awarded the contract for the 2012 Games.
But when the athletes walk in to the stadium in front of a worldwide audience of 4 billion people, the orchestra will in fact be pretending.
Twitter has been abuzz with outrage.
"What a bloody joke," one person said, "The London Symphony Orchestra told to mime at games opening."
"You'll see the London Symphony Orchestra at the Olympics, but you won't hear it - how ridiculous, what a farce," another posted.
The decision was made by the London Games organising committee, which is worried about the acoustics and the uncertainties of the British weather.
"Due to the complexity of everything involved in staging the ceremonies, it's not possible for all the music in all the shows to be live," a committee spokesperson said in a statement.
"There will be live musical elements, but many of the songs will be recorded to track in advance of the shows.
"This is standard practice for an event of this scale, and the performers have no issue with it."
The music to blare out of the stadium at the opening games ceremony was recorded at the famous Abbey road studios.
Melbourne Symphony Orchestra operations director Lou Oppenheim says the decision to pre-record the music is not unreasonable.
"Performances such as the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games are incredibly complex from an operational perspective," she said.
"The inter-relationships between a whole lot of different elements, including the musical elements, the pyrotechnics, the announcements, the lighting of the cauldron - everything has to be done to split-second timing."
Ms Oppenheim says a whole lot of different things can influence what can happen with the timing which is calculated to the tenth of a second.
"The wonderful thing obviously, the audiences will be still hearing the sounds of the fabulous London Symphony Orchestra, so it's not as if they're miming to, you know, another orchestra," she said.
"But if that's what's happening I would understand that that's possibly why that might be the case."
What might come as a surprise to many is that the Sydney Symphony Orchestra mimed its performance at the opening of the Sydney Games in 2000, and the backing tape was recorded, in part, by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.
Ms Oppenheim says live outdoor performances are difficult to manage and it is important that nothing is left to chance.
"I think it's important that we hear orchestras in the best fantastic light and if they've actually had to make a call that that's the way they've got to do it for this, I think you know, some understanding around that and to make sure that all of the elements of the ceremony can come together as smoothly as possible," she said.
Topics: olympics-summer, music, england
First posted
Source: www.abc.net.au
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