Should law schools invest in scholarship?

Bill Henderson, analyzing USNWR rankings on Conglomerate, suggests that emphasizing scholarship in hiring is a poor investment for most schools.

Bill refers to his recent paper with with Andy Morriss (whom we at Illinois recently hired, in part for his outstanding scholarship). That paper says this emphasis on scholarship produces gains for faculty rather than for students or society.

I have a couple of questions. First, we need to know the cost of the emphasis on scholarship. How much extra are schools paying for better scholars (given, of course, that they have to hire somebody)? How much are they paying in lower teaching loads and other perks for better scholars? 

Second, to the extent the payoff depends on the effect on USNWR rankings (e.g., stickiness of reputation scores), the question is how much we should let those rankings drive results. Among other things, can we be sure that the USNWR-driven system is the long-term equilibrium? Might there not be competition for rankings, if the market believes USNWR is not measuring the right things? Might not USNWR change its emphasis on reputation? In fact, I suspect it will, if only to increase volatility and therefore interest in the rankings.

Third, to the extent the payoff depends on the social value of scholarship, Henderson & Morriss mention work by Tom Smith – much of it is not cited. Well, this is not news. The question is, so what? Most businesses fail because of the uncertainty of the world. If they all succeeded, this would mean, to me, that the failure rate was suboptimal. Similar considerations apply to scholarship.

Fourth, some of the investment in scholarship Henderson & Morriss refer to (see n. 94) is rather modest moves schools are making toward promoting scholarship (e.g., through blogs). It's unclear why this would hurt students. Moreover, it could help address the problem discussed in the preceding paragraph.

Bottom line: very interesting work on this issue by Henderson & Morriss, but I'd like to see more to support the conclusion that investments in scholarship don't pay.

Comments

[William Henderson]

I am really glad Larry posted these comments, because my post might suggest to some that I am anti-scholarship. I am not.

All else equal, virtually anyone would prefer to attend a law school with a distinguished faculty (and future Illinois Law alum will appreciate the collection of talent you had assembled). However, in the law school world, all else is not equal.

What we have here is a line drawing problem. The market is segmented: graduation from a national law school essentially guarantees lucrative employment upon graduation; at a regional law school, these same opportunities are reserved for only the top 1 to 15 percent. The marginal benefits of more-and-better scholarship is likely to vary by a school’s position in this hierarchy.

For example, secure in his or her future employment prospects, a student at a Top 10 law school can treat the three law school years as a graduate education experience with education as the end in itself. They might be willing to pay the higher marginal cost of financing the Harvard model (a community of scholars). And it is a great intellectual experience, and it does provide a framework for solving complex problems. In contrast, students at a Tier 4 school might be more interested in beefing up career services or a program that increases the school’s bar passage or practitioner skills. Our regression results clearly show that costs relative to future employment prospects is the dominant strategy for high LSAT students shopping schools in the bottom ¾ of the hierarchy.

That said, I think it is a mistake for a tier 3 or 4 school to adopt the Harvard model of placing primary emphasis on legal scholarship. Consider the following thought experiment: A nonprestigious law school can invest X marginal dollars in (a) curricular innovations, (b) merit-aid (a form of tuition reduction), (c) better facilities more conducive to learning, or (d) attracting and retaining high productivity scholars. The lower a school’s place in the hierarchy, the less likely that strategy (d) will result in any tangible benefit that will redound to the students going into debt to pay the higher faculty salaries, especially if the most productive faculty eventually leave for more prestigious schools anyway. In contrast, investments in the other strategies remain with the institution.

Larry raises a good point on actual cost of promoting scholarship. I am assuming that a law school filled with teachers rather than scholars, who teach 4 courses a year to slightly bigger classes, would be significantly cheaper to run. And I think there is a great opportunity to be a teaching-first law school. In this category, Baylor has really distinguished itself (low tuition, high bar passage, ready to try a case at graduation, and a USNWR ranking that always borders around #50).

Again, law schools are engaged in positional competition. In this context, conventional strategies practiced by most or all participants are unlikely to produce significant gains. I am not anti-scholarship. I just wanted to point out instances where a law school is likely to be spinning its wheels if its true constituency is students and alumni rather than faculty.

[Larry E. Ribstein]

First let me emphasize that I think law schools should appeal to different markets just as products appeal to different consumers. I think the reason we don't see more of this, as I've written before, has to do with lawyer licensing preventing an open market for legal education services from developing.

My caveats went not to the bottom line policy question but to the extent to which we can draw these conclusions from USNWR data in the current regime given the questions I posed.

In other words, suppose the data showed that law schools could get a significant reputational payoff from investments in scholarship -- should it make these investments? Bill's post, and my first paragraph above, would suggest maybe not, for some schools. Yet schools may nevertheless compete for reputation because the payoff goes to the workers, not the consumers.

To the extent this is all about cost-effective improvements in reputation, then I think we still need to know more about the costs and the payoff. With respect to the latter, I'm still not sure that the current USNWR data should necessarily be the metric (though in principle I have no problem with rankings).