Interesting stuff… The WSJ Law Blog reported on Friday about Northwestern’s plan to offer a two-year JD program. WSJ quoting the dean of Northwestern Law School:
Tuition: Don’t expect to save money. Northwestern announced the program but won’t answer the $42,672 question of whether the compressed plan will be cheaper. Van Zandt told the Law Blog that, rather than the prospect of a cheaper degree, the financial attraction of the program is more likely to be the ability to be earning a salary a year earlier. (And yes, the $42k figure is NU’s annual tuition.)
Time This is a five-semester program that will begin in May. The 25 to 60 students expected to join will take the same number of credits as students in the three-year program. They’ll take extra courses each semester and pick up one or two credits through mini-courses between semesters.
Curriculum While the two-year option will have the same curriculum as the traditional program, the two-year students will be the first to test two new required courses: quantitative reasoning, including accounting, finance and statistics; and the dynamics of legal services behavior, including skills such as teamwork, leadership and project management.
Admission Applicants will be required to have two or three years of “substantive work experience” after college. People with work experience are likely to have “the good time management” necessary to success in the program, Van Zandt told Insider Higher Ed.
Not being a traditional JD student myself it’s hard to say whether this is a good or bad development or whether, in the words of one critic it will produce “substandard lawyers.” Other than the shorter time horizon, it’s hard to see what value this adds for the student. Or maybe that’s value enough?
Assuming the same subject matter is covered with the same depth, I can see it benefiting the students when it comes time to take the bar. The students would not be as far removed from their first-year classes. It would also give the top 5% (or so) an additional year making a 6-figure salary.
Conventional wisdom is that 3rd year is a kind of a waste. A couple of years ago, I remember reading an article which noted that some place (Seattle University maybe?) had decided to to lop off the last half year. The logic was that since people had nailed down their offers after their second summer, there was little incentive to keep them down on the farm for another whole year.