As with 2014, the proportion of full-time law students paying full freight fell substantially at the average law school not in Puerto Rico. In 2015, the last year for which data are available, the average was 28.1 percent, down from 32.9 percent. In 2011, the average was 20 points higher.
A decade ago, more than half of law students paid full tuition; now, not even one in three does.
At the average private law school, nearly as many students who received half-to-full tuition grants paid nothing at all. Those numbers might have converged this year, but the crunch in students has decelerated, so they may have leveled off. Nevertheless, law schools must be losing a lot of money.
Indeed, in 2015, revenue from full-time students paying full tuition is now half its peak in 2011. At freestanding private law schools, including the for-profits, it’s fallen to one third. In 2001 the median private law school made $9.0 million on these students. In 2015, it took in $4.3 million.
So how substantially are law schools discounting? Here’s what tuition discounted by the median grant looks like at private law schools by the mean of their full tuition quintiles. It’s a mouthful, but the idea here is to set full tuition as the independent variable and let the discounted tuition float.
We find that law schools charging in the fourth quintile of full tuition (~$49,000) discount so much that they’re cheaper than the median discounted tuition of the third full-tuition quintile (~$45,000). Meanwhile, the gap between private law schools in the fifth quintile (~$56,500) and the rest is widening. What’s also obvious is how much more law schools are willing to charge students paying full freight.
Information on this topic from previous years:
- “Full-Time Students Paying Full Tuition Fell ~5 Percentage Points in 2014” (January 4, 2016)
The Last Gen X American 
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