The wagering is on about which law schools will shut down in the near future.
Abovethelaw.com presents a discussion by David Barnhizer, professor emeritus of Cleveland-Marshall School of Law. In a paper he argues the reasons law schools in the Rest Belt are especially vulnerable. Here you can read that paper.
But when I was pitching my marketing communications services to law schools, what I had picked up is that the decision about trying to keep the doors open depends primarily on the hope/despair of the leadership. There are no absolute markers about when to pull the plug.
Deans who had hope and the support of university top brass were willing to invest in innovative approaches to reach potential applications. One push in that was the objective to save the faculty jobs.
On the other hand, deans who had emotionally descended to the seventh layer of pessimism were searching for signals that the place should be shut down. Their move was to be simply passive. They did nothing to boost enrollment figures or increase job prospects for graduates.
This same phenomenon is taking place in small liberal arts colleges located in non-urban areas. At my alma mater, Seton Hill, Greensburg, Pennsylvnia, the late president, JoAnne Boyle, made it her mission to make it less vulnverable to disappearing. She succeeded in that by expanding it to university status with lots of career-related programs. How it fares post her death will be an interesting case study on how important is leadership as variable in survival of institutions in higher education.
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