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But Wu's first task is to transform UC Hastings in the eyes of everyone else. Right now, the school is mired in a years-long rankings slump, according to U.S. News & World Report, the oft-reviled, oft-revered site of record that rates law schools. In 1992 it was 19th among the 175 accredited law schools nationwide; when Wu arrived in 2010, it was 39th. This year: 54th.
The main reason, U.S. News rankings czar Robert Morse explains, is that Hastings can't seem to place graduates into full-time jobs any more.
But the U.S. News ratings don't reflect the true merits of the schools, Hastings board trustee Debra Bogaards argues. "Some universities play with statistics," she says, explaining that other schools will juke their post-graduation employment rates by counting people who work at jobs that don't even require JDs. Others are located in areas where the legal economy has flourished rather than declined, so they have an automatic edge, says Hastings professor Marsha Cohen.
"I think we have a tremendous amount to offer," Cohen adds. "The school is fabulous, the faculty is terrific, and there's only one other place in the entire country [D.C.] where you can walk to so many courts in so little space." Hastings is one of the few campuses where students can spend a morning in federal court and then cross the street to take a class after lunch, she continues. And in recent years, it's gotten ahead of the curve preparing students to serve a burgeoning tech sector, which could be to San Francisco lawyers what big oil is to their counterparts in Houston, or Wall Street is to their peers in New York.
The problem, Cohen adds, is that those amenities aren't factored into the ratings. A school's U.S. News score, then, may be a facile indicator of how great it actually is; the rankings guide, which published its list of top colleges and universitites this week, has been accused of favoring elite insitutions and ignoring the issue of college affordability. But it's still the metric that law firms and prospective students use. Once a school's score starts declining, it gets caught in a death spiral — since employers won't hire from low-ranked schools, a bad rating only begets a worse rating.
When compared to other schools, Hastings is at a unique disadvantage. As a public school, it relies on the state for funding, and yet state resources have steadily petered out. In 1986, 82 percent of the school's operating budget came from California's general fund; this year the state's contribution was 17 percent. And since Hastings is a stand-alone school, rather than a department within a university, it doesn't have a larger institutional teat to suckle at.
As a result, student tuition has skyrocketed, from $1,200 in 1986 to $47,634 today (even adjusted for inflation, that's more than 18 times what it was in 1986) and students are graduating into a more competitive workforce, owing to all the bloodletting of the recent recession. Some of San Francisco's legacy firms had to undergo mass layoffs, which released a lot of experienced "lateral" candidates (people hopping from one firm to another) into the market. They sucked up many of the associate positions or second-tier jobs that would have gone to new graduates.
Students who graduated in 2010 and 2011 — right around the time Wu took over — faced a steep private sector downturn and a market so eviscerated that even summer gigs were hard to come by. The federal government shutdown and budget cuts that followed only exacerbated the situation, limiting the number of available government and nonprofit jobs. Hastings students who'd been on top of the world, with jobs lined up before they'd passed the bar, would graduate only to find those opportunities had dried up.
"The sky is not falling," Wu announces in a sobering baritone. "It's already fallen."
The landscape was different when board trustee Bogaards attended Hastings in 1978. She'd come from a poor neighborhood in Culver City where white-collar professionals didn't exist. Bogaards was the first person in her family to pursue an advanced degree; her parents didn't graduate from college until late in their adulthood.
"I didn't have any examples of lawyers in my midst," Bogaards recalls. "But I knew I wanted to go to law school. I knew that by being a lawyer I could help others."
At that time, UC Hastings was widely considered a premier school, ranking about 13th or 14th in the national polls, Bogaards says. Tuition was $700 a year. Half of Bogaards' classmates were divorced women returning to school to start a second career. Everyone had a good shot at getting hired in what was then a robust Bay Area job market. Bogaards started her own personal injury and elder abuse practice.
Three decades later, that world seems almost unrecognizable. Data compiled by the legal website Above the Law showed that though 71 percent of students in Hastings' 2013 class were employed, nine months after graduation, most were in positions they hadn't anticipated. Seventy-two percent of them had hoped to work for a firm, and only 35 percent were able to do so; 30 percent wound up in jobs that didn't require bar passage.
"The thing you always hear about the job market is that it's very competitive, that everyone wants to come to San Francisco, and that there aren't enough jobs to support all the people with JDs," third-year Hastings student Clifton Smoot says, recounting a joke that's made the rounds among his classmates. He can't recall the punchline, but it has to do with passing the bar and then winding up on a street corner in the Tenderloin. Smoot, who moved to San Francisco in 2010 and worked in bike shops before deciding to pursue a law degree, says he's already about $100,000 in the hole. For a law school student in San Francisco, that's actually pretty good. The average cost of two years at Hastings — when you factor in housing, living expenses, and tuition — is around $150,000, he estimates.
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