Academic

UMass Dartmouth SNESL Merger: Questions that a Board Ought to Ask

By Roger Dennis

Recently, Dan Filler reported on the continuing efforts of UMass Dartmouth to acquire the Southern New England School of Law (SNESL).  Dan properly suggested that from an academic quality perspective if the UMass system wants a law school it would best be advised to create the program from scratch and place it on a research-intensive campus (i.e. the Amherst site).

Dan?s brief blog post nevertheless got my juices flowing.  So I want to ask Dan?s question from the perspective of the UMass Dartmouth campus rather than the UMass system.  In my analysis I assume UMass Dartmouth wants to seek ABA accreditation promptly.

UMass Dartmouth is an intriguing entity.  The university has over 9,000 students, 4,000 of whom live on campus.  The UMass Dartmouth campus has academic ambition.  It currently has a good but not outstanding reputation.  It is ranked 61st (and 16^th among state supported institutions) in its US News cohort.  The campus has a broad range of undergraduate and graduate offerings, including a selected number of Ph.D. programs.  The campus wants to increase its research footprint and desires to be an engine of regional development.  The campus faces significant economic stress as a consequence of reduced state funding.  This has resulted in layoffs and hiring freezes.

The first question a board should ask is what the likely economics of acquiring SNESL be?  Would the campus have to contribute operating funds to make the law school a go?  Press reports suggest that the law school intends to charge about $23,000 for in-state tuition.  There is good data available on what it costs to run an ABA accredited law school.  The average direct expenditure per student for publicly approved ABA schools is in excess of $31,000.  Typical indirect expenses raise the average fully allocated expenditure per student to at least $35,000.  On a fully allocated cost basis only a handful of ABA state-assisted law schools spend less than $23,000.  All of these law schools are in very low cost communities outside the Northeast.  And none of the low expenditure schools face the financial aid demands that UMass Dartmouth would face.

Publicly available data suggests SNESL has a bar pass rate in the low 40s.  The ABA bar pass standard is particularly convoluted, but in shorthand the standard requires a pass rate of 75%.  To attract students at the quality that leads to an acceptable ABA law school bar passage rate, UMass Dartmouth would need to discount heavily, raising its costs in a dramatic manner.  Moreover, press reports suggest that the law school would have to invest significantly in new faculty, library and technology to meet ABA standards.  So a skeptical board ought to think that the near-term per student costs of running SNESL as an ABA school would significantly exceed the planned tuition level.  Hence, UMass Dartmouth will have to subsidize the law school from other campus resources at least for some number of years.

So is it in UMass Dartmouth?s strategic interest to merge with SNESL?  It would be far from a costless transaction.  Major fiscal and other resources would have to be contributed to the law school to create an academic program that adds luster to the campus.  Thus the opportunity cost is high and realistically the returns are likely to be many years in the future.  My advice: move with caution!!

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on November 30, 2009 (boomark / email).