The UCLA School of Law is increasingly looking to private donors
to compensate for recent cuts in state funding and may ask the
university for increasing autonomy over those funds in the coming
years.
In response to discussion of privatization of the UC Berkeley
Boalt Hall School of Law, UCLA law school Dean Michael Schill said
the law school is already having to aggressively raise funds from
private sources, and in the future may ask for greater freedom in
how it spends those funds.
In an article published in Monday’s Los Angeles Times,
Christopher Edley Jr., the dean of the Boalt school, discussed his
proposal to privatize the law school, giving it greater autonomy
over decisions such as hiring new faculty.
Such a proposal would require approval by the university as well
as higher UC officials.
Schill said moving toward private resources is nothing new, and
that in many ways both UCLA Law and Boalt were “increasingly
playing the private game.”
But Schill did not want to suggest the law school should cut
itself off from state funding, which he said was absolutely
essential to the school despite its recent cut.
“If we were to lose our state subsidy without having the
type of endowment that the schools we compete with have, such as
NYU or Stanford, we would be in a catastrophic situation,” he
said.
Even an increase in student fees would not be enough to maintain
the program’s quality if they lost state subsidies
completely, he said.
Student fees have already been dramatically raised to compensate
for decreased state funding in the last three years. The cost of
resident tuition combined with fees went from $13,361 two years ago
to $22,112 this year, and is projected to continue increasing due
to rising costs.
State funding currently comprises 44 percent of the law
school’s budget, down from 65 percent two years ago. That
number is expected to decrease to between 40 and 41 percent next
year.
With greater financial self-sufficiency, Schill said autonomy
over those finances should increase.
“As we increasingly utilize private resources, the
argument that we should be constrained in how we spend those
resources diminishes considerably. The University of California
system puts a lot of restraint on how we can spend our money and I
think that it’s important that we have additional flexibility
in how we expend our money,” he said.
Currently, the law school must ask the administration’s
approval for a number of programs, as well as when offering
administrative salaries.
More financial autonomy would allow the school to attract
faculty with other incentives that may be unavailable under
existing rules.
“Right now, our faculty is as good as any faculty in the
country. But they are heavily sought after by other schools,”
he said, adding that still, UCLA Law has not lost a single faculty
member due to the inability to pay competitive salaries, and hired
six faculty last year.
Schill said he was considering a proposal where the law school
would establish its own private foundation to manage its endowment
and be able to spend privately raised money without being subject
to rules of the UCLA Foundation or the UC system.
Whether the university or the UC would approve such a proposal
is still unclear.
In a statement, Chancellor Albert Carnesale did not specifically
address any form of privatization, but said UCLA’s leadership
was considering a range of measures that might contribute to
maintaining and enhancing the quality of the university.
“We are analyzing a broad spectrum of possible measures,
some of which might be found to be worthy of implementation and
others of which might not,” Carnesale said.
Jodi Anderson, the student regent on the UC Board of Regents,
said the issue of privatization or greater financial autonomy for
Boalt and UCLA Law would be given cautious attention.
“With the budget problems, there is much more willingness
to look at how to bring in greater sources of external
funding,” she said.
Anderson said it was important for the regents to address more
directly whether the UC should be on the path toward a private
model.
“If you look at fee increases that our law students are
facing right now, many might charge that we’re already on a
path to privatization. That’s something that warrants the
attention of the board,” she said. Schill said aggressive
fund-raising and continued state support are necessary to
maintaining the public school’s two-pronged mission ““
to increase number of lawyers from various socioeconomic
backgrounds and to train lawyers who will serve the public
interest.
Scholarships for low-income students and loan-forgiveness
programs that private schools can offer make them more competitive
with UCLA Law.
Schill said graduates of UCLA’s law school are enormously
overrepresented in lower paying jobs after graduation such as
public interest law firms, nonprofit organizations, and government
in Los Angeles, something the law school is proud of and hopes to
continue with sufficient funds.
“You cannot graduate from law school with $150,000 in debt
and go out and get one of those jobs that pay $40,000 a year. We
need to be able to fund financial aid,” he said.
Fund-raising from private sources has become a necessity because
of decreased state resources, but in many ways it is also done
because the program wants to grow and enrich the curriculum, Schill
said.
“The days in which anyone ever said this is good enough
because it’s public are over for UCLA ““ if anyone ever
said that. Our aspiration, which I believe is close to the reality,
is that the quality of our education is every bit as good as the
quality of education that students would get from Harvard, NYU or
from Stanford,” he said, adding that what is not the same
between the schools is financial aid for students.