Legal News

Zot! Can Irvine Law Keep the Magic Going?

By Ashby Jones

The law school at UC Irvine. It’s new. It’s bold. It’s selective. It’s star-studded. It’s controversial (or at least it was during the search for dean). It’s got momentum. In short, it’s got buzz.

But can it keep it up? It’s certainly trying. The school on Monday announced that everyone in next year’s incoming class will, for all three years, receive a scholarship worth 50 percent of their tuition. The grants will be funded not by the state of California, which has seen better days, but private donations. Click here for the school’s announcement. Click here, here, here and here for previous LB posts on the school.

Wowza, you might be saying. If Irvine was more selective than Yale in its first year, what’s it going to be like now?

Aha, there’s the rub. Keep in mind that tuition for its inaugural class is free for every student for all three years. That’s right. The lucky 60 students who started at Irvine back in August will graduate debt-free (or close to it), allowing them the liberty to, well, do just about anything. It’s a big part of why only 4 percent of the school’s applicants for that first class were admitted.

So while the class of 2013 will have it good, it won’t be nearly as good as the folks just ahead of them. Irvine’s a state school, but tuition-including professional fees and other campus fees-for the second class during the 2010 - 2011 school year is expected to be about $40,000 for in-state students and about $50,000 for those out of state. Half of that might be a good deal, but it sure ain’t free.

It will be fascinating to chart whether and to what degree the graduates in ‘12 and ‘13 (and ‘14 and ‘15, for that matter) successfully nab jobs that might otherwise have gone to kids from UCLA or USC or even Stanford and Berkeley.

LBers, any thoughts? Any Irvine students want to let us know how the first semester went?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on December 22, 2009 (boomark / email).