I was looking at the tuition costs for UC Boulder and I saw the law school’s tuition is 2.5-3X larger than other graduate school. My question is why? I’ll note that as a first-professional degree it is on par with a master’s program despite being labled a doctorate and entitling the graduate to where doctoral robes so why should it cost so much more than an MS of Computer Science of MA in History at the same school?
Because people expect their ROI to be much higher than a MA in history?
I suppose some of the many legal dopers … urm, SDMB members of the legal profession, that sounds better, will chime in soon. But don’t you think its likely that Law School is a specialized profession, whose best teachers could likely make more money working in their respective fields, compared to say even the best physicists or bio technologists, to say nothing of historians or computer scientists?
Because they can. Universities don’t set tuition based on cost of providing the education. I’ve sat in many meetings discussing tuition rates, and the biggest factors seem to be 1) what will students pay and 2) what are our competitors charging?
I get blank stares when I ask “what does it cost us to deliver this program?”. In fairness, the cost is hard to determine. The first student is very expensive, the last one essentially free.
That was one of the first things that came to mind; a tenured law school professor’s salary isn’t what he’d be raking in as a biglaw partner, but it’s nothing to sneeze at. Another is that many schools offer very attractive scholarships to students with high GPAs or high LSAT scores, and/or offer greatly reduced tuition to the top students after the first year in order to have a sucessful graduating class with a high bar passage rate, such that the bottom 2/3rds or so are subsidizing the tuition of the top 1/3rd or so. I’m sure another factor is what the average prospective student thinking of attending law school imagines their income as a lawyer will be, and what sort of debt they will be able to take on accordingly.
I heard a professor in the Vanderbilt Law School say exactly this, along with “We charge what the market will bear.”
He also noted that prospective students tend to assume the value of their degree is related to its cost; below-market tuition would invite the assumption that the school isn’t much good.
Ding ding - we have a winner!
You also have to factor into your equation that law school does a piss poor job of qualifying anyone to actually be a lawyer, a huge portion of which occurs on-the-job, paid for by clients. 
Hell, the vast majority of lawyers feel the need to take private refresher courses just to pass the bar!
Then consider the job prospects for the thousands of freshly minted lawyers, and you really have to question why they thought the education was worth such a high price.
You are seeing a lot more “legal” work being done by non-lawyers these days. Much (most?) of what lawyers traditionally do could be done by any reasonably intelligent person with far less than 3 years of training.
The shine is coming off law degrees - there’s been a massive drop in new enrolments in law schools, perhaps as a response to the high tuition fees and poor job prospects. You can see the trends here. The site I linked to is pretty biased, but I’m confident the numbers are accurate.
to get the students used to using large monetary values.
At my son-in-law’s school it was basically 100%. And not a weekend course either. And lots still don’t pass. (He did.)
We can also add limited supply, and the fact that those wishing to become lawyers have no choice but to attend. Teddy Roosevelt passed the bar just by reading the law. Things were easier then.
Well, except George Mason University School of Law. They have somehow managed to be a tier one law school in an area with multiple tier one law schools, and they charge about a third of the price. I think we were ranked 36 when I was there. I paid approx. 10K a year. Best bang for your buck in DC Metro area.
I would agree that law school does not teach you the day to day, practical business of being a lawyer (which also hugely depends on what type of law you practice, and that you practice law at all, which many don’t). It’s supposed to teach you how to think like a lawyer, i.e., critical thinking, logic, etc. It is also a filter, like any other. By graduating law school you have demonstrated that you meet XYZ requirements that may be attractive to prospective employers.
Because law schools are cash cows for universities-no expensive labs, no research , just lecture halls.
Well, no. The majority of those sorts of costs are paid by grants, endowments, and donations; in fact, in times gone by, student tuition at public universities only paid about a third of the costs of education. That fraction has been going up lately, but I believe that the costs of research are still paid by grants. Law professors don’t have huge research costs, it’s true, but they’re not getting huge research grants either.
There’s plenty of research. The doctrine of “publish or perish” holds as true in law schools as in other parts of the university. For proof, look to any of the Law Reviews published by law schools, or textbooks published by law professors, or annotated statutes where the annotations are written by legal scholars. The law is always changing; a Supreme Court decision today may change the way the law is to be interpreted from here on. Researchers help legal professionals understand the changes.