 "Photo: Sara Young/The Daily Texan")
According to recent data gathered by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, representation of minorities in law schools is up across the country, but the number of blacks in law school is shrinking, a trend that has yet to be seen at UT.
Law school Dean Lawrence Sager said the school has seen an increase in both the number of admitted black and other minority students among the school’s 1,250 current students.
“In 2002, our student body was made up of about 3 percent African-Americans, and that was around the time the Hopwood Decision came out, which called for affirmative order,” Sager said. “Currently our student body has 6 percent of African-Americans, so we’ve managed to double since 2002. We also have the largest Hispanic student body among elite universities, and overall we have around 32 percent of our student body made up of minorities.”
The school’s Web site does not categorize current minority students into individual races but does boast the alumni pool, which includes 1,755 Latinos, 765 African-Americans and 424 Asian-Americans.
“The pipeline of students coming out of college is very narrow — pipeline being the number of African-American students graduating and applying to grad school,” said Bucky Askew, a consultant on legal education to the American Bar Association. “For example, in the state of Alabama only 2.9 percent of the graduates are African-American, which is relatively small, and only a percentage of that number of graduates apply to law school.”
The recent data also includes information about the growing cost of law school, a trend the report attributes to an emphasis of teaching with greater resources. Law school costs are increasing much faster than the costs of other professional schools such as medical, dental and veterinary schools, according to the report.
The average increase in law schools’ tuition over the past 12 years has been about 7 percent, compared with 5 percent for medical schools. But overall costs remain favorable for law schools, with an average in-state public tuition of $14,461 compared to $22,048 for medical schools.
“According to this week’s report from the Government Accountability Office, tuition and fees at law schools, and the debt load taken on by students, compare favorably with the costs of attending medical school, dental school and veterinary school, and the debt loads of students in schools preparing for those professions,” said Carolyn Lamm, president of the American Bar Association.
