Charlotte School of Law: Let’s make a deal

The email solicitation almost has the feel of a late-night infomercial. If you act now, they’ll also throw in a free iPad.

But the sender isn’t offering a new gadget no modern kitchen should be without—the pitch is for a legal education at Charlotte School of Law. And Charlotte is surely not the only law school laboring to fill seats for the incoming first-year class.

Lawyers Weekly obtained a copy of an email solicitation recently sent to a prospective student. The recipient, who had a high LSAT score, said she did not apply to Charlotte and doesn’t plan to attend law school this fall. She said that she had received similar offers from several schools and that Charlotte’s email didn’t stand out from the others except for the promise of a free iPad.

The email from Melanie Cronin, admissions associate with Charlotte School of Law, says: “Since we have a rolling admission policy we have kept a few spaces open for our incoming fall 2012 class and still have some scholarship funds available. Because of your [LSAT score] you could qualify for a scholarship between $17,000 and $31,000 depending on your final cumulative GPA reported by LSAC.”

Orientation for Charlotte students begins on August 13, meaning that the prospective student received the offer about a month before the start of school. The school’s website lists tuition and fees for the 2012-2013 academic year as $38,606.

While the email says that the school has “kept a few spaces open,” Forrest Stanford, associate dean for admissions at Charlotte, said the school wound up with open seats unintentionally because of a reduced number of applications. In May, Lawyers Weekly reported that applications to law schools were down 15 percent nationally and that schools in North Carolina were feeling that trend in their own admissions offices.

“I think every law school has a few spaces open. We didn’t plan it that way, we didn’t want it to be, but it is,” Stanford said.

The email continues: “I understand that this is a big decision and may take some planning in order to be able to start in August. For this reason, I also have some moving expense reimbursement funds of up to $2,000 available (for fall only). However, we have noticed that many students do not actually spend that much in relocation costs so if you do not need the moving relocation, you can chose either a laptop computer or an iPad 3 instead.”

‘Questionable behavior’

Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado and the author of the blog “Inside the Law School Scam,” says a number of law schools are making late-in-the-game offers such as this. He’s posted several examples on his blog.

“I don’t know how typical it is, but there’s certainly quite a bit of it going on. I’ve seen now emails from a bunch of schools, including fairly high-ranked schools, soliciting applications even a month before first year orientation begins. It’s not just really low-ranked schools like Charlotte,” Campos said.

On Twitter, someone using the screen name @cougarsays tweeted in early July, “I just got offered a seat in the 1L class at Charlotte School of Law when I never even applied.” The tweeter tagged her post with the label “sketchy.”

Stanford said that the email was part of an outreach effort targeting students who just completed the June LSAT. Typically, students taking a June LSAT are considering law school for the next year’s fall.

Campos said that a few weeks between taking the LSAT and enrolling in law school was not nearly enough time for prospective students to decide which law school was best for them.

“What potential students ought to be doing is shopping for the best offer, not just taking the first offer that’s made for them. If someone just took the LSAT in June, under no circumstances should that person be enrolling in August. They have a whole year to figure out if this makes sense for them. I think this is very questionable behavior on the part of the law school,” Campos said.

Stanford, however, argued that by the time prospective students take the LSAT, they’ve already put a lot of thought into their decision about whether to attend law school.

“Well, hopefully they’ve been looking at it for a while,” Stanford said. “It’s not like they just decided to sit for the LSAT one day. It’s not like a spur of the moment decision they made over the Memorial Day holiday.”

Target is 500 students

Charlotte has a lot of seats to fill. The school’s enrollment has grown rapidly since its creation in 2006. Stanford said the school was trying to attract over 500 students for this year’s new class, although he expected that they would fall somewhat short of that goal.

Stanford said he wasn’t personally aware of any students who had enrolled due to the most recent solicitation, but that the email is also partly designed to get prospective students thinking about Charlotte for the 2013 school year.

“You market to a certain segment and see what happens,” Stanford said. “That’s sort of what we do, we run the flag up the pole a bit and see who’s interested.”

Campos said that last-minute solicitations offering significant discounts on tuition were “clearly a sign of desperation, and desperate institutions aren’t thinking about the best interest of the people they’re trying to entice to bail them out. I don’t think that any school that is in a financially sound position would engage in this kind of behavior. The people being solicited, unless they’re extremely naïve, can see that to be asked to apply this late in the process and to be offered significant discounts off of list price tuition in the bargain, along with iPads or what have you, is a sign of desperation.”

Campbell School of Law, in contrast, is not soliciting any more applicants. Assistant dean of admissions and financial aid Dexter Smith said he anticipated the school would meet its goal of 165 incoming students.

At Elon School of Law, associate dean for administration Alan Woodlief said in a written statement that the school expects its incoming class to be similar in size to previous ones, which have ranged from 107 to 132 students. He said the school contacts students after each LSAT and that students who took the June LSAT could apply for this fall, but that most of them would be considering admission in 2013.

Officials at North Carolina Central School of Law could not be reached for comment.