When the faculty of law put together a plan to raise tuition to $22,000 per year over the next five years, it promised to do research on the tuition hike’s impact on accessibility, and on what jobs its graduates chose.
But when U of T’s new provost, Shirley Neuman, met with law students to explain how the research would be conducted, she was met with hard questions.
“It was a terrible meeting,” said Peter Galbraith, a law student who was at last Friday’s get-together. “She sort of went though this lengthy, utterly condescending lecture on how it was going to be done,” he added.
Galbraith said he asked Neuman several pointed questions about how the study would be conducted. According to Galbraith, the trouble started when he questioned the way U of T will collect information on how many lower-income students will be discouraged from applying to the law school. He said the proposed study methodology will not be able to track these students unless they apply first. Galbraith, who graduated from the University of Calgary with a mathematics degree, said he used Great Lakes pollution as a metaphor for how the survey may not find problems with accessibility until it is too late.
“She just flipped out. She told me I should choose metaphors that weren’t so offensive,” he said. “She sort of yelled at us,” Galbraith added.
“We were just patted on the head and told ‘we don’t care about the issue.’”
But Neuman said she was simply explaining the issues. Most of the questions asked by the students “were thoughtful,” she said, adding that she was attempting to answer their queries “with information.”
“The database used will be provided by the Law Society of Upper Canada. It includes all those articling in any given year in Ontario and all those lawyers registered for practice in any given year in Ontario,” Neuman said in an e-mail interview.
“We can get data from 1995 on. The question the Governing Council wishes to look at is the relation between tuition and career choice. With the Law Society data and using multiple regression analysis we can analyze significant differences in career choice as a function of attending U of T or another school, of year of graduation (which is a proxy for tuition) from U of T or from elsewhere, and of economic variables (e.g. number of positions filled in the province, economic indicators) for lawyers articling or registered in Ontario.”
Neuman said a second study will look at accessibility. “We will look at trends and significant differences over a number of years in applications to U of T Law school, offers made, offers accepted, and proportion of the eligible pool applying to Canada. If there is ‘sticker shock’ we would expect to see the numbers of applications, or our proportion of the total pool, dropping.”
On the methodology, Neuman said “the data is the best arms-length data available; it tells us what lawyers actually do in their careers (including whether they take legal aid work); the method of multiple regression analysis is standard in social science research and highly credible.”
Multiple regression analysis studies statistical variables to make predictions based on relationships between the variables.
But some law students are still unconvinced. “The gist of it seems to be, on the accessibility side, they are looking at admissions data from 1995 to this year to determine the financial backgrounds of applicants to this faculty, to see if there is significant change,” said Josh Paterson, a law student who is also a member of U of T’s Governing Council.
But Paterson said the data from 1995 is outdated because of the time it takes to complete law school. “They only have one year’s worth of data to base the articling on.”
Paterson said the issue should be studied by outside experts. “You should be asking people who don’t come to our faculty.”
In the end, Paterson said it is middle-class students who stand to lose in the new law school programme.
“Thirty per cent of the tuition increase has to go to aid,” he said, noting that lower-income students can take advantage of the subsidies. Higher-income students can pay their own way. But middle-class students may not be able to afford the higher tuition—even though their incomes mean they don’t qualify for financial aid packages.
“There’s a huge squeeze on the middle class… the people in the middle are being squeezed out.”
In the end, Paterson does not hold out much hope that the Governing Council will be able to make suggestions about how accessibility research is carried out. That’s because the study’s methodology will be approved after the report itself is presented to the Governing Council. “If the GC has any suggestions or wants to make changes to the methodology, it will be too late because the report will be finished already.”
