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@ THE COLLEGE OF LAW
Willamette Named “Best Value” Law School For the third straight year, Willamette University College of Law has been ranked a “Best Value law school” by preLaw magazine. Of the 60 names on the list, Willamette was one of two in the Pacific Northwest and California, and the only one in Oregon. The rankings take into account in-state tuition, debt load, bar passage and the percent of graduates employed nine months after graduation. Willamette was one of only three private schools in the country to make the list. Jack Crittenden, editor of PreLaw and National Jurist magazines, explained that “Private tuition has increased by too much to consider the [vast majority of private] schools a good value.”
The magazine tinkered with its methodology this year to enhance fairness. In the past, a law school needed a better bar pass rate than its state average to be included on the list. This year, the magazine used a two-year average for both bar pass rate and percentage of students employed. “We are very pleased to have once again earned a ‘Best Value’ designation,” said Dean Peter Letsou. “These challenging economic times make it especially important that we pay close attention, not only to the quality of our program, but also to the cost. This honor demonstrates that we are achieving success in both areas.”
Welcome Part-Timers! Not everyone who wants a law degree can afford to spend three years doing nothing but reading cases, attending class and stumbling, bleary-eyed, out of the law library at 3 a.m. So, Willamette has created a part-time day program. Starting this fall, students can pursue a law degree on a part-time basis. Candidates must meet the same admission requirements as full-time students. They’ll also need to submit an essay outlining why a part-time program makes sense for them. Part-timers may take between eight and 12 credits per semester (about three-quarters of the normal course load) and pay approximately 75 percent of full-time tuition. They must take no longer than six years to complete their degrees. “This lets working professionals and people who have families go back to school,” said Admissions Director Carolyn Dennis. “The school is very flexible about working with students because we want them to be successful.”
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More details: Part-timers may be working long hours, but they still need to adhere to the law school’s mandatory attendance policy and other academic regulations. If they eventually want to go full-time, that’s OK. (In fact, the law school encourages it.) Part-timers can’t choose the time their classes meet, but the folks who do the scheduling in the law school will try to group courses so the students don’t have to duck in and out all day. Parttimers also are eligible for meritbased scholarships. And perhaps the best news: School-sponsored TGIF gatherings (read: free food) typically occur late in the day, so part-timers won’t feel left out of the law school’s social whirl.