Alex Lepe
Last time I caught up to Andrew Morriss was his first day on the job as dean of the new Texas A&M School of Law two years ago in downtown Fort Worth.
On his mind back then: Ways to make Aggie lawyers more distinctive; link the law school to A&M’s broader expertise; pare students’ financial burden; and bring in more faculty. What's up with Aggie law these days?
Whoop! We’ve had considerable success in rankings. We went from unranked to No. 111 this year (in annual U.S. News & World Report ranking). That’s a big jump. No. 14 in intellectual property, and 18 in dispute resolution. Those reflect the fact that we’ve made a lot of progress.
Differentiation: We’re playing off what A&M already offers in the system. First thing, we hired several faculty jointly with some of the other parts of A&M. We have two faculty now with appointments in engineering. We have two with appointments in agriculture, one in architecture, and we’ve offered a course jointly with the Bush School (of Government and Public Service) that has both law school and Bush School students in it.
We’re really exploring the ways the law school and the university can collaborate to really offer something distinctive.
New faculty: We hired 11 last year, 12 if you count President Michael Young. And then we’ve hired several so far this year (to a total 53).
Applications: When the school became Texas A&M, applications went up by 25 percent. We’ve largely held that increase, but most importantly, we’ve seen applications at the top end of qualifications go up (more than 6 percent this year).
Placement rates. Those have continued to increase. We’ve seen a steady increase in the number of students getting jobs, and also in the number of employers looking at our students. (Employment rates for graduates rose to 82 percent for the 2015 class from 2013’s 72 percent, the law school’s data shows. Employment rates rose to 75 percent from 65 percent for jobs full-time, long-term, requiring bar passage, significantly favoring candidates with law degrees, or professional.)
Student debt: We cut our tuition by more than 15 percent starting in the fall. The law review course that everybody ought to take as they prepare for the bar exam - it’s a list price of $3,800 - is now included. And we’ve dramatically increased our scholarship spend.
What’s up with expansion plans downtown: We’re in the early stages of the state process to analyze the need and get on the capital budget. As you know, we have three parking lots. The hope would be to build a new parking structure on one of them, and a new law school (on another). We’d like to put all of the law school in the new building. The old building could be repurposed for something else.