Australia’s legal education-industrial complex or: how to learn to stop worrying and boycott the Juris Doctor

Each year, a fresh batch of law students participate in the time-honoured tradition of applying for seasonal clerkships at Australia’s most prominent law firms. The process is renowned for its competitiveness, with firms frequently receiving hundreds of applications for a handful of opportunities, and is frequently compared to The Hunger Games. Its impact on mental health is notorious among law students, among whom depression and anxiety abound at the best of times. A cultural antipathy towards lawyers means many will consider these privileged people’s problems, and though they are serious issues, that description is largely accurate. Despite the industry’s proclaimed good intentions (with the word ‘diversity’ appearing 55 times in the Melbourne University Law Students’ Society 2021 Clerkship Guide), developments in Australia’s tertiary education sector, work economy and social welfare system have entrenched inequality and will result in the legal industry remaining exclusive and homogenous for years to come.

In the year 2000, the University of Melbourne began offering a graduate-entry law degree under a Latin name more familiar in the United States — the ‘Juris Doctor’ (or ‘JD’) — which was pitched as a higher-level professional qualification. When the University of Melbourne then ceased offering the Bachelor of Laws (‘LLB’) in 2008, Monash University became the only Group of Eight university in the state to offer the course. Consequently, it has consistently required a minimum ATAR in the high-90s in recent years, and, considering private and selective schools’ domination of VCE rankings, it is unlikely the student cohort is representative of the state’s diversity. 

The JD has since been introduced at the majority of Victorian universities, and, whatever its merits, it certainly presents a more expensive alternative to the traditional LLB. While domestic student fees in an LLB are currently $45,420, a JD student, after having perhaps incurred a debt of $20,804 for a Bachelor of Arts or $34,605 for a Bachelor of Commerce, faces prohibitive fees in the realm of $105,000-$130,000. Concerns with exorbitant fees for the JD are hardly new, with then-Education Minister Julia Gillard criticising the courses as a means of universities circumventing bans on full-fee places in 2008. However, the financial strain they cause has recently been compounded by the Commonwealth Government introducing a Higher Education Loan Program (‘HELP’) cap of $108,232, meaning JD students will often have to pay tens of thousands of dollars upfront before completing their degree (that is, if they are eligible for a loan, which permanent residents are not). It is noteworthy that no Victorian university offering a JD explicitly states this on the landing page for their course. Similarly, while limited Commonwealth-supported places (‘CSPs’) are allocated to JDs, no landing page details their number. 

If all the above weren’t enough, law graduates must then complete their Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice, a course which is necessary for admission to the Supreme Court of Victoria, and which also includes a requirement of 75 days of practical work (paid or unpaid). Putting aside the question of why a professional qualification such as the JD or LLB does not meet the requirements of that profession, the Graduate Diploma costs an additional $10,000, for which students may only receive a HELP loan if they have not exceeded the cap mentioned above. Clearly, though top and mid-tier law firms extol the virtues of inclusive workplaces, our educational institutions currently make a legal education inaccessible to many. 

One economic force operating to exclude many students from a legal education is outside the control of university administrators, and this is the insufficiency of student allowances and other necessary government support. In my case, while completing the JD I lived with my partner — a graduate teacher at a public school — and her modest income disqualified me from any form of government assistance despite our separate finances. I was fortunate to have a relatively well-paid job throughout my studies, but income from part-time work could not maintain my expenditure on rent, unsubsidised public transport, textbooks, groceries, health insurance, dentistry, medication and therapy, and I seriously depleted my savings. This is an experience shared by many, with 40% of Australian students reportedly suffering from food insecurity. 

Financial and time pressures also prevented me from gaining practical experience either through volunteering or working as a paralegal at a much lower rate of pay. Lack of legal experience is a significant hurdle to finding employment as a graduate, and for good reason: a university education alone does not prepare students with the fundamental skills required to work in the field. It strikes me as bizarre that, other than exams, the dominant mode of assessment in my degree was essay writing, which is not a particularly relevant skill outside of academia. Document drafting, client interviews, negotiations, advocacy, court etiquette and professional conventions such as the difference between ‘yours faithfully’ and ‘yours sincerely’ were not taught in any meaningful way, and students are required in a sense to self-educate, in their own time and at their own cost. Those with financial obligations are deprived of the time or financial flexibility to seek out these opportunities, and the shortcomings of universities in ensuring graduates are industry-ready therefore disproportionately affect disadvantaged groups. Education Minister Dan Tehan, at the same time as cutting university funding, has expressed a desire for graduates to be ‘job-ready’, and, while this crude expression is often used to disdainfully refer to an education in humanities, it is an appropriate objective for an occupation-specific qualification such as Law.  

Australian universities are in crisis. Both Coalition and Labor governments have been hostile towards universities over several decades, and recent budget cuts and exclusion from the JobKeeper program have come at a time when border closures seriously prejudice their financial viability. It is difficult to be sympathetic to universities who, for their part, have been complicit in the corporatisation of higher education, with increasing class sizes, the overworking of (and even wage theft from) a casualised academic workforce, and a short-sighted obsession with climbing education rankings through research, resulting in the dilution of educational quality while funds are diverted to astonishing executive salaries and vast marketing budgets. The current crisis is a dangerous opportunity — the literal translation of the Mandarin word — for universities to redress the issues of a system that has increasingly come to see students as a necessary evil. 

Some of the issues I have raised are entrenched socioeconomic problems that require costly, large-scale reform. But some are not. The difficulties of studying at a time when wage growth is poor, the cost of living is high and when government support is inadequate are well-documented, and poor graduate outcomes and credentialism also mean that many will remain in tertiary education for longer than in the past. Currently, the ‘benchmark in legal education’ is a course that requires tens of thousands of dollars to be paid upfront, and which meets the same professional requirements as a graduate-entry LLB. There may be advantages to a JD, and for some students these might be so significant as to justify the price tag. However, the course becoming the de facto qualification for students who wish to study at an ‘elite’ university and who do not meet the lofty ATAR requirements of Monash’s LLB, does unquantifiable harm to the prospects of the profession becoming representative of broader society. Lawyers occupy a singularly privileged position as the profession that represents and decides others’ legal interests, advocate for (and in many cases enact) legislative change. Universities are a gatekeeper of this profession, and students are in that sense a captive market. Given the substantial headwinds currently faced by the sector, there is unlikely an appetite for structural change that would diminish the universities’ capacity to charge full fees, but they are nevertheless public institutions whose heritage in Australia is one of social justice, and they therefore have a moral obligation to provide accessible and affordable education. This is especially so when educating those who will uphold and develop the law. We all have an interest in the profession becoming more representative of society, and the important and much-heralded advances in female participation address only part of the issue.  

In the meantime, students should vote with their feet, and refuse to pay $100,000 or more for a JD, instead opting for a graduate-entry LLB, a perfectly fine course which is still offered by many institutions. Indeed, course coordinators have stated that ‘They [JD and LLB] have the same course content, the same expectations, the same everything’ and ‘We call our JD courses advanced, but that’s really only to meet university requirements’. There is a demand for Commonwealth-supported courses that, through creative assessment and a focus on practical skills, prepare students to enter a highly competitive job market, and opting out of a full-fee JD may not only be an intelligent choice as a consumer, the market pressure it would create would go some way towards encouraging universities to democratise a profession that has too long been the domain of the elite. 

Disclaimer: I completed a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) at the University of Western Australia, a Juris Doctor on a Commonwealth-supported place at Monash University and was formerly employed by La Trobe University.