Wyoming law school ends out-of-state tuition--for three students per year
Corrected: In-state tuition will be offered to three nonresident students per year at the University of Wyoming College of Law, its board of trustees decided last month.
Annual in-state tuition at the law school is approximately $16,000, according to the Wyoming Business Report. Previously, annual out-of-state tuition at the Laramie school was $32,590, according to its Standard 509 Report (PDF) for 2016.
In recent years, the school offered in-state tuition prices to top-performing, out-of-state students.
“Mindful of both the university’s goal to increase enrollment and the state’s goal to diversify its economy and reverse the brain-drain crisis in Wyoming, it’s important to understand the economic stimulus effect and the capturing effect of getting nonresident students to come to Wyoming,” Klinton Alexander, dean of the law school, said at a January board of trustees’ meeting.
Two or three students per year had received the out-of-state discount out-of-state discount for the last several years. This decision by the board of trustees makes it official until at least 2020.
“When your median salary is around $55,000 per year after you’ve graduated—and that’s if you have a job—that’s something a student is looking at: ‘Can I pay my student loan back?’ So, by cutting their law school tuition in half, it’s huge,” Lisa Nunley, the law school’s director of admissions and student services, told the Wyoming Business Report.
Out of 73 graduates in the class of 2015, 43 had full-time, long-term, JD required jobs, according to the school’s most recent employment summary (PDF). Its bar passage rate for 2015 was 71.22 percent, according to the school’s 509 Report.
Updated at 5:48 p.m. to correctly state that the out-of-state tuition waiver approved by the law school board of trustees applies only to three students per year.
