by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
The location is still a secret, but Florida Coastal School of Law will move into its new home in January, said FCSL Dean Peter Goplerud.
The nine-year-old law school has outgrown its current location in a Beach Boulevard office park and will move to roomier environs on the Southside during a week-long move over Christmas break, Goplerud said in a Tuesday interview.
Goplerud wouldn’t give away the location. But, he said the new building will feature twice the space, high-tech classrooms and plenty of parking. As the school’s enrollment swelled to near 900 students, the facilities at the current location were no longer adequate. Goplerud said he wants to keep the school the same size until the dust has settled from the move.
“We’ve capped growth for right now until after the big move,” he said.
The new facility may be double the size of the current building, but don’t look for Florida Coastal to double its enrollment. Goplerud is targeting about 15 percent growth over the next five years, which would bring enrollment to about 1,100. Goplerud would like to add 65 faculty members over the same stretch.
Goplerud is counting on the school’s new facilities, which include an expanded library and two fully-functioning courtrooms outfitted with the latest in courtroom technology, to broaden the school’s appeal. He said about three-quarters of new students come from outside Florida.
“The geographic location doesn’t hurt at all,” said Goplerud. “If you’ve spent four years of undergrad in Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa or Minnesota, three years of law school 10 miles from the beach sounds like a nice change of pace.”
Goplerud should know, he came to Florida Coastal from Drake University’s law school in Iowa.
Florida Coastal will also look to increase its minority enrollment, currently at about 17 percent. Goplerud said the school would try to keep tuition increases under control in an effort to make a legal education accessible. Tuition currently costs $25,000 a year, about $3,500 below the national average for private law schools. The school will also become more active in recruiting at historically black schools, said Goplerud.
Thirty percent of the school’s students receive scholarships to help mitigate tuition costs. Goplerud said the school was also about to embark on a private fundraising campaign to create a loan forgiveness program for students who pursue public interest law out of school.
Although Goplerud was mum on the school’s location, he did expand on the decision not to come downtown. The school and City worked for years on a deal that would have brought Florida Coastal downtown, near the County and Federal courthouses as well as a majority of the City’s law offices.
In the end, it was parking, not money or space, that drove Florida Coastal’s decision to move to the Southside, said Goplerud.
“Downtown would have been a nice location obviously and we worked hard with the JEDC and the mayor’s office to try to make it work,” he said. “It was somewhat an issue of economics, but really it was the parking issues that couldn’t be addressed.
“One thing I made clear to the mayor, though, was that we want to be as much a part of the community here as possible.”
In addition to the school’s new location and expansion, Goplerud spoke about a number of other Florida Coastal aspects and legal education in the U.S.
• On his finishing his first year as dean of Florida Coastal School of Law: “I think we have had a good school year. We finished up the year with right around 900 students. We will have probably 150 to several more than that in the next month when the new class comes in. We have had a number of very high-profile speakers and several very well-attended programs throughout the year. We have probably a dozen new faculty members and some new staff people. It was a good year.”
• On diversity within the student body at FCSL: “In terms of geographical diversity, it is very different than it used to be.” Goplerud said during FCSL’s first years most students were solely from the Jacksonville area. And now? “The students in the class that is coming in will probably be from between 35 to 40 different states and from four different countries and about 16 percent will be minority students. That is good, but not where we want to be.”
• On the FCSL’s student body containing a lot of non-traditional students (students that don’t go straight to law school from college): “Our goal is to get the strongest students that we can and to get the most diverse student body that we can and to serve under-served communities. We don’t target necessarily so called non-traditional students. When you have half of your student body that has been out of school for at least a year, I am not sure who is traditional and who is non-traditional these days. That has kind of been the trend for the past 10 to 15 years in legal education.”
• On whether taking some time off before going to law school helps students success rates: “It is hard to generalize. I would advise for students generically to take a year or two to be out in the world. There is a perspective that comes into a classroom that can be a different perspective. There is a seriousness in terms of the approach to the tremendous workload, in the first year particularly, that is different. I have seen enough students over the years and I have seen some extremely successful students who have come right from undergraduate and had all of the maturity that you would want someone to have. And I have seen some people that have been out for 10 years who still aren’t mature. So it is hard to generalize.”
• On FCSL’s attrition rate: “The attrition rate is comparable to that of other law schools, close to 4 or 5 percent.”
• On how FCSL recruits new students: “We actively recruit but we are changing our recruiting approach somewhat. For a long time the school was doing a lot of direct marketing, mail marketing and telemarketing as well as marketing use of the Internet. We are finding now that if we want to take it to the next step up in terms of quality and diversity, we need to have a greater presence on college campuses in the southeast part of the United States. We are also going to target some different types of places. We are talking about the possibility of targeting a dozen, maybe 20, small liberal arts colleges in the upper Midwest and we are trying to convince some of the students that have spent four years in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and Iowa that three years of education 10 miles from the beach is probably a good change of pace.”
• On competing with other, more established law schools: “I don’t think that it’s likely that we are going to be competing with Harvard for students or for faculty. We are not going to be competing necessarily with any of the top 30 or 40 schools. There are 190 American Bar Association accredited law schools in the country and there are only 15 or 20 so called elite schools that go head-to-head within our regions or within the areas that we specialize. In the schools that are free-standing like we are, that have done quite well, there are few schools that you can point to that have great success stories in a short period of time and we are in the pack with them right now.”
• On the advantages of being a for-profit, independent law school: “As a free-standing school, as a proprietary school, we do have flexibility. We have a law school culture that emphasizes process, emphasizes collaboration and emphasizes parking your ego at the door and that in and of itself makes for a lot of flexibility. We are very, very concerned with doing the best job we possibly can for our students and the more flexible we can be, the more likely it is that we will be able to accomplish that.”
• On the rise in law school tuition rates across the country: “If you look at the tuition around the country for public law schools, for resident tuition, the tuition has gone up just remarkably in the last seven or eight years. You see 10, 15 or 20 percent increases on an annual basis in some states to the point where their resident tuition at the public law schools is $13,000, $14,000 or $15,000 per year. It is not that high at the public schools here in Florida yet, but I am sure the administrators at those schools are working to make sure it doesn’t get that high. But many states have found that the tuition has to be increased to cover the cost of providing the education.”
• On the risk of FCSL out pricing itself in the future: Goplerud said he doesn’t think that will ever happen but “there will be a need for all law schools to take a very, very careful look at the debt level their students have. It is a major concern. It is reality though that the cost of providing the education does increase on a regular basis.”
• On if Jacksonville will have a public law school in the near future: “I don’t know enough yet about Florida politics and politics as it relates to higher education aspects to speculate on that. The state in the last five years has approved and supported the launching of two new public law schools. That makes it less likely that the legislature would start up anything anytime soon. And with a law school with 1,200 or 1,300 already in northeast Florida, I wouldn’t think it would make a lot of sense to open a public law school here.”
• On his thoughts about FCSL’s new board of directors: “We are very fortunate. Our ability to attract the local ties that we have been able to attract says a lot about the maturity of the law school and the respect that the law school now has. That is a credit to (former dean) Don Lively and (interim dean between Lively and Goplerud) Dennis Stone and all of the hard work that they did. I was fortunate to step in to a very nice setting. I have not encountered any skepticism or resistance. All of that, I think at this point, or most of it, is behind us and that is a credit to all of the folks that put in a lot of the work over the first eight years of the school.”