Rutgers puzzles law enrollment in Camden: Why did twice as many students choose Newark?

First-year law-student enrollment at Rutgers-Camden fell 31 percent this year, to its lowest in at least a decade, while its Rutgers-Newark counterpart saw a slight increase.

The reason could be as simple as geographic preference: students choosing to attend classes in the campus closest to where they live, grew up, or hope to work after graduation. South Jersey vs. North Jersey; Philadelphia vs. New York City.

The unexpected enrollment imbalance comes in the first year of a merged law school, which had planned on equal numbers on each campus.

"It's one of the issues we're going to be looking at very carefully in the second year," said Ronald K. Chen, the Newark-based co-dean of Rutgers Law School.

"What would cause this imbalance? I'll be quite honest with you. It was a big surprise," he said.

Chen said administrators were looking at a variety of reasons, including recruiting, marketing, and job markets.

The consequence of students' preferences, in the aggregate, is a clear imbalance: Newark has 214 first-year law students, exactly double Camden's 107.

The 2-1 enrollment ratio matches a 2012 crisis at Rutgers-Camden. Law students were reluctant to enroll because of a proposed merger of Rutgers-Camden and Rowan University that sparked fierce resistance from Rutgers-Camden students, faculty, staff, and alumni. That year, the Camden law school enrolled 116 first-year students to Newark's 225.

"The merger was based on having two coequal partners. … so right now we need to move Camden's enrollment up," Chen said. "Although I have to say, the students that are there now are getting a lot of attention."

He noted that some first-year Newark classes are larger than desired, "so it's not as if we're happy about this imbalance in Newark at all."

Faculty in both locations were already set to shrink through attrition in coming years, as some professors who leave or retire are not replaced.

The Camden campus chancellor, Phoebe A. Haddon, said that going forward, "it doesn't necessarily flow, for me, that there will be equal numbers at each place. … That's something the deans would have to decide."

Haddon cited several factors that may lead to a decision to have different enrollment numbers: faculty size, the legal needs, the job market.

Administrators said one cause for the enrollment shift — and a potential solution — might be marketing and outreach.

"Camden's yield seems low for Camden, and I and others are going to be working the phones, having events, making sure people are experiencing every opportunity to connect with the Camden campus … so that we are not leaving potential enrollees on the table, which I must say I think we did last year," said Michael T. Cahill, who joined the law school in July as Camden-based co-dean.

More than a dozen students in this year's first-year class on both campuses detailed a range of individual reasons for their choice: How the campus felt during a visit, which market is better for a specific kind of law, what kind of housing and transportation options were available.

"My work location, Middletown, is closer to Newark," said Sherry Gelenius, a first-year law student at Rutgers-Newark. "There are simply too many days when I know I will be running out of work and just barely make it to class."

A few students said they had also looked at some historical information, including past rankings, employment statistics, and faculty information.

Since the merger, the law school is ranked as one school, and curriculum and programs are largely designed to be the same in both locations. However, one program available only in Camden, the Summer Jump Start program, helped tip two students to that campus, they said.

Students in Jump Start take a course over the summer, lightening their load for the fall and serving as a transition into law school.

Shonti Tager, 29, of Eugene, Ore., said he thought the law school should use Jump Start and other programs to recruit students to Camden.

"If they advertise these programs more to the incoming enrollees, they will hopefully be able to even out the numbers as much as possible. If you get some kids from North Jersey to come to Camden and give it a chance," he said. "I just don't think that they advertised it enough."

One challenge of the merger has been combining two admissions offices that used to compete for students. Some administrators have reported tension over the creation of a unified application and friction in aligning workflow.

The deans said a certain amount of culture shock comes with any merger and would be smoothed out over time.

"It's pretty clear that we share the same overall commitments, and I think we have a degree of dissent in opinion that I consider to be healthy. … As the admissions season develops," Cahill said, "we'll be making some hard decisions, and we haven't made those hard decisions yet, and we'll see how that goes."

Chen said he doesn't believe any administration issues caused this year's enrollment imbalance. Regardless, he said, his job as dean is to ensure things get worked out.

"We're building an airplane while we're flying it in some ways," he said. "This is a work in progress, and some people just need to be a little patient."

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