BPP Law School – already
London’s most expensive postgraduate law school – has announced a 10% hike in its fees for the Legal Practice Certificate (LPC) to £11,500.
The hike widens the price-gap between BPP and City Law School, the next most expensive LPC provider in London, to nearly £1,000.
City Law School will charge its full-time students fees of £10,600 for the 2008-09 academic year, after announcing a more modest 1% rise in its own rates.
Commenting on the move, BPP chief executive Peter Crisp (pictured) said the fee hike was necessary to cover the cost of providing students with up to 16 hours of face-to-face tutorial contact a week.
He said: “Face to face teaching is the key to what we do and it is enormously expensive. We are offering a programme at Masters level and have to recruit staff from City practice. While they do take a huge pay-cut to teach, we find that recruiting the right people becomes more expensive each year.”
Crisp said he could not comment on whether coming years would hold further fee increases for students.
Key rival the College of Law remains London’s cheapest LPC provider, despite upping its own fees by 5% to charge full-time students £10,340 from September 2008. Unlike the College, BPP does not enjoy charitable status.
Last year BPP – the course provider to the City LPC consortium comprising Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Herbert Smith, Lovells, Norton Rose and Slaughter and May – became the first private-sector company to be conferred degree-awarding powers.
Talkback: Does the LPC still represent value for money? Click here to have your say.
I assume the 10% rise is to pay for the exam invigilators going through everyone's text books to check there are no vertical lines!! What a joke - access to the legal profession is difficult enough without increasing fees by such a steep percentage.
I'm studying the LPC by weekend learning and despite the huge sums I have to pay (not to mention travel and accommodation expenses), BPP will not send out vital course materials by post. Hence on Saturday after 4.5 hours of gruelling litigation exams, we all had to trek across London to the law school in Holborn to collect materials required for next weekend. With full time jobs, families and life in general, this was not really what any of us needed, especially when there were hardly any staff at the law school which meant we had to queue for a long time before being seen.
No one should even consider paying the fees themselves if they intend to practise in the City. Since all the firms recruit in advance, there will be a gap between being offered a training contract and starting work, so you might as well do the LPC then, and be given a grant to do so. If you want to practise in another field where firms do not pay the LPC fees, BPP is probably not the best place to go anyway.
But with regards to other schools, the reports I get from friends doing the LPC elsewhere suggest BPP is worth the premium.
The fees hike is certainly interesting in these 'credit crunch' times. The argument put forward by Peter Crisp - that BPP, unlike the College of Law, does not enjoy charitable status - is interesting. I believe, but I shall certainly check, that the College of Law distributes money to various charitable institutions/projects. I have absolutely no idea whether BPP Law School does the same with profits.
BPP does not pretend to be a charity or even altruistic. I believe it has realised that its services are in such demand that it can charge such a price (with profits going to its shareholders). That is a company doing what it is supposed to, is it not? As long as firms believe the same and continue to send their trainees to BPP and pay the fees, this will continue. This is simply the free market determining the price. Considering prospective students of BPP will be looking at the institution in order to give them a competitive advantage over others looking at corporate/commerial law, I think they would understand this mentality perfectly well. If they do not they should consider improving their commercial awareness before entering this area of the legal profession.
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