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Better aligning the law degree with student needs
In a decisive effort to align its curriculum with the changing needs of law students, the dean of law at the University of the Sunshine Coast has unveiled the university’s plans to reduce the duration of its law degree by one year.
Grace Robbie
Speaking on a recent episode of The Protégé Podcast, Professor Jay Sanderson, the dean of law for the University of the Sunshine Coast, discussed the university’s initiative to transform its law degree program from a traditional four-year course to a more streamlined three-year degree. He shared that this transition aims to provide greater flexibility and address the specific challenges that law students encounter in today’s academic and professional landscape.
Sanderson explained that the decision to change the duration of the law course was made to better accommodate the needs of today’s law students, who have to balance their academic pursuits with employment to support themselves financially.
“Next year, we’re rolling out a new revised program. So we’re going from a four-year degree to a three-year program.
“[It] really responds to a couple of things. One is we’re finding students have lots of challenges. It’s the cost-of-living pressures, it’s housing, it’s affordability. Many of our students are working while they’re studying,” he said.
The revised three-year curriculum will rationalise the course structure, enabling students to concentrate on fundamental legal subjects by eliminating general elective courses.
“What we’ve done is condense the program so that they get their law courses, Priestley 11 core courses, [and] they get a lot of choice with law electives. But we’ve removed what we call here free or general electives, so they’re not doing the non-law course,” he said.
Sanderson revealed that this change is to guarantee that students continue to receive the rigorous legal curriculum and various opportunities while also granting them flexibility in their studies.
“What we’re hoping to do is provide the same legal education, the same opportunities, but provide that with the students doing a single degree, they can complete that in three years instead of four, and provide, particularly towards the end, a little bit of flexibility with electives so that they can work, we find, particularly towards the end of the program,” he said.
He emphasised the importance of law schools being attuned to the needs of their students: “It’s not necessarily reacting, but keeping in mind and having an eye to the future in terms of what the legal profession might be, what our graduates might require, [and] recognise that a lot of law graduates don’t become lawyers, so they won’t necessarily follow that path through to become solicitors.”
Sanderson outlined how the law school has actively collaborated with its advisory committee to ensure that the revised program not only meets current industry standards but also reduces the financial strain on law students by shortening the duration of their studies by one year.
“We work closely with our advisory committee, so the local legal profession on devising that program, so that we can hopefully provide something that is robust, rigorous, gives all the knowledge that they need, but also tries to reduce the time [and] that financial burden, potentially, of doing a four-year program versus the three,” he said.
