Law Schools Show Tint of Gray : Older Students Are ‘Dedicated Group’ Seeking 2nd Careers

The Rev. David Cantrell was looking for a new career.

“My wife wanted a divorce,” he said. “It’s very hard to be a divorced minister.”

So Cantrell decided to be a lawyer. At 40, almost 15 years since he had last opened a textbook, the Northridge clergyman entered law school.

Now struggling through first-year courses, Cantrell is no old-timer in the classroom. He attends the tiny San Fernando Valley College of Law in Sepulveda, where more than half of the 200 students are 35 or older. There are a handful of students in their 60s and one applicant in her 80s.

Older students are becoming more common at law schools throughout the country, administrators say. People in their 30s and 40s are turning to law as a second career, returning to the classroom despite the rigors and expense of a legal education.

‘Extremely Motivated’

“They are extremely motivated students,” said Pam McConnell, a professor at the school. “They are here not because it’s something to do after college but because they’ve made a choice and maybe some sacrifices to be here. It’s a real dedicated group.”

According to American Bar Assn. statistics, almost a quarter of the 55,000 people who applied to ABA-accredited law schools last year were 30 or older.

At Southwestern University’s School of Law in downtown Los Angeles, 20% of last year’s applicants were over 30, and the average age of students has risen to 28. Officials at USC and UCLA keep no such statistics, but report noticeable increases in the number of older students.

“We have a guy who was a violinist in the philharmonic. We have a guy who was a policeman,” said Lawrence Raful, an associate dean at USC School of Law. “There are women whose children are grown who realize they may have missed something at their 21-year-old stage. There are still people who grew up watching ‘Perry Mason’ and are just now getting around to going to law school.”

‘An Opportunity School’

Older students have become unusually prominent at the San Fernando Valley college, in part because of the school’s admissions policies. Applicants must score in the top 50% on the Law School Admissions Test and, in some cases, need not have earned a bachelor’s degree. By comparison, this fall’s USC law class graduated from universities with a B+ average or better and scored in the top 10% on the LSAT.

“We are an opportunity school,” said Keith Sonne, admissions director at the Valley school, which is a satellite campus of LaVerne University in LaVerne. “We give an opportunity to the person who might not get it elsewhere.”

The college is in a beige, two-story office building on Sepulveda Boulevard, between an Earl Scheib auto paint shop and Duke’s Beer Bar.

Pam McConnell’s first-year criminal-law class convenes in a smaller building in back. Although the classroom is classic law school--tiered in a semicircle with rows narrowing down to a podium--McConnell is hardly Professor Kingsfield. She is thin and attractive, with blond hair and wearing a bright blue dress. She smiles and jokes often, moving quickly about the front of the room.

“Teaching older students, you have to change your teaching techniques,” she said. A former deputy district attorney, McConnell, 32, is younger than most of her pupils. “When you teach at night, you have to be more entertaining because many of the students have put in a full day of work.

“I won’t wear a clown suit and honk a horn, but I try to be funny because it keeps them awake and it keeps them thinking.”

Struggle to Stay Awake

The effort is not wasted on student Raymond Bock of Calabasas. He says that, at times, an entertaining professor is the only thing that keeps him from dozing off. Bock, 65, works part time as an industrial engineer for the federal government while attending law school.

“A man my age gets four hours sleep and then he tries to put in three hours of class after a full day of work,” he said. “You bet that’s tough. These tired old synapses don’t work as fast as the young kids’.”

Like other students who leave the business world to go back to law school, Bock found it difficult to reacquaint himself with nightly studying. Most of the older students attend class part time, only three days a week. But the vast number of law cases that must be memorized presents a formidable obstacle.

Long Reading Assignments

“The thing I hear most is, ‘Oh, my God, how am I going to do all this reading,” said Raful, the USC dean. “When you’re working in the real world, you may read The Times or a novel, but you sure don’t read 250 pages of text each night.”

In the Kelemen household in Woodland Hills, studying has become a family priority. Chuck Kelemen, 43, is a first-year student at the San Fernando Valley law school, his wife has returned to college to earn a degree in social work, and their two sons are still in school.

Sal Porretta’s family also has taken an interest in his homework. The 43-year-old retired Burbank policeman, a classmate of Kelemen, said his teen-age daughter delights in nagging him about studying.

And there is the ever-present competition from younger students.

“It’s a little bit intimidating, because they are fresh out of school,” Porretta said. “They probably know how to study better than I do. My note-taking is terrible.”

Cantrell, the Northridge clergyman, found the pressure overwhelming in his first attempt at law school. He flunked out of Southwestern last year. He says he has a better understanding of the sacrifices that must be made this fall.

“Once they have mastered the study habits that first year, then they are OK,” McConnell said.

All this puts a strain on home life for students who have spouses and children.

“I started as a part-time student against my husband’s wishes. He didn’t want me to go at all,” said Patricia Andreoni, 39, of Sun Valley, a second-year student. “I have five children. My children are jealous of the time I spend studying.”

Bock doesn’t have such worries.

“I’ve become a hermit,” he said. “But since I was divorced several years ago, I didn’t give up anything.”

The reasons that people give for choosing law as a second career vary.

“There are several theories,” Bock said. “One is that I’m stupid.”

Kelemen saw it as a challenge.

“I ran a gas station. I was an X-ray technician. I was a computer consultant and a general contractor,” he said. “I’ve done all my goals. It was time to find a new one.”

Kelemen became interested in law after paying $80,000 in legal fees to recover money owed to his contracting business. Watching lawyers at work, Kelemen thought he could do better.

His situation is fairly common, Raful said. Through informal observations at USC, the associate dean has come up with three groups of people who most frequently choose to return to school to study law:

Many entered the relatively new paralegal profession and found that advancement was limited without a law degree. Having already done much of the work of a lawyer, they decide to take the final step in their career.

Some are businessmen who, like Kelemen, have had frequent and frustrating experiences with lawyers and decide to study law themselves.

And there are women whose children are grown, leaving them free to go back to school for a new career.

Admissions officials say it is difficult to evaluate applications from such people. College records, often more than a decade old, are of little value. Job experience, although a significant indication of the person’s perseverance and general aptitude, does not translate into classroom ability.

Often, the application of an older student relies heavily on the nationally standardized LSAT. Since many of the older students have not taken a test in years, they are likely to fare worse than students just out of college.

“It’s a Catch-22,” Raful said.

However, someone who did poorly in college can overcome their academic past with a successful job record and high LSAT score.

“They can come in and say, ‘Look at me now. I’m grown up and I have a career,’ ” said Sandra Oakman, director of admissions at Southwestern.

Once accepted and acclimated to study habits, the older student has another difficulty to contend with: cost of tuition. The three-year program at San Fernando Valley College of Law costs $15,600, and at USC students pay almost $12,000 for one year.

Most students, young and old, attend law school on financial aid. However, many students in their 30s and 40s have mortgages and family expenses, making their financial burden greater.

Kelemen has been able to afford his schooling, and that of his wife and children, thanks to money saved from past business ventures and some current part-time computer consulting.

Porretta is on pension from the Burbank Police Department.

For Andreoni’s family, the money situation has not been so good. They have had to live without the second income she earned for 18 years as a teacher.

“We’ve been eating macaroni and cheese for two years,” she said. “A lot of my children’s extracurricular activities are being curtailed because of finances.”

Despite such hardships, older students are succeeding in their studies, administrators say.

“We’re very enthusiastic about them,” said John Huffer, dean of the San Fernando Valley school. “They can’t devote themselves to law school the way full-time students can. But they are serious people and that usually makes up for it. They don’t waste law school time frivolously.”

Officials at other local law schools reported similar observations and mention maturity and dedication--qualities they say are more evident in older students.

Robert Vandret, a partner with the law firm O’Melveny & Myers, said job applicants who come to law as a second career are treated no differently than those who attended law school immediately after undergraduate studies.

“We’ve hired people who have gone to law school late in life,” Vandret said. “In an individual case it may help; in another it may not.”

Many of the students at San Fernando Valley College of Law have not yet set their sights on future employment. They are concerned with class, homework and fast-approaching midterms.

“This was always an ultimate goal, but I was afraid to try it,” Porretta said. “Now that I’ve retired from the Police Department, I can try to accomplish something I’ve wanted to do since I was 20 years old.”