According to the Illinois State Bar Special Committee Report that Laurel linked to below, the answer is "yes." Or at least that high tuition has greatly exacerbated the problem. Although I will criticize the Report's analysis in this post, I strongly urge those interested in these issues to review the Report themselves. In critiquing the Report, I do not mean to minimize the seriousness of the problem that many individuals who need legal services do not receive them. I also believe that law schools can do far more to help with this problem by expanding clinical offerings and alike. But despite the widespread dissatisfaction and anger towards law schools, the legal academy is not to blame for every problem befalling the legal profession.
The notion that high law school tuition causes attorneys to turn away from public service and the representation of underrepresented groups has some surface appeal. If law students must amass over $100,000 in debt to attend law school, then surely most will opt for high-paying careers so as to service their debt.
There are two clear problems with this claim, however. First, lack of access to legal services is a longstanding problem in the United States. A 1972 study cited in Bates noted that the middle 70% of the United States population is effectively blocked from accessing legal services. At the time, law school tuition was a fraction of what it is now and few lawyers exited law school with significant debt. The problem may have worsened in recent years, but it is difficult to place the blame on high law school tuition when there have also been dramatic cuts to Legal Aid and state legal service budgets, and lawyers have many other financial obligations besides their student loans. The United States is also hardly the only industrialized country in which many middle-class individuals cannot afford legal services, even though in other countries lawyers are not nearly as debt-ridden.
Second, the Report fails to place enough emphasis on the fact that law schools have been producing far more graduates than there are legal jobs. This has been disastrous for many law school graduates, but the oversupply of lawyers places downward pressure on the price of legal services. Moreover, while it may have been true at one time that lawyers were not attracted to public interest jobs (or would sometimes parlay such jobs into higher-paying jobs with large law firms), this is simply not how the legal market works today. Indeed, there is immense competition for public interest and government jobs. A Yale Law School fact sheet claims that it is more difficult for Yale graduates to find public interest jobs than law firm jobs because of hiring freezes and alike. Competition is such that it is not uncommon for new lawyers to work for free for public interest organizations or governmental entities in the hope of securing gainful employment in the future.
In fact, given that the federal government will foregive the student loan debt of any law school graduate who works for a governmental agency and/or not-for-profit for ten years, one might argue that high law school tuition actually incentivizes law school graduates to work for the public interest. Unfortunately, the Report's discussion of such programs is cursory and repeats widespread misimpressions such as that enrolling in such programs will have a significant negative impact on one's credit rating. The Report's authors would have benefitted from a close reading of Phil Schrag's excellent article on Income-Based Repayment and other federal programs.
Based on its tenuous conclusions about the relationship between high law school tuition and lack of access to justice, the Report then advocates for major changes in the student loan system and accreditation standards. Some of the recommendations strike me as sound, others less so. The Report also notes that the Committee's mandate did not extend to examining curricula, but it nevertheless attributes the unemployment crisis facing many graduates and the lack of access to legal services partly to inadequate legal training. Even if one is sympathetic to these claims, it is hardly the case that legal education is less practical today than it was ten years ago (as a 2011 ABA report indicates).
An example of the Illinois Report's poor work in this regard is that it takes law schools to task for failing to provide sufficient support for the growing number of graduates who will work as solo practitioners and recommends that Illinois law schools offer courses in law firm management. ABA statistics indicate, however, that only 2.7% of graduates worked as solo practitioners in 2011 (the number fell to 2.3% in 2012), and all but three Illinois law schools offer such courses (the University of Chicago, Northwestern and Loyola-Chicago appear to not do so, but I may have missed the course in their catalogues).
The Illinois Bar's quick acceptance of the Report indicates the extent to which law schools are no longer being afforded the benefit of the doubt on the question of whether they serve the public interest. But it is far too convenient to blame law schools for the scandal that is the legal profession's continuing inability to adequately meet the needs of the public.