Thanks to Gilman for pointing out Vault’s article on the most underrated law schools. Houston as a city gets a bad rap. From being boom town in the 80s where “if you got out of bed, you made money” ( according to a retired lawyer from Fulbright & Jaworski ) to a place that elicits winces when you state that you live there.
What a lot of people don’t know about UH Law Center and the University of Houston s the dismal amount of funding it gets compared to other state schools. In fact much to most Texans’ chagrin, there are only two Tier-1 universities in the great State of Texas: UT-Austin and Texas A&M. California by comparison has 10, New York 8. What does that bode for Texas? Well as large as we are and as much populace as we have that resides within our borders we simply don’t have as many well funded academic/research institutions as we should. University of Houston suffers as a result and UH-Law Center shares that burden.
This doesn’t undermine the level of scholarship that UH as a university is capable of but a cutting-edge academic research institution can’t be had without financial support from the center. The curious thing is that once you have an institution going, it will spin off and self-fund through a great extent but not without the original impetus of state funding.
Frankly UH Law Center, UH and Houston as a whole really is worth it ladies and gentlemen. In fact there’s a whole website dedicated to just that.
March 24, 2007 at 12:26 pm
The University of Houston in general is rather unknown and underrated. When I tutored high school kids for the SAT, mostly the private school crowd in River Oaks and Memorial, the only predicable motivator I had in my arsenal was “If you don’t do this work, you might end up at UH.” Sad but true. Universities, like prophets, get no respect in their home town.