Golden Anniversary Campaign
By almost any measure, Monterey College of Law’s first 50 years have been a resounding success. Now, as our Golden Anniversary approaches, it’s time to pose some questions:
• How do we shape our law schools for success over
the next 50 years?
• How do we elevate our academic program to continue
its leadership role in legal education:
• How do we help our students successfully balance
work and family with their desire for a legal education?
• How do we build on our strengths and position our law schools to provide even greater
service to our communities in the years to come?
We’ve come up with some answers. We need to:
• Do more of the things that make us great. Things like maintaining our unique tuition guarantees, supporting our exceptional faculty, introducing advanced technology, providing more financial aid, continuing pro bono legal clinics, and enhancing barexam preparation.
• Do fewer of the things that hold us back. Financial constraints plague all small non-profit and tuition-based educational institutions. We are forced to make hard decisions between increasing financial aid to, expanding the academic curriculum, investing in new educational technology, enlarging our academic support, or servicing the building renovation bond debt.
Golden Campaign Goals
We can only achieve these goals with the support of our entire Monterey College of Law community’s financial support.
We are reaching out to our Trustees, Faculty and Alumni to raise $5 million as part of our 50th Anniversary Celebration.
• $1 million financial aid endowment to support students.
Currently, we can only provide nominal ($500 – $1500) grants from our limited scholarship
funds. This endowment would increase our ability to offer financial aid by 100%.
• $1 million for endowed faculty chairs, grants for faculty development, and educational
technology upgrades.
These funds will provide training for our faculty including adult learning styles,
teaching techniques, producing online classes, conducting legal writing and research
courses, creating and grading exams, and substantive law up-dates. Investing in technology
to produce online courses has proven a necessity and allows us to take advantage of
the broad expertise of our 80 faculty members, serving potential students who live
or work beyond reasonable commute distances.
• $2.5 million to retire the building renovation bond debt.
Up to $300,000 per year in interest and principal payments to Certificate of Participation
holders will be freed up and re-directed to expand our academic support and financial
aid programs.
• $500,000 endowment to support and expand our pro bono community advisory clinic programs.
This expansion will increase the number of programs, and the students and faculty
who can participate in them. It will enable us to increase our geographical reach
to provide services in South Monterey County, a critically underserved region.
This is the first capital campaign of this magnitude in MCL’s history. As a community-based, community-serving non profit, we think it is time to build on the success of our first 50 years and lay the foundation for our success in the next 50 years.