When Greg Shaffer was asked how many pre-law advisers the university has, he sat behind his desk with a blank expression on his face.

“It’s just me,” he said.

In his State of the Campus Address, university President Dan Mote announced the university’s admission rate to law schools reached 75 percent for the 2006-2007 school year, up from 63 percent three years ago. The reason why?

Shaffer, according to university administrators and pre-law students, is a huge help.

Shaffer has been an adviser with the university since fall 2003. The surge in law-school admission rates can be traced back to Shaffer and his ability to prepare students for the law school process as early as freshman year, Dean of Undergraduate Studies Donna Hamilton said.

“We have wonderful students with very good career goals. And a lot of the students who are interested in law find their way to Greg Shaffer, and he knows how to advise them to get in (to law school),” Hamilton said. “A lot of that jump has to be attributed to Greg.”

Since Shaffer’s hire in 2003, he said he has made the pre-law advising office more visible to all students, not just government and politics and criminology majors, and has established a strong connection between the university and top law schools. Shaffer meets with more than 700 law-school hopefuls each year, hosts workshops for current students and alumni and advises the College Park Law Society, he said.

“He’s a fantastic resource,” said president of the College Park Law Society Erica Guy, who is also a law-school applicant. “He knows the process in and out. It’s a credit to him that so many people are going to law school.”

Shaffer said he has established the kind of relationship with law schools where he can call up admissions counselors and advocate on behalf of particular students. This relationship, repeatedly referred to as the Maryland “pipeline,” accounts for this university sending double the amount of students to top-25 law schools since 2003. This “pipeline” has led to seven times as many university students being accepted to top-10 schools, Shaffer said. Harvard University even requested that the university host an annual workshop on the campus for interested students.

“You do see the Maryland student being slightly better than before, but I’d like to think a big part of it is that we’re out there in the College Park community and more people are aware we exist,” Shaffer said.

Ever since working part-time for the letters sciences office as an undergraduate student, Shaffer said he joked that he would come back to the university to take his dream job of advising students interested in law school. For students, however, the fact remains that Shaffer is the main resource they have to fuel their law school hopes.

“I think increasing the budget for pre-law advising [is important],” Guy said. “We’re sending more and more students every year, and the fact that we’re such a huge university and have one pre-law adviser? I know from working with him that he tries to make time for each student that wants to meet with him, but he’s got to have more faculty and more resources to help him out.”

University alumnus Jeff Brown, currently in his first year of law school at the University of Pittsburgh, said he had to go outside of the university to prepare for law-school applications.

“I never went to pre-law advising,” he wrote in an e-mail. “Many of my friends that did said that it was not very helpful, so I just decided to get most of my information from books about law school.”

Brown, who said Kaplan’s LSAT preparatory course was an important preparation tool for him, said the university should have a pre-law major or have more courses focused on pre-law students.

More emphasis on pre-law could be on the way, Shaffer said.

“I think the university has started to realize the value of pre-law advising,” Shaffer said.

Shaffer pointed to the fact that his part-time position was made full-time in early 2007 as proof.

“Before [I came], it was a lot of part-time folks who didn’t have a whole lot invested in the university,” he said. “We have some stability in the office, I know most of my students from their freshman year. … They’re not just seeing a faceless adviser.”

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