Seething Hall Mall Skooll (with McLaren F1 debt!)‏

Last night, at Prince's Hall, Mr Whistler made his first public appearance as a lecturer on art, and spoke for more than an hour with really marvellous eloquence on the absolute uselessness of all lectures of the kind. —Wilde

[Robin Williams voice:] Gooooooooood mooooooooorning, ScamDeans! Riiiiiiiiise n' shine!

Luckily, I personally never spent any time in Seething hall. I wonder what would have happened, though, had I fallen for what poker players call the "Seething Hall Sucker Play" (i.e., trying to go to law school there). When I was considering going to law school, someone else who was also applying told me that "The Hall" offered him some 30 g's of scholarship money. To my surprise, that did not even cover all of tuition; there was another $6,000 due. He had to beg a special committee to get that extra 6 g's, and word on the street is that they put all the scholarship students in the same section to ensure most would lose their hats by the next year, since scholarships are on condition one finishes close enough to the top of the class. It puzzled me that even getting 30k off the sticker still left 6k a year to pay, which sounds very low—Walmart nay, dollar store low—now with tuition inflation and the other six-figure numbers we see here lately. But think carefully before you judge 6k a year as penny-ante: at three years of it, with interest, you have 20k or so, a substantial debt by itself, to all but the Rich Uncle Pennybags one-percenters. By comparison, 20k would be enough to start a well-funded at-home business, or even a seeder fund for a larger business. Even a paltry 20k of debt is a lot of dough to bake on an uncertain outcome. Luckily, I refused to think that a job at the end of law skooll was guaranteed, as I did not fully trust the "job placement number tango" that they advertised (99% of Seething Hall stupents become millionaires within 9 months of graduation!). 

I wonder what could possibly be wrong with Seething Hall? On that note, let's take a quick break. We need to raise money to pay for this blog, so let me give a "shout out" to our new sponsor:

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Ok, back to the post. Consider it: without a good job, even a mere 18k or 20k is a brutal amount of debt. Even with a job, it is annoying, and eats up several nice Professor Tammy Piety-quality luxury vacations to hot spot destinations. Hey B-lite, say 'hi' to Tams if you get there before me. For all the talk of tuition increases and debt loads in the media, no one has really expressed the sheer value of the wasted dollars that we are paying back. I am not suggesting people forgo formal education to take chartered cruises of all their friends and family to Andros, just to have little-umbrella-style drinks with B-Lite, but if you are wasting that much money, why not? If there are no jobs, why not get an Abercrombie & Kent loan instead of a Stafford one? The debts we read of now, 125k, 175, even 250k, nondischargable and without escape, are beyond comprehension for anyone who is not rolling in the top 2%, or 1% of incomes. All the talk of "you may as well put your tuition money on the roulette wheel" should be extended to its logical conclusion: instead of gambling it, just spend it on exotic automobiles so desirable that they didn't bother to translate the owner's manual into English.

Ridiculous: In under a decade, Seething Hall has increased their tuition by over 11k, to $47,300 or so a year for the next batch of raw-rumped 0L's. That is a lot of jack, jack. When it comes to the law skooll game overall, Seething Hall's yearly percentage price increase doesn't matter much, only because the situation has gotten so bad. We are beyond Shelby Cobra debt; we are in McLaren F1 debt. But for decency's sake, what did Seething Hall do with that 11.3k per student more? (That is $13 million added income to the school, not subtracting what "scholarships" they give out for the first year to a portion of the incoming students). Is the education at Seething Hall one-third better now than it was in the mid 2000's? Riiighhhtt. 

Someone told me to go to Seton Hall because of its proximity to Wall Street and New York money, but I had my doubts, and those doubts seem to have been justified; from a 2011 report:

With a sky-high tuition of $45,048 and poor job prospects for the majority of graduates, attending Seton Hall is most likely a bad idea. Even those who receive scholarship money must place in the top 50% of their class in order to avoid losing their aid, so students who do decide to attend Seton Hall on scholarship should be prepared to work hard.

Overall, if you are accepted to one of the Rutgers schools or another cheaper law school in the area, you should seriously consider pursuing that path. While a small number of Seton Hall graduates end up making the big bucks, the vast majority of them do not. [http://www.top-law-schools.com/seton-hall-law.html]

Here's to you, Seething Hall Mall Skooll. I have two questions: first, why do you exist? and second, and most important, for the price, do you recommend Synthetic Blend or Full Synthetic?
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Read my book-length satire/exposé of law school, Smarter Than Socrates: The End of the Law School Era.