As the facade continues to crumble on the Law School brand, I find it quite comical how various LawProfs have become increasingly bitter, snippy, and downright angry about people questioning the value of a law degree.
To a certain extent, it is understandable. No group likes to have another group trash them wholesale for who they are. Lawyers understand this more than most - who hasn't been (not-so-jokingly) reviled as a "shark", a "bottom-feeder", an "obstructionist", or a generalized "a-hole"? I'm used to people acting that way towards me, once they find out I am a lawyer. It's not pleasant, but I know that many people have had bad experiences with lawyers, whether deserved or undeserved. I get that. Sometimes I counter the argument by saying that lawyers have the unique (and sometime unpleasant) task of being an advocate for one side, and in any conflict is is natural to feel some vitriol towards the side that you perceive to be impeding your progress. But that's the way it goes. I don't feel the need to defend myself to the millions of people who think lawyers are "bad people" - it isn't worth the effort, there is a lot of grey between the extremes of black and white, and few minds will be changed in any event.
Not so with LawProfs. I would have said this was due to the fact that they are concerned about their pocketbook, and to a certain extent I'm sure they are. However, when you look at LawProf CVs (and trust me, reading one after the other makes for a natural substitute for caster oil, in case you ever need to purge), one thing is clear - these are not exactly rags-to-riches people. They largely come from big-name schools. Have big-name pedigrees. Have done some big-name stuff. Stuff that the vast majority never even come close to touching or having access to.
In essence, they largely come from money and influence. How could it be otherwise? Who can afford to do what they have done? How else could they garner the plumb assignments they have had prior to becoming a professor? Bootstrapping and sacrifice? Don't make me laugh.
As such, this is not really about LawProfs losing their livelihood. While that might sting a bit, they have other resources to fall back on by virtue of the segment of society they come from.
This is really about pride. And pride goeth before a fall, as some ancient wisdom has said.
LawProfs did what they did because the like the position in society they occupy. They enjoy being looked up to and respected. They enjoy hearing themselves talk (clearly). They want to be revered by their peers and colleagues, so they hob-nob at high-dollar colloquia and write love-letters (i.e. legal scholarship) to each other in order to garner influence. They wanted to be admired by legions of law students who were eager to join the "majesty" of the profession they claim to occupy. And let's be honest: the job was a sweet deal - in comparison, you have to lay a lot of bricks and hang a lot of drywall in order to make $200k a year, and the hours aren't nearly as good.
But, as the tarnish has spread and lives have been reduced to debt-serfdom, the LawProfs just aren't getting that ego-stroke they way they were accustomed to. Deans and administrators are talking more and more about "little-people" stuff, like budgets and increased work loads. People are demanding more accountability and work product that justifies their role, not just their pet project of the semester. And that causes the LawProfs to have a sad. Even from LawProfs who are in no danger of losing their jobs due to the size of the foundation that supports the school or parent university (i.e. status and preftige).
Why did this happen? Is it solely because times are tough for "lazy", "bitter", "entitled" graduates, and students need a convenient scapegoat for their "failure"? If only it were that simple - at least that would imply that things are actually better for everyone, student and LawProf alike. Student frustration over having to "settle" for their second or third choices would actually be a welcome outcome, as opposed to current joblessness and crushing debt for thousands upon thousands.
No, I would argue that the ire towards LawProfs comes from the fact that for decades, they Just Didn't Care. Period. And why should they, when they were in no danger of facing the kind of circumstances their students faced? I'm sure there is a LawProf or two out there who tried to help their students, put in a word for them where they could, so let good karma fall where it will. But as a profession, they were too busy being complicit in the scam, looking the other way, pretending that thousands of lives weren't being destroyed while they wrote yet another "Law and _____" article or attended another circle-jerk symposium for $100-200k a year and a six-hour-a-week teaching load.
One thing is for certain. As the situation continues to sour, and as fewer and fewer law students attend, watch the Pride sail into the stratosphere as LawProfs are increasingly required to do what most people do for their livelihood - work. Inside the bubble, no less. And instead of regarding their own contributions to the situation with sober judgment (with rare exception), these butthurt LawProfs are blame-shifting and looking in all the wrong places for respect and sympathy. They did everything right...! Didn't they...?
Nope, there's no Sympathy for the Devil here. In short, welcome to how the other-half live. Enjoy your stay.
Nope, there's no Sympathy for the Devil here. In short, welcome to how the other-half live. Enjoy your stay.
When I was in law school 30 years ago I think most of my professors, while not quite Horatio Alger stories, were not from money and influence. They were mostly very bright graduates of good law schools who got plum judicial clerkships and then worked a few years as associates in biglaw. I suppose things may be different now when there is far more competition for those positions and influence might count for a lot more, but I will disagree with you on one point.
ReplyDeleteA 40 or 50 something lawprof with no reputation as a practitioner and no book of business is not likely to get into a firm no matter how much money and influence they have. It's kill what you eat nowadays and no firm is going to subsidize you while waiting to see how you pan out as a rainmaker. Corporations will only hire lawyers over 35 if they have specific experience useful in their industry. The tax prof with a C.P.A. license will probably find work but what use is a torts or civil procedure professor to anyone?
I think they all know how far up a creek they'll be when the house of cards comes down, and that it is for that reason that they are so willing to lie and cheat to dupe 22 year olds into ruining their lives in order to continue their no-work lifestyles.
When it comes to making a living, there's always the streets. The unemployed professoriate can take to the streets and become Fellatio Alger success stories.
Delete"Law professors" truly care about prestige and being revered by their peers and students. These cockroaches have big egos, and MANY - if not most - of them come from privileged backgrounds. They have often clerked for federal judges or spend a couple of years in Biglaw.
ReplyDeleteIn their eyes, they got to rub shoulders with perceived giants. However, they realized that they could not hang in the game for long. The pigs then use this brief experience, their academic background, and ability to produce meaningless tripe in NON-PEER reviewed journals to load up their CVs - in an effort to impress the gullible.
In sum, these bitches and hags have no character and no integrity. They generally hold their TTT and TTTT charges in contempt. Yet, they are happy to cash their unjustified big checks for their minimal "work." They do not give a damn what happens to their students upon graduation. They got paid up front, in full. You, the student, are a mere afterthought.
I am proud that I have played a role in undermining students' - as well as the general public's - faith and esteem for these supposed "law professors," i.e. failed lawyers from upper middle class backgrounds. The use of the descriptive terms when describing these sewer rats was strategic on my part.
Aside from providing a visual to the term third tier toilet, I have also succeeded in bringing these dung beetles down to where they belong: in the street, next to their mother. And together we have affected the tenure model.
Even at "First Tier" schools, the T14 grad deans and professors look down their noses at their "sub-elite" students.
DeleteMy GPA and LSAT were competitive for the T14, but I chose to go to a less expensive state school ranked in the 30s, thinking I would be fine going to a school in the "top tier." At orientation, the dean (a Yale grad) introduced the new faculty hires. All were T14 grads, mostly from Yale and Harvard.
The dean and the tenure-track faculty liked to talk about how great our school was, but when it came time to hire faculty, they wouldn't touch a grad of our school (or a similarly ranked school) with a 10-foot pole. The message was clear: "Even the best grad from this school isn't good enough to teach here."
Even in the classroom, you could tell that many of the professors viewed us "sub-elite" students with contempt. Most of them viewed us as something getting in the way of writing their next worthless piece of scholarship.
Despite all their contempt for their lowly students, I never heard of any professors failing to cash their student loan funded paychecks.
I will post something I posted before, both here and on Outside The law School Scam, which I remember only because dupednontraditional was kind enough to post it on his other blog:
ReplyDelete"I'm someone who graduated from law school in the 1970s, and I can say that law school faculty have always been somewhere between utterly indifferent and outright hostile to the fate of the vast majority of their students - only those at or near the top of the class (top 10% .... as they themselves had been) were considered worthy of attention and support.
But it didn't matter then the way it does now - law school was far far less expensive then, and student loans, to the limited extent they existed, were dischargable in bankruptcy.
Only a fraction of my class (25%?) went on to make long term careers as lawyers, but no one's life was wrecked as a result of spending 3 years in law school.
THAT IS NO LONGER THE CASE.
But law school faculty willfully ignore that fact. From their point of view, the large majority of their students who have never made careers as lawyers don't deserve too. As long as their law school produces a small % of winners, they're doing their job correctly. But the hundreds of thousands of lives wrecked that the current set-up has produced should and hopefully will come back to haunt them soon."
"From their point of view, the large majority of their students who have never made careers as lawyers don't deserve to."
DeleteThis is exactly how law profs think. They were successful (at least at becoming scammers), and they think any one who isn't successful like them must be lazy or dumb.
Even if every law student is brilliant and works as hard as possible, the ever-worsening lawyer glut will ensure that half of them won't get JD-required jobs.
Appreciate your comments, Anon 7:33. One thing I always like to do is try to archive comments from time to time, just to demonstrate that the scamblog movement isn't just a handful of crackpots (as is often the knee-jerk response). These are real people with real life experience on the subject.
Deletehttp://dupednontraditional.blogspot.com/2013/02/the-only-winning-move-is-not-to-play.html
I think that where "faculty attitude towards students" is concerned there is a three level pyramid. At the pinnacle are the most elite schools where the faculty see the students as peers. Next come schools that are fairly selective where a lot of graduates will have halfway decent outcomes and they can justify the rest of the students as being necessary to keep the lights on and the paychecks coming. The vast majority of schools are in the bottom level, where the professors and administrators know damned well that most students are destroying their own lives.
DeleteI would further submit that over the last forty years (since a glut of new law schools opened in the early seventies) the lines between the three levels have been slowly but steadily creeping upward, so that many if not most T14s are now in the second level and most first tier schools are now in the bottom level.
Its funny, but I remember having contempt for law profs at my law school. I saw them as losers, incapable of practicing law and pretty much worthless at teaching law too. I learned little from my profs. There was maybe one good one in the bunch, a retired Judge. The rest of them were worthless. I learned the law on my own by reading the casebooks and the outlines available for purchase and then prepared for the Bar by paying for a third party company to teach me what I needed to know. I think the great majority of us pretty much do the same.
DeleteDuped,
DeleteAnon 7:33 here. Apologies for not providing a link to the post at your site.
The other comments you selected are excellent.
I attended a TT law school in the 80s. With a few exceptions, virtually all the law professors were openly contemptuous to the vast majority of students. Some were openly insulting and went out of their way to humiliate students in class, but most were just assholes. They really are scum of the earth and relished being assholes while expecting the students to suck up to them. IMHO, they deserve to get kicked to the curb. I've never met a group of bigger assholes in my life, period.
DeleteAmerica's greatest natural resource is its supply of law professors!
ReplyDeleteDon't undermine one of the most important progressive institutions in American history, the American law school!
If you think there are too many law schools, you hate women and minority lawyers, and want to return to the bad old days of Professor Kingsfield!
Nothing is as important as maintaining tenure at American law schools! Tenure is the foundation of our entire democracy!
Visiting Steve Diamonds website that's not too far off what he seems to believe.
DeleteHe also believes for the great majority of law graduates their JD is a wonderful investment. Law graduates are highly sought after in many fields, not just law, and most make a comfortable living.
As per Simkovic and McIntyre's paper, legal education in itself makes people marvellously efficient and productive workers in any field they choose to work in.
Sure law professors are well rewarded, but that's because all of them are making a great sacrifice working in education. Any of them could jump into far more lucrative and rewarding careers in biglaw any time they choose.
Steve Diamond actually genuinely seems to believe this nonsense.
The cognitive dissonance of the legal academy is just plain annoying. While largely espousing the merits of social mobility,the legal academy is locked in a tight circle jerk of empty acolades, self promotion and reinforced social heirarchies based on the presumptive prestige of a small group of law schools. No where is this more evident than in the review and selection of law journal and review articles for publication. Second and third year law students do not have either the knowledge required nor the professional depth to make decisions regarding which law review/journal articles are "better" than other articles. They simply make their selections based on the academic pedigree and the law school affiliation of the author. Blind peer-reviewed articles, as is the standard in orher academic scholarship, would resolve this issue. Of course the top-tier law schools do not want to change the status quo as we may all learn that there is just a man (and not a very scholarly man) behind the T14 curtain. The lowly state school educated, 3rd tier law lecturer may actually write a more significant, more cogent article than the ivy league law professor, but we will never know it.
ReplyDeleteI cannot imagine a more ludicrous system for the assessment of legal scholarship than the one currently in place. Does anyone think for one minute that graduate students (working on the equivalent of a MA degree) in sciences should determine which articles have sufficient merit for publication in physics, chemistry or astronomy? Should third year medical students determine which articles get published in AMA journals? Should MBA students review and determine which articles get published in the Journal of Finance or the Journal of Marketing?
Professional academics in these and other fields would rightly scoff at the idea that their academic work should be reviewed by less than their peers, professionals who have had significant experience in similar academic areas. The fact that law professors continue to permit second and third year students review and assess their work really undermines any contention that legal academic scholarship is actually worthy of the designation "academic scholarship."
I agree with this.
DeleteAnon @9:11 here.
DeleteThanks.
While legal scholarship has little credibility now, if and when the JD becomes a two-year degree, it will have less, if that's possible. In that case, students who have had only the first year of required courses will be serving as the principal editors of the law review and journals. For journals about a particular subject (sports law, environmental law, intellectual property, etc.), the editors will not have even had the basic survey course in the subject matter.
Again, the whole system of legal scholarship is ridiculous and indefensible.
And yet, they so often are better paid than their peer-reviewed brethren in the hard sciences. Scammers, indeed!
ReplyDeleteYep. Not to shamelessly self-promote (as I consider myself on OTLSS now), but a few months ago being a university professor was the least stressful career of 2013, according to CareerCast.com.
DeleteThis was across all disciplines, so we know the LawProf gig is still sweeter, yet. But we kinda knew that already from experience.
http://dupednontraditional.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-profs-protest-too-much.html
And the way they teach sinks below not caring, into outright bullying and deception.
ReplyDeleteI speak of the famous "hide the ball" method of law school pedagogy, which is analogous to nothing I can think of in other fields of study. Instead of clarifying the material, like any conscientious teacher would, law professors waste your time with cold-calling, badgering strings of arid questions about "the facts" of the assigned appellate decisions in the casebook, patented little sarcastic jokes, and hypotheticals from fantasy-land meant to misdirect.
They have their phony justifications-- teaching you to think like a lawyer, ect.-- which is comical in light of their often meager practice experience. The real reason is that they need to fill classroom time and have nothing to say.
Suppose a law professor taught the actual doctrine and the judicially-created analytical framework, or tests, designed to apply those doctrines. Suppose he or she lectured about the context in which the tests came to be formulated, and even assigned a few cases to illustrate how courts have applied the tests. Suppose he or she even discussed significant splits in authority. It probably would not even fill half the semester-- and that is for the core first year subjects, not the second and third year fluff.
One of the most exasperating experiences in law school actually comes just afterwards, when you take a nine-week $3000 bar review course. There it is, the actual content of law school, with the bullying and time-wasting and puffery and misdirection and mysticism and staggering expense and sacrifice subtracted. Nine weeks of material, and $3000.
The other reason:
DeleteIf law professors actually taught the subject matter and tested it properly, it would be a lot harder to sort students into the various grades on the mandatory curve. It is much easier to provide no meaningful instruction or feedback, give a single open-ended vague final exam and reward the students who manage to intuit the exact answers the professor wants to read.
Law school is basically a giant competition for grades with a six-figure entrance fee.
I ammglad my adjunct professor in college who was also a successful attorney, talked me out of attending law school. At first, I was like "what does this guy know, he is just trying to trample on my dreams". But, boy he was right, and I took his advice and stayed away from law school. I instead wasted my money on a grad degree, a so-called Masters of Taxatiom degree.
DeleteI could not imagine paying $100,000 to sit in a class where a law professor teaches you the material in gobbly-gloop hide the ball non-sense.
The business law undergrad class I took from the attorney was a wonderful class, I learned so much and he taught in a highly effective, direct manner.
Here, here...it's all about the standard distribution curve and differentiating the top 2 percent. It certainly was in medical school. All those wasted lives (5 percent attrition, an additional 5 percent failing to graduate on time), suicides, suffering, health decline, lost youth over a decade of self-study, for a bloody 2 percent differential, so dermatology and ortho go the biggest scum bags...
DeleteDon't worry, some law school professors are already thinking proactively!
ReplyDeleteJustin Long at The Faculty Lounge:
"But there is an entire side to the discussion that we simply aren't having: beyond reducing supply, we should be increasing demand. Despite the shrinking numbers of existing jobs in existing firms working for existing clients, there is no corresponding shrinkage among those who simply cannot afford the legal advice they need. Where is the debate about how to find funds so that lawyers can be hired to serve those clients, at salaries commensurate with their skill, education, and indebtedness?"
It's not enough for the taxpayers to subsidize the production of lawyers, the taxpayers also have to subsidize the employment of lawyers, so the lawyers can pay back all those loans!
(Professor Long is an untenured professor at Wayne State's law school, the 105th best law school in all the land. No wonder he's getting nervous. But hey, he went to Harvard undergrad, so he's better than you! Frankly, you're not subsidizing him enough, yet.)
Typical limousine liberal law prof answer: Make the taxpayers pay for it but don't cut my bloated salary!
Delete" Where is the debate about how to find funds so that lawyers can be hired to serve those clients, at salaries commensurate with their skill, education, and indebtedness?"
DeleteThe debate is as non-existent as the idea is nonsensical.
"Perhaps the new support ought to come instead from foundations or philanthropists. Perhaps the bar itself, those lawyers who have found lucrative careers in our noble profession, should be cross-subsidizing service to the less-well-off to a much greater degree." --Law Prof. Justin Long.
DeleteI am with Justin. Hey, law schools, next time some elderly rich philanthropist or Boomer-era alum who has found a lucrative career in our noble profession approaches you with a six or seven figure donation, be sure to mention Justin's advice.
Yes, be sure to tell the prospective donor that the money would be put to much better use starting a fund to subsidize practicing lawyers who take cases on behalf of clients "who simply cannot afford the legal advice they need."
It's fun to watch law schools scramble to re-define themselves in the midst of the shitstorm. The posturing is incredible:
Delete"We'll make students Practice Ready!"
"We'll reform our cirriculum to make it more practical."
And now law schools justify their role by arguing that lawyers are needed by "those who simply cannot afford the legal advice they need."
What, pray tell, is this type of needed legal advice, and why is it needed? Why should others pay for it?
Injured persons already can freely hire lawyers based on a contingency fee and free consultations with PI lawyers are commonplace. Apart from personal injury, ordinary people's legal needs stem from the fact they lack money. That's fine, but it ain't a sustainable market. And there are already hordes of out-of-work lawyers who could service this need. But no one can afford to work, maintain an office, and incur possible liability to boot, for free.
How much longer will the public put up with the law schools slinging this utter shit?
The issue should be a reach-back: Why shouldn't these clowns' paychecks for the past ten years be subject to recall? It's payback time.
"Despite the shrinking numbers of existing jobs in existing firms working for existing clients, there is no corresponding shrinkage among those who simply cannot afford the legal advice they need...." [Justin Long]
DeleteHuh? What legal needs are going unmet? The opportunities for free or discounted legal advice has never been greater. Forms for wills, living wills, non-contested divorces and many other documents can be found online and purchased extremely cheaply or are free in many cases. For personal injury cases, attorneys will routinely take these matters on contingency and in criminal cases, the court will appoint a public defender to represent you. For other matters such as contested divorces, or people who have been scammed in some way, law schools are falling all over themselves to open more free legal clinics just so their students can become solo practice ready.
Of course, law schools are the problem on both ends of this equation. Law Schools are pumping out twice the number of needed lawyers, most of whom have incredibly high debt. When those attorneys can't find a job and in a fit of desperation open a solo practice, they'll find that not only are they competing with discounted services on the internet but also with the law school clinic down the street which is offering free service.
Here's a question to ponder: As there is significant overcapacity in the market for legal services, why would there be unmet needs for legal advice?
"Huh? What legal needs are going unmet?"
DeleteThe goal is a "civil Gideon", where if you sue anyone or are sued in a civil case, the taxpayers are required to provide you with a free lawyer (as they already are required to do if you are a criminal defendant).
As for what legal needs are going unmet, a law school dean in New Jersey suggested that lawyers be provided to tenants in all eviction cases. Aside from the fact of what would happen to rents if you had to go through a lengthy legal process every time you wanted to evict someone, the dean ignores that in most eviction cases, tenants can't or won't pay rent, and are simply trying to stay in the apartment rent-free for as long as possible - it's not like they have a case against eviction.
"Here's a question to ponder: As there is significant overcapacity in the market for legal services, why would there be unmet needs for legal advice?"
The problem is the amount of law school debt people have now. It used to be you could make a living representing poor and middle-class people by charging them moderate fees - if you have $150,000 in debt to pay off, that is no longer possible.
Anon 1:38 here.
DeleteThanks for your comment. Yes, I understand that servicing debts means that there is a bigger nut to crack every month for the practioner. But I honestly don't believe that most solo practioners have the luxury of weighing a moderate fee against a siezable one. There is just simply insufficient work of any kind and the poor and middle class have access to all of the free and low cost internet and other resources I have mentioned. To the extent that these folks require help, they do not need leagl advice so much (as proclaimed by Mr. Long) as they just need a paralegal or notary to tell them which blanks need to be filled in and where documents should be filed. They don't need the Rule Against Perpetuities explained to them, they just need to know that if a holographic will would be valid in their state and if they are using a form, what they should put in which blank.
But to the extent that servicing debt is a barrier to rendering legal assistance to poor and middle class people, the law schools have largely created this problem. Legal academics' plans to "solve" this problem is usually a just a mea non cupla claim and distraction as there is no attempt to fix the real issue, which is that law schools are graduating twice the number of lawyers required and the tuition is just too damn high.
Here's a contrary view from the other side of the fence.
ReplyDeleteMy sense is that most law professors haven't been impacted that much by the scam blog movement, actually. Most professors know that the job market is really tough and that applications are down. They know that budgets are tighter, that pay increases are lower (or non-existent), and that faculty hiring has slowed dramatically. And they may have heard about the scam blogs.
With that said, most law professors don't spend a lot of time thinking about such things in their day-to-day lives. They go on teaching their classes, writing their articles, and meeting with students just as they did before. Plus, students at their home schools treat them the same way that they did before. There's a lot of anger in the scam blogs, obviously. But most professors don't read the scam blogs, and professors who don't criticize the scam blogs online generally aren't the specific targets of that anger.
Just my 2 cents. (I also don't know any professors who "Just Don't Care," but that's a separate comment.)
Prof. Kerr,
DeleteDo law professors spent time thinking about the highly misleading placement statistics that many, even most, law schools were publishing until very recently? Do law professors spare a thought or two about the impact those stats may have had on the lives of their students?
Dybbuk, I suspect that a large chunk of law professors don't know that their schools publish placement statistics. I also suspect that a lot of those that do know their schools publish statistics have no idea what their placement statistics are. Also, most of those who know that the statistics exist and have an idea of what they are have no idea whether they are accurate. Placement statistics are something that the Career Development Office and the Dean's Office would deal with, not the profs. To be clear, I'm not defending that; I'm just trying to describe the world view.
DeleteOrin
"I also suspect that a lot of those that do know their schools publish statistics have no idea what their placement statistics are."
DeleteLaw professors these days are like the Czarist nobility in St. Petersburg - endlessly gossiping over the latest scandal in the Imperial court, talking about the new ballet at the Mariinsky, and discussing Pushkin's literary work, while carefully not thinking at all about the suffering of all the serfs who make their elegant lifestyles possible.
Professor, it's my sense as well that the average tenured law professor is too pampered and too dull to take heed of the secular economic changes that are taking place in the country, and in real legal practice.
DeleteHe, as a mere employee, cannot see what cause it is that is creating these effects: no COLAs, plummeting applications, plummeting admissions standards, 22% larger 1L class sizes, or even, anger amongst his students.
Certainly, he would not put two and two together and realize that the demand-side erosion has everything to do with scam blogs, word-of-mouth, the constant national reporting on this horrendous bubble.
He lives in blissful ignorance of that fact that if the public withdraws those public subsidies he's been gorging himself upon for decades - literally to the loss of all of the rest of society - he'd lose his shirt overnight. He knows not that fraud occurs every single day in a desperate attempt to keep those subsidies rolling in. He's too aloof to see the nascent consensus forming amongst the left, the traditional champions of public subsidies, that such should be withdrawn.
Your argument has convinced me. The average tenured law professor is too stupid to realize what's here already, and what is coming next. Good riddance to the average, tenured law professor.
"They go on...meeting with students, just as they did before."
DeleteOr, perhaps, not keeping their office hours, just as they've been doing for years. Some professors are so arrogant, so pampered, so barricaded from their ordinary tuition-paying students, that it defies the imagination.
Too bad so many top universities have big endowments. Even after the students quit signing their futures away, the tenured professors can continue their own scams for years by demanding pay from institutions without students.
"By the way, where did the students go? Remember when we used to have students?"
"Oh, them. Don't you remember, we got rid of them because they wanted jobs."