Saturday, October 4, 2014

Cooley to close Ann Arbor Campus

Link to Taxprof.

According to TaxProf, the Ann Arbor Campus will go offline after this Fall semester.  Students at the defunct campus will get some stipends and be able to continue their legal education at Cooley's other campuses.


34 comments:

  1. Wow, a whole $1500 towards the cost of switching to another campus—the nearest one being an hour away. Just break your lease and move during the winter break, if you can do all that for $1500. And if you can't move, well, you can drive back and forth every day for the next year and a half, if you have a car. Or just transfer to the University of Michigan, which surely will roll out the red carpet for students coming from the second best law school in the US.

    Old Guy

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    1. Right now, to get to the AA campus, I have to cross the street and cut through a parking lot (BTW, it used to be Tom Monaghan's 'Ave Maria' law school). To get to Lansing, it's at least an hour. To get to their Auburn Hills campus it's probably closer to 90 minutes, due to monstrous traffic (leaving Ann Arbor at 4PM on a weekday, I got to Oakland University at 6:30 PM).

      For people in the western Detroit suburban sprawl, Ann Arbor was a great location.

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  2. A "closed campus" counts as a "school closure" to the Dept. of Education; if they give up on the law degree, they win the student loan forgiveness lottery - or they can take 1,500 bucks and continue on the path of 150,000 in utterly unpayable debt. This is an obvious choice kiddos...

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    1. Don't expect Cooley to advertise the fact.

      We shall see how many of them pull out at the end of the semester and get their loans forgiven (which means absorbed by the public). I'd pitch the number pretty close to zero.

      Old Guy

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    2. Excellent point. I wonder how many (if any) students will realize that the governor just gave them a last-minute reprieve? Or will they all just continue blithely along on their march to Old Sparky?

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    3. "Excellent point. I wonder how many (if any) students will realize that the governor just gave them a last-minute reprieve? Or will they all just continue blithely along on their march to Old Sparky?"

      Since they're Cooley students, most likely the latter. But this point should be made widely available.

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  3. I think the moral of the story is that anyone currently at a law school teetering on the brink, stay in school as long as you can stretch it out so you increase your chances of discharge.

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  4. Charge 40k and offer 1.5k "stipend." Great deal - like a car dealership offering "cash back."

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  5. http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lf99u9H5zs1qbrisdo1_250.gif

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  6. Another song for the Greatest Hits album...and just in time for Christmas.

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  7. As I've said before, if you're stupid enough to attend Cooley, at least be smart enough to enjoy the weather at the Tampa campus.

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  8. This is not only the end of a Cooley campus but the beginning of the end of the scam. I predict three law scool closures in the next 18 months: tjsl, Vermont and charlotte. Pop the champagne!!! This is great.

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    1. I doubt Charlotte is in any danger. http://www.charlottelaw.edu/sites/default/files/admissions/12_17_13Std509InfoReport-206-1672-12-17-2013%2013-19-19.pdf

      For the 1L class of 2013, there were 3340 applications. 2870 of those were for full-time students.

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    2. And they even turned almost 900 of those people down. That makes Charlotte a "selective" institution.

      Old Guy

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    3. Wait until these moron start taking the bar. I'm not a big fan of the lsat but if the median lsat is 144 which is about 23rd percentile then these poor souls will fail in droves. The aba will have to address the problem.

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    4. "The aba will have to address the problem."

      IIRC, the current ABA requirement is that those grads from a school who take the bar must have a bar passage rate at or above the average for all schools. Given that some schools in many states have gone to an open admissions policy, they can not achieve that, short of keeping a substantial portion from taking the bar.

      I expect the ABA to relax that requirement. Of course, given a three-year average, and standards declining starting in 2013, many schools will have until 2018-19 before it bites (some, of course, are probably well below the average now).

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  9. Key quote from Cooley's press release:

    "The Law School has always admitted students to the school as a whole and not to a particular campus."

    Translation:

    Don't think you can get out of your student loans, just because we closed one campus of our law school.

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    1. Dept of Education regulations expressly state otherwise.A closed school is a closure of a campus. It says "OR" not "AND"

      (ii) “School” means a school's main campus or any location or branch of the main campus.

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  10. Curious about the meaning of "JD advantage", I lifted this text from one of the reports that the ABA requires of each law skule:

    "A position in this category is one for which the employer sought an
    individual with a J.D., and perhaps even required a J.D., or for which the
    J.D. provided a demonstrable advantage in obtaining or performing the job,
    but which does not itself require bar passage or an active law license or
    involve practicing law. Examples of positions for which a J.D. is an
    advantage include a corporate contracts administrator, alternative dispute
    resolution specialist, government regulatory analyst, FBI agent, and
    accountant. Also included might be jobs in personnel or human resources,
    jobs with investment banks, jobs with consulting firms, jobs doing
    compliance work in business and industry, jobs in law firm professional
    development, and jobs in law school career services offices, admissions
    offices, or other law school administrative offices. Doctors or nurses who
    plan to work in a litigation, insurance, or risk management setting, or as
    expert witnesses, would fall into this category, as would journalists and
    teachers (in a higher education setting) of law and law related topics. It is an
    indicator that a position does not fall into this category if a J.D. is uncommon
    among persons holding such a position."

    That definition is absurdly broad. It includes drones in the admissions offices of law schools, just because a JD is not "uncommon among persons holding such a position" (read: law skules frequently hire their own graduates at $9 per hour to stamp "ADMITTED" on the applications of other lemmings). It includes accountants and also doctors and nurses working in various administrative capacities, without any evidence that a JD on top of the degrees and certifications that these professionals require gives them any advantage in finding work.

    Indicia of a true "JD advantage" position would include these:

    1) A demonstrable and rational preference for a JD. (This excludes most or even all administrative jobs at law skules.)
    2) A substantial, not tenuous, connection to law.
    3) Significant use of legal training (not just Thinking Like a Lawyer™ and other bullshit skills supposedly imparted by law skule).
    4) Compensation and career prospects that would entice real lawyers (not just those who cannot find other decent work).
    5) A demonstrable and significant advantage, from the JD alone, in hiring or compensation, preferably both.

    Old Guy

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    1. Delivery Driver is a JD-Advantage job:

      1. Drivers are in Traffic all day
      2. Traffic has Law
      3. Therefore, a knowledge of Law/JD is "a demonstrable advantage in performing the job"

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    2. JDs should go and apply at Domino's. If they get an interview, cite knowledge of traffic law as an important qualification. I am sure the corporation will be glad for the assistance in avoiding legal difficulties and offer the job on the spot.

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    3. "...for which the J.D. provided a demonstrable advantage in obtaining or performing the job,"

      Note that of the jobs listed, only FBI agent would probably fill the 'demonstrable advantage' requirement, which in practice is 'asserted advantage'. No dean or professor touting law school have ever offered evidence in favor of the advantage.

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    4. I read somewhere that Domino's will only hire Ave Maria graduates as drivers.

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    5. Whispering a "Hail Mary" can only help when you're driving at those speeds.

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  11. Law school admissions must be the easiest job on the planet. UGPA and LSAT above a certain level = admit, below a certain level = reject. Even then, about half of the US law schools are heading towards open enrollment, so the admissions person need only consume a fifth of scotch to make his job bearable and then just print out admissions letters to everyone that has a bachelor's degree and no felony convictions in the past two years.

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    1. Perhaps now, but my experience was different when I went to Notre Dame in the 1980's. I had a job that caused me to interact with the admissions staff. They looked for certain mixes of backgrounds as well as a geographical mix. There was a de facto quota on ND undergraduate alumni, whose GPAs and LSATs could have mostly filled the place (and thus the ones who got in were the cream of most classes). Then they wanted some Ivy Leaguers, some honors graduates of small, regional Catholic colleges, a few service academy types, some big ten alumni, and a smattering of others. They also sought a diversity of undergraduate majors. They were lax on admissions standards for nontrads because so few applied and they wanted some of those around, too. An imperfect science because not all acceptees enrolled but they got a diverse (albeit 50%+/- Catholic) and truly national student body. But maybe today it is a warm body standard there, as it certainly has become in the lower realms of the USNWR hierarchy.

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    2. Before law school became a scam many universities that had law schools used to him that attendance at the university improved your chances for admission to the law school. The reality was that the law school always had a quota - a maximum number they would admit from the university so for many it lowered your chances. Not to have a quota was to be swamped with your own graduates.

      In DC Georgetown and GW both had caps on their own graduates and also graduates of other local universities, which could be seen in the fact that they admitted almost an exactly identical percentage year on year. Most of the T-20 schools had some variation on that sort of policy, i.e., the main university falsely implies a benefit to going there as an undergraduate, the law school keeps quiet. These days though, Georgetown Law and GW Law would probably take any of their BA/BS-graduates with a pulse.

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  12. Glory days! Watch out law school scamdeans and professors, the collapse has begun.

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  13. Cooley graduate here. I noticed Cooley, like most law schools, is promoting the diversity scam to try to recruit more students. I am not just talking racial diversity but also issues such as physical disability backgrounds or any kind of "traditionally under-represented" backgrounds like gender. What the ABA and NALP claim they promote and the reality are galaxies apart. In today's tight job market if you are handicapped or a member of a so called "protected class" you will never even get to claim discrimination or that a law firm is not hiring a diverse body because of the fact there are either hiring freezes or layoffs. If you don't get a chance for even an interview they know nothing about you.



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  14. OT:

    Should we start a pool on when a law school announces a concentration in "infectious disease law"?

    Cash in on the Ebola craze, lemmings!

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  15. (Imagine this being said in the very best Monster Truck Show Announcer Tones)

    Join us for our Upcoming Seminar On:

    "Law And The Philosophy And Policies Underlying Infectious Diseases Quarantines, With Special Emphasis On SARS And Ebola Patients: Necessary Public Safety Doctrine, Or 1st And 4th Amendment Constitutional Violations?"

    (All participants will earn 0.5 credits of valuable and sought-after Professionalism CLE merely for refraining from tossing rotten tomatoes in the general direction of the speaker panel. Check your rotten tomatoes at the door, please.)

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    1. ( sorry, operator error, this was intended to have been in reply to the great opening provided by 2:19 pm )

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  16. I'm just waiting for the total 2014 enrollment numbers.... I''m like a kid on Christmas Eve!

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