From the News-Sentinel:
Indiana Tech Arthur Snyder said the university has lost $20 million on the law school and, given projected enrollments, expected the deficit to continue. “This was an extremely difficult decision for all involved," Snyder said. "Over the course of time it has become apparent that the significant decline in law school applicants nationwide represents a long term shift in the legal education field, not a short-term one. Specific to Indiana Tech, the assessment of the Board and our senior leadership team is that for the foreseeable future the law school will not be able to attract students in sufficient numbers for the school to remain viable.”
Indiana Tech Law School currently has a total of 71 students, and Snyder said they will have the option to complete the year, with those in their third and final year having the ability to graduate from the law school in May. First and second year students will have the option to transfer to other law schools at the start of the January 2017 semester, or to complete the year at Indiana Tech Law School and then transfer for the start of the fall 2017 semester.
Chris Mackaronis, a Washington, D.C., attorney representing one of the faculty members affected, said the university’s Board of Directors had recently voted unanimously to close the school at the end of the academic year in June 2017. The vote, he said, conflicts with years of representations to the students, faculty and the American Bar Association regarding the university’s commitment to pursue full accreditation and long-term success for the law school.
http://www.news-sentinel.com/news/local/Indiana-Tech-Law-School-to-close-next-June--losses-at-million
This feels like the final scene of Return of the Jedi.
ReplyDeleteAgreed! Fixed.
DeleteThe soundtrack is appropriate. Just visualize Dougie Fresh's resume exploding like the Death Star overhead and it works perfectly.
DeleteCelebrate this glorious moment! Who will be next?
ReplyDeleteThe for-profit schools should be in the crosshairs next. It's a shame they haven't been put down yet. After that the rest of the 4th Tier schools should be shut down. Based on bar-passage rates alone, at least 50 schools should be shuttered.
DeleteHahahahahaha!!!
ReplyDeleteTruely this is a good day.
If someone could get me video footage of dougie cummings going to the welfare office, that would be the icing on the cake.
Now, let's take odds on which school is next!
First domino to fall? What toilet will be next?
ReplyDeleteWell I guess this will give andre douglas ponds Cummings the chance to move on to Harvard where he belongs. I'll bet his office is waiting for him.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the soon to be pink slipped Indy Tech Law "professors" can rely on 2nd Restatement on Contracts, Section 90 to sue the Board of Trustees because they detrimentally relied on the Board's commitment to keep the money train going while sacrificing their lucrative seven figure annual salaries in Biglaw. I am surprised lawyers aren't lining up to represent the aggrieved law "professors."
ReplyDeleteAny legal counsel should demand an UFRONT legal retainer.
DeleteThis breaks my heart. Indiana is flourishing. Consumer demand and incomes are rising as evinced by spending on purchases of Saturns, Pontiac, Mercury's and Plymouths. Small business start ups like Vape shops are dotting the vast landscape. Governments are investing in new jails and diabetes clinics. The Indiana Toll Road is being resurfaced so folks can seamlessly and effortlessly travel to casinos east, west, north and south. Gary doesn't smell that bad anymore and I saw a tree. If you want a State that makes it, make it Indiana!
ReplyDelete"A Tree Grows in Gary"
DeleteTo the faculty at Indiana Tech, please note that I like my latte extra hot and double-cupped.
ReplyDeleteBurger King is always hiring!!!
DeleteI don't think they'd last one week at Burger King. I worked in food service when I was younger; it's a hard job. It's also an honest job.
DeleteLaw faculty could not last at any job where productivity is quantifiable.
DeleteThat's funny. CTL-F of "sorry" and "apologize" for the article get no hits.
ReplyDeleteVirtually no one outside of certain meeting rooms in Fort Wayne and delusional souls thinking in fantasy rather than reality thought this school resembled anything close to a decent idea, much less a good one. This whole enterprise was stupid from the get-go, a really bad concept up there with New Coke and investing big in Yahoo and remaking Psycho shot-for-shot. Every published writer in the history of published writers littered mental trash cans with infinitely better ideas. This one should have been laughed at and tossed aside before it even made it to group discussion.
Was there not one rational grown-up in the process who put a hand on the table and said "wait..."? Are the remaining captains of the ship still crazy enough, with enough hubris and cognitive dissonance, to believe the voyage was a good idea in retrospect?
At best, this whole thing was a highly reckless waste of time and resources. Most people willfully ate the shit sandwich, but some of the effected - as with any shit sandwich business - are relatively innocent. It would be nice if the people responsible for plotting the boat straight at an iceberg exhibited some sort of public shame or remorse for the inevitable sinking fate.
But they did a feasibility study before opening that assured everyone that the school would be a roaring success. What's going on?
ReplyDeleteIn college I had a conversation with the Executive Director of the local United Way who was bemoaning the fact that one of their agencies, the local YWCA, was headed for financial ruin and would soon be looking for the United Way to bail them out. The YWCA had just finished building a brick-and-mortar structure that housed a single tennis court, certain that rentals of the court through the long Minnesota winters would allow them to pay off the debt they incurred, which the UW thought was not at all a viable plan.
DeleteWhile I, too, had wondered about it I noted that I had read in the local paper that they had commissioned a feasibility study that said it would work. He smiled at me in a way that made me think he was going to pat me on the head and the conversation went like this:
Him: Do you know what the purpose of a feasibility study is?
Moi: To determine whether a plan you have is feasible.
Him: No, the purpose of a feasibility study is to tell you that the decision you already made is absolutely right.
And that applies in spades to Indiana Tech's "feasibility study", which was obviously nothing but a justification cobbled together for a decision made before the "feasibility study" was commissioned.
DeleteHot damn!
ReplyDeleteWe all knew that it had to happen. We accurately estimated this toilet's losses, which represent half of the university's endowment.
Note that Indiana Tech's lip-flapping shill blames the toilet's failure on "the significant decline in law school applicants nationwide". Well, Snyder, why not dig up the "feasibility study" that sought to justify the opening of your toilet skule? What did that "feasibility study" have to say about the market, particularly in Indiana, for your "innovative" institution?
Even the ass-licking ABA would have to have yanked Indiana Tech's provisional accreditation. The handwriting was on the wall. And Indiana Tech could not have kept itself going, even with this year's larger number of paying students.
The shameful—indeed, downright risible—four-year saga of Indiana Tech should discourage the opening of more toilet skules, whatever their fabricated justification.
Indiana Tech, rot in Hell.
"We accurately estimated this toilet's losses, which represent half of the university's endowment."
DeleteAbsolutely brutal. Contrary to what their name suggests, Indiana Tech is a relatively small private college (less than 10k undergrads+grads). They literally had to close the law school or risk the entire university going under. This mistake will no doubt haunt them financially for decades.
When Indiana Tech decided to open the law skule, its endowment was around $40M. Now it has burnt through half of that. That's a hell of a loss.
DeleteExpect tuition to go up for the students in the other programs—who benefited in no way from the disgraceful toilet of a law skule.
The Harvard of Fort Wayne is no more. Outstanding scholars such as Cummings and Lamparello should have no trouble finding high-powered legal jobs in New York or DC. I think the whole fiasco was intended to advance their careers at great cost to the parent institution.
DeleteIt was a comical, incredible, and tragic episode in the greater history of exploitive legal education. Chains are meant to be broken.
Current students, with the probable exception of 3Ls, have another option: they may be able to avail themselves of the provisions for eliminating the loans of students whose skule closed its door in their face. Rather than transferring to another Indiana Tech (and there are scores of them), consider this rare opportunity to shake off the burden of those student loans. Remember, O Warrior™, that you're not going to succeed as a lawyer—and probably won't even become a lawyer. Get out now if you have any intelligence at all.
ReplyDeleteMost of their students were full-ride anyway....
DeleteAccording to their 509 disclosure, 7 out of their 60 students two years ago got "scholarships" representing full tuition and 2 others got more than full tuition.
DeleteMaybe I was wrong, but I thought they cancelled tuition for a whole class....
DeleteNo, they cancelled tuition for a single year, namely 2015–16. This year tuition stands at $19,750.
DeleteI was right for a year, then. Not perfect, but I'll take it.
DeleteYeah, blame it on "the significant decline in applications." Closing the school probably had nothing to do with the fact that after all of the start up costs, the propaganda, faculty swager, investment of admin time, $20 million loss not to mention the wasted time, money and misplaced dreams of the law students, after all of that, the law school could only graduate one student who could pass the goddam bar.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GwjfUFyY6M
ReplyDeleteBeautiful!
Strange to see that one of the faculty members hired an attorney. Don’t they know that they are a “sophisticated” employee who understood the risks of working for a fourth tier law school? Plus, a JD alone is worth one million dollars! The faculty at Indiana Tech need to network. They should have no trouble networking into one of those million-dollar big law jobs they claim they gave up to teach. And if they can’t network into a big law job, they should stop acting so entitled and move to Nebraska. There are also plenty of flexible document review jobs they could pursue. The second best aspect of the JD (after the million dollar premium of course), is the versatility. You can do anything with a law degree! They should consider going into business management or politics.
ReplyDeleteNicely done.
DeleteThey could always move to North Dakota.
DeleteThe fact that the one faculty member hired a DC lawyer shows a lot of confidence in the local talent.
And they should review the list of 300 "JD-Advantage" jobs that their admi$$ions office distributed. FBI special agent. Passport and visa examiner. Ad measurer. Friend of the court (I'm not kidding). A veritable smorgasbord of glamorous million-dollar careers.
DeleteThis could be terrible news... toilet schools like these are indispensable in producing the indebted slave classes that make sandwiches and pizzas cheaply. Now, my Jimmy Johns is going to go up in price...
ReplyDeleteI hope scambloggers and friends take pride in the failure of this contemptible and frequently ridiculous effort by bottom-tier academic money-grubbers to enrich themselves at the expense of the gullible and the under-qualified. I do.
ReplyDeleteOn September 14, 2013, newly-opened Indiana Tech Law School held a dedication and investiture ceremony. The ceremony was attended, amidst "much pomp" by representatives of law schools from all over the country, by the State Attorney General, and by a gymnasium-full of Indiana Tech faculty, alumni, and Fort Wayne community members. Clearly, this hare-brained project had the support, or at least the sympathetic acquiescence, of a lot of people who should have known better or who should have raised questions.
They may not have, but we did, and our impact was recognized even then by the law school's Founding Dean, Peter Alexander, who devoted part of his speech to denouncing law bloggers. His priceless words at the opening of the school should be remembered on the date it announced its forthcoming demise.
From the Indiana Lawyer, September 25, 2013:
"{Alexander's] address also contained strong words for the critics in the blogosphere who have relentlessly questioned the wisdom of starting another law school. . . . “You see, people may write things about us,” Alexander said. “They may blog about us. They might even insist that they know where we are coming from and what really we are about. I can’t do anything about that and neither can you. Their slings and arrows are crafted in the darkness of ignorance and they take aim in the green eye called envy. But I’m really not worried about those people. I have a higher calling.”"
http://www.theindianalawyer.com/indiana-tech-dedicates-law-school-answers-critics/PARAMS/article/32429
Less a year after making that speech, Alexander "resigned". So much for his "higher calling".
DeleteThree years and a month after its ceremonious opening, Indiana Tech announced its closure. Far from envious, our eye saw the future with pinpoint accuracy.
By the way, Alexander, that's not what Shakespeare meant by "slings and arrows". But literacy never was Indiana Tech's long suit.
Didn't they commission a brand new, state of the art building especially for the law school? What a boondoggle.
ReplyDeleteYes. And a curated art collection.
DeleteYou have to be particularly inept to bungle in academia, where the government hands you blank checks on the backs of the middle and lower classes. Pretty much everyone else has managed to keep the scam going as the DOE and ABA both refuse to perform their duties.
ReplyDeleteGovernment and academia - two areas where people get paid, no matter what, while crashing the bus. The rest of us have to live in the "real world", where failure has actual consequences.
DeleteMust be nice to get to spend "other people's money" all the time...
"Education is the one thing people are willing to pay for and not get."
DeleteRev. Theodore Hesburgh
Great quotation, 11:20. Indeed, education cannot be bought at all—not from a Yale, and certainly not from an Indiana Tech. A degree can be bought, more or less; but education takes place internally, if at all.
DeleteYou can lead a lemming to water but cannot make it drink.
Very proud of what the scam blogs have achieved! Well done!
ReplyDeleteIt’s interesting to note that it was the main university that pulled the plug on Indiana Tech Law School because it was bleeding so much red ink, it put the whole university at risk. We have often speculated that stand alone schools like Appalachian Law School or Vermont Law School are the most vulnerable, but I wonder if that is the case. Stand alone schools can probably hold out a long time by cutting costs and continuing to borrow money. Creditors are unlikely to pull the plug because if the school stays open, at least they can milk some money out of the place via the student loan conduit. This is what happened with that school out in San Diego a while back. Maybe the most vulnerable law schools are money losers that are attached to a main university, especially if the main university lacks deep pockets (like Indiana Tech).
ReplyDeleteOrganizations exist to perpetuate themselves. The stand-alone schools will hold on to the death. The ones attached to a larger (or more important) organization will hold on until they threaten the existence of the larger organization, as in the case of Indiana Tech.
DeleteCreditors won't be quick to lend money to toilets that won't be able to pay it back.
DeleteThank the ABA for rubber-stamping provisional accreditation on a law school where there was unlikely to be significant demand for the school's graduates, let alone, attracting graduates of a sufficient academic caliber to pass a bar exam.
ReplyDeleteThe issue of who is an accreditor and the standards they need to meet has to be taken seriously by the ABA. The accreditor should operate like the board of directors of a listed public company, with a sufficient number of independent directors, a full-time staff to study the landscape and report on lawyer income and employment and the legal issues the accreditor faces such as possible antitrust constraints and whether these constraints actually apply to limits on law school enrollment in the face of severe lawyer oversupply.
Having a group of mostly tenured judges and law professors, with no skin the game of lawyer unemployment, working a few hours a year on accreditation without any studies on lawyer oversupply does not work. The accreditor is ignoring evidence that there may be as many as a million unemployed law graduates, including persons who left the profession because they could not find work. There may be many more temporary workers and solos in the legal profession earning $40,000 a year or less on average. Why do so many people leave the legal profession? How can you call a paralegal or human resources job JD preferred or advantage, without scamming a naive young person with no relevant work experience to tell them if there is any preference for a law degree with most paralegal or HR jobs (there isn't, except in a 1% rare case).
If the ABA is going to continue to act as accreditor, it needs to reinvent itself.
The fact that the faculty are going to sue the university is rich. According to Above the Law, one inside source said:
ReplyDelete__________
"Admissions professionals were pressured us to admit anybody with a pulse to the law school. They were frequently asked to admit people with LSAT scores of 132, 135, 138, 140. The law school felt that its dedication to quality over numbers was compromised.
It almost seemed like getting butts in seats was more important than complying with ABA standards, along the lines of, “Fuck the ABA, fuck the students, we want revenue.” We said, “You know, we’re going to become another Cooley and we’re going to lose accreditation,” but they didn’t care."
____________
That source is probably a professor and would not have said anything as long as the gravy train kept rolling. Now that they are losing their jobs, it's time to suddenly discover the ethical issues involved in operating a TTT and also to agree that the LSAT has predictive value.
The claim that the law faculty didn't know that the university was operating a scam, well hahahha.
See:
http://abovethelaw.com/2016/11/faculty-students-to-file-suit-against-law-school-for-fraud/?rf=1
“Indiana Tech is a corrupt diploma mill that should be investigated by the Department of Education and the Higher Learning Commission. What they’ve done to these students is not right, and it’s not fair,” said our source.
DeletePretty much sums it up.
The depositions that come out of these cases (assuming any are actually filed) will make fantastic reading.
DeleteHilarious how this anonymous source (i.e. prof) tries to make it sound like IT was a legitimate law school until the bad guys in administration decided to turn the place into another Cooley. This school was a scam from day one. And you can bet your ass that Mr. Anonymous didn’t have any qualms about cashing his paycheck every two weeks. As for the poor students - fuck em. Anyone with an IQ above room temperature could have spent 15 minutes on Google and figured out that attending IT Law School was a really bad fucking idea.
DeleteI agree with 1:59. No profe$$or there ever publicly uttered a peep against the toilet until the day that it announced its closure; on the contrary, numerous profe$$ors kept singing its praises. Before the ink was dry on the announced closure, however, the media reported that profe$$ors were suing. And now we're being told that a few corrupt administrators ruined what would otherwise have been an excellent law school.
DeleteBullshit. Indiana Tech never could have been excellent, even with capable administrators (which it never had). It was born a Cooley and died a Cooley.
Nooooooo!!!
ReplyDeleteNow where am I going to get my degree in hip-hop law?
At Yale Law School. Cummings is leaving for Yale in December.
DeleteWelcome faculty and administration to private solo or small firm practice. Scoring three bills for a traffic is good stuff now. See: Billboards around Chicago advertising $49.00 traffic tickets. So, you say you "just" need 75K for a decent gig? Do the math...how many misdemeanors, felonies and PI per year do you need to get there? Good Luck.... PDs and gub'mints are still laying off or not hiring attorneys.
ReplyDeleteThey could come work at the factory with me. 12.34 to start, 401k matching, excellent dental plan.
DeleteI went into academic editing after saying goodbye to the law. After learning "the ropes" (it took a year or so to be able to do it both fast and well), I make more than most solos, with the added bonus of not having to deal with clients or asshole opposing counsel.
DeleteThe people who donated millions to this dead toilet must be feeling awfully foolish.
ReplyDeleteThis is a small victory. It does not hit the many toilet law schools that cannot place a high percentage of their lawyers in full-time permanent jobs. It particularly does not hit the first year employment scam known as clerkship/ big law which pushes a high percentage of elite lawyers out of full-time permanent work of any kind in the short term or after a few years.
ReplyDeleteI am just following up on the people who worked with me in big law over a period of a few years less than 5 years ago, and the employment outcomes for anyone with more than 5 years of experience are not pretty.
-All of the contract partners that were made in that era of a few years while I was working there were subsequently laid off, notwithstanding their working like dogs. No, this is not a Chicago firm, but a law firm with a traditionally stable partnership.
-Only one former partner in the group found a full-time permanent job. One is wholly unemployed. Another struggling in small law.
- Most of the mid-level or senior associates who left in that era are struggling. Everyone found a job right out, but the jobs were not stable. In house jobs that were "restructured" out of existence after a few months, getting a job in small law that then changed its direction and laid the lawyer off, getting a job in mid-law without enough work for the job to be only very part-time in the long term, and wholesale unemployment in one case. Only one person has a full-time permanent job and that is in house.
- This does not include the very junior lawyers with three years or less of experience- who left outside the recession based on being "reviewed out" through the law firm's normal process of doing so. I have not followed up on them.
- The whole practice group has 20 or so people in the main office. They are still bringing in 2 to 4 younger lawyers a year. Several junior and more senior associates who came in after I left have come and gone since I left.
This is a situation where the up or out policy, where everyone who leaves is "reviewed out", is leading lawyers into what you can only call structural employment. The demand is not there.
At the older ages, the practice group in the main office is mostly white male. Very few women and no minorities in the second half of their careers work there.
Large law firms need to have an age-balanced workforce to counteract these trends.
Law schools need to keep track of job placement through retirement age because there is such a supply/ demand imbalance right now of lawyers.
The scam of using jobs that will end in a year or a few years as a basis for placement has to be curtailed by forcing law schools to provide long term employment statistics. What you have now is massive structural unemployment and underemployment among lawyers.
Law schools will not provide statistics unless absolutely forced, and then likely as not the statistics will be fictional. I'm in my mid-50's and someone from my law school cohort becomes unemployed every couple of months. And when you lose your job in your 50s, you're simply done in law. Hopefully you've saved a bit and your kids are out of college so you might have the space to reinvent yourself. More often though, the kids are in college and there is still a mortgage on the house. In short you are truly screwed.
DeleteThe problem is that these types of job losses are frequent and common for lawyers. Who goes to a T8 law school knowing there is a big risk of losing your job by age 50 or so and that if this happens, your career is done? In healthcare or education, there is much less of a risk. Law is like trying for tenure with a PhD - but even more risky.
DeleteIf you are a woman or minority, your Harvard Law degree may just be a fancy degree with no meaningful job or income prospects by the time you reach middle age. It is even hard for white males, but if you're not a white male, well, good luck.
Why take this risk when you can go to med school and practically be guaranteed an okay income until you decide to retire or have to retire on account of bad health.
Well, sorry if I'm a bit late to the party, but I also just wanted to chime in and express my joy at this wonderful development.
ReplyDeleteIf the students there have any brains, then they'll take advantage of the "Get Out Of Jail Free" card and ****ING USE IT!
And as for the professors, especially the anonymous source... oh, now they want to cry that they're the victims? Pardon my language, but FUCK THEM!!! They deliberately lured students in with the intention of defrauding them, and now they want to cry foul? Let them struggle and suffer too. It's like many months ago when this blog posted about the hypocrite professors campaigning against paying internships for their own students; the attitude both then and now is to the effect of "only good stuff for us, but not for them!"
I hope someone makes a list of all the deans, professors and faculty of this doomed toilet so we know where they end up.
This is a wonderful accomplishment for us bold scambloggers. Still, ITLS was an easy mark, almost like low-hanging fruit if you will. This school got opened just as all the serious and intelligent people were avoiding law school in droves; taking down a lol skool which was founded and established before the recession might prove to be more challenging. (And even then, my money's on any or all of the 3 Infilaw schools, or maybe even Cooley. Or how about Vermont or Appalachian?)
So, which law school do you think will close next and why? Discuss.
Full list of staff, drawn from the toilet's Web s(h)ite:
DeleteYoungwoo Ban Reference Librarian and Assistant Professor of Law
Charles P. Cercone Dean, Professor of Law
andré douglas pond cummings Professor of Law
James A. Crilly Technology Support Technician
Crystal Cully Associate Director for Law Admissions
Laura Dannebohm Assistant Dean for Student Advancement and Assessment
Amanda Ebert Business/Financial Aid Office Representative
Celia Garza Faculty Assistant
Robert W. Gevers, II Assistant Dean for Career Services
Aretha C. Green Assistant Dean for Student Affairs and Adjunct Professor
Lydia LaMont Administrative Assistant
Adam Lamparello Associate Dean for Experiential Learning, Associate Professor of Law
Joni Larson Professor of Law
Tara L. Lewis Registrar
Yvonne Lindgren Assistant Professor of Law
Charles E. MacLean Associate Dean for Faculty, Associate Professor of Law
Marc McAllister Assistant Professor of Law
Sean Middleton Assistant Dean for Admissions
John Nussbaumer Associate Dean for ABA Accreditation and Bar Preparation
Phebe E. Huderson-Poydras Associate Dean for Library Affairs and Assistant Professor of Law
Richelle Katrese Reeves Admissions Coordinator
Janet Riley Technical Services Librarian
January Simpson Circulation Manager
Cynthia Swann Assistant Professor of Law
Latia Ward Reference Librarian and Assistant Professor of Law
It's amazing that a toilet with scarcely enough students to make up a Gospel choir employs someone just to attend to "ABA Accreditation and Bar Preparation". And he didn't come cheaply: they hired him away from a lavishly paid 31-year gig at Cooley.
DeleteActually, kind of sad. Those all appear to be skilled high paying jobs that require advanced degrees. Where are these folks going to find work like that in Indiana? Manage a Vape Shop? Casino? Pawn Broker? I don't think Valpo is hiring.
DeleteWhich law skule will be the next to shut up shop?
ReplyDeleteNot Cooley: it's big enough that it can just close a campus, as it did a couple of years ago.
Tentatively I'll bet on the Appalachian School of Law: it's in dire financial straits, this year only 33 people matriculated, and last year a third of the entering class left (in most cases for academic reasons—in other words, failing out). To get an idea of the foulness of the finest law school in greater metropolitan Grundy, Virginia, note that the toilet boasts on its Web site of the following graduates, evidently the most accomplished in the past fourteen classes:
Justin Marcum '11: 20th District Delegate, West Virginia House of Delegates; Mingo County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney
Joey Mossor '11: Judge Advocate General Corps, United States Marine Corps
Capt. Melvin “Artie” Vaughn '07: Area Defense Counsel, Judge Advocate General Corps, United States Air Force
Vince Riggs '06: Fayette County Circuit Court Clerk in Lexington, Kentucky; manages over 130 deputy clerks
Chris Fortier '06:recipient of the Virginia State Bar R. Edwin Burnette Jr. Young Lawyer of the Year Award for 2013; attorney advisor at the Social Security Administration
Jarrod Crockett '06: District 91 Representative, Maine House of Representatives
Dan Kostrub '05: partner, Steptoe & Johnson PLLC; focuses his practice in the areas of real estate and energy law
Dave McFadyen ’05: District Court Judge in the 3B Judicial District of eastern North Carolina
Matt England '05: Family Court Judge for the 14th Family Court Circuit serving Fayette County, West Virginia
Gerald Arrington '04: Buchanan County, Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorney
Capt. John K. Harris '03: active duty United States Army Reserve Officer; joined the military in 1997; has deployed to Iraq and served at various levels of command
Suzanne Kerney-Quillen '03: Assistant United States Attorney, United States Department of Justice
Daniel Boyd '02: Juvenile Court Judge in Hawkins County, Tennessee
Marcus McClung '00: Scott County, Virginia Commonwealth’s Attorney
Old Guy,
DeleteI typically enjoy your posts and find the analysis spot on and sagacious. Not in this case. I studied the list of "accomplished" alumni from Appalachian Law that you posted. They seem to be doing very well. Frankly, I graduated 26 years ago from a Top Tier, ranked school and I would kill to take any of those jobs listed above. I brought home a princely sum of 27K last year as a Solo Attorney. I struggled and stretched and hustled. With other attorneys advertising traffic matters on billboards for $49.00, I guess in am no longer competitive. Potential clients just walk when I quote a realistic, fair fee. I applied for numerous law jobs, like the positions listed above, and was rejected.
That list contains fourteen names and covers the fourteen graduating classes from 2000 to 2013 inclusive. We can reasonably suppose that these are the best outcomes that they could find. After all, Appalachian would not advertise its less distinguished graduates, nor would it dig back fourteen years if the most recent graduating class teemed with graduates in high places.
DeleteSo what do they have in fourteen years? Three judges and four lawyers working in government, mostly from years far in the past. Two military lawyers. One lawyer in private practice. In addition, four people in various positions that don't require a JD: two people elected to state legislatures; one clerk of the court; one military grunt who was in the army before law school.
Those thin results enable us to conclude that attending Appalachian makes no financial sense.
Do you know how hard it is to get a gub'mint law job? It's the Holy Grail today. One needs to be connected or have a buddy or graduate at the top of their classes from a T-2 or better, even thirty years later. Every lawyer who does not make 50K or better and or works above 60 hours a week desires one. Even "Big Law" folks want a gub'mint job. My hat is off to those Alum you cite to as a reason not to attend Appalacian.
DeleteOld Guy is correct.
DeleteThose "successes" mirror my own experience looking back 2+ decades. The successful people from my class and others after and before (success in quotes) are not in private practice.
Just more proof law is really a scheme.
First, the schools and pwarfs scam gov't Fed. loan dollars then the "successful" students decide to milk the taxpayer by doing the same thing.
Do you understand that working for the gov't at any level is the same as being subsidized by the taxpayer?
If law has reached a point where the majority of the "successes" work for the government then it's yet another scam/sham industry because it needs to be propped up by the gov't in order to be viable.
Basic economics.
"G" is not making money for anyone. It's just another form of tax on the economy and drag as gov't grows distributed across all taxpayers.
Here:
https://fee.org/articles/does-government-spending-boost-the-economy/
and see also:
https://www.boundless.com/economics/textbooks/boundless-economics-textbook/measuring-output-and-income-19/measuring-output-using-gdp-92/gdp-equation-in-depth-c-i-g-x-349-12446/
-----------------------------------------
Finally, over 14 *years*. There are never enough "G" jobs to support all lawyers while the rest (see here and here, below) are getting killed in the Real Economy.
Links:
http://jdunderground.com/all/thread.php?threadId=118233
$12.50/hr. in Los Angeles.
http://jdunderground.com/all/thread.php?threadId=117457
28 to 32K per year in Greenville, NC.
$16 per hour (..at 32,000)
Most shit hole law schools can cherry pick from their alumni roster and come up with a fairly impressive list of politicians, judges, practicing attorneys, and businessmen. I'm talking about people who have hit home runs with their careers. The Appalachian list is comprised of a hand full of people who have hit singles, and maybe a double or two. Nothing wrong with that, but if that's the best you can come up with, it says a lot about the school.
DeleteGood analogy to baseball.
DeleteThe scamsters at Appalachian would reply that us'n's hyar in Appalachia jes' ain't innerested in no hoity-toity jobs in New York. The fake country charm might have more appeal, however, if by the scamsters' own estimates attendance didn't cost $52k per year. Spending more than $150k, especially if obtained through non-dischargeable loans at high interest, in order to attend this Blue Ridge toilet is simply foolish: even the handful of graduates with adequate outcomes probably don't make enough to cover the payments on that much debt.
The gub'mint jobs listed above come with IBR and student loans are forgiven after 10 years of service. GONE, POOF!!! It is a sweet deal. I know it, Appalachia knows it and these gub'mint attorneys know it. They have a sweet deal and did well even if Appalachia charges $1.0 million per semester. I would cut off my nuts to take one of these jobs and so would thousands and thousands of other underemployed and unemployed attorneys.
DeleteWell there's the thing of it, 8:22. The forgiveness is based on a mindset not much different from lawprofs saying they gave up enormous wealth to pursue a nobler calling. The loan forgiveness program pre-supposes that everyone on the gubmint payroll could do a lot better in the real world which is, of course, absurd.
DeleteThe Austrians' greatest accomplishment is that they got most of the world to think that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German when, in fact, the opposite is true.
i read this on my phone the other day and i forgot to comment.
ReplyDeletehahahahahaahhahahahahahahaahahahaha!!!!!!