UPDATE: The Charlotte School of Law has indeed closed down, without so much as an announcement. See the comments for details.
The Charlotte School of Law, known as Harlotte by those who call a spade a spade, may have followed Indiana Tech and Whittier into educational-scam hell.
Now the ABA has rejected Harlotte's "teach-out" plan for enabling the remaining students to finish their Mickey Mouse degrees while the toilet school shuts up shop. In addition, Harlotte has lost its license from the state of North Carolina. By Harlotte's own admission, it is not eligible to ride the federal student-loan gravy train. A visit to www.charlottelaw.edu results in a logo and "Website Unavailable".
To their credit, most of Harlotte's lemmings had the damn sense not to come back for more abuse from the scamsters who screwed them last winter. A hundred or so, however, remained loyal to their InfiLaw overlords. Some people will never learn.
But what can they do, now that their precious toilet school seems to have shut up shop? Lee Robinson, head of the alumni association (yes, there actually is an alumni association), suggests that "these students’ only option is to transfer to a different school, and in the process, likely lose thousands of dollars and years of their lives". Transferring in the middle of August, just a couple of weeks before they had expected to start classes at Harlotte, would not be easy: even if another school took them at this late date (probably several dozen would), they would have to move in a great hurry and suffer substantial financial and other losses. That's unrealistic for many people, and undesirable for all.
Are the richly paid bureaucrats of Harlotte rushing to the students' aid? Probably not, since the very Web site has been taken down. Back in January, Harlotte locked the students out of the administrative offices and stopped answering the telephone. I shouldn't expect courtesies to the faithful now that the operating license is gone and even the ABA is denying its rubber stamp of approval. Maybe the other two outlets of the InfiLaw chain will reach out to the stranded students and, more importantly, the proceeds of their student loans. But Harlotte itself appears to be dead.
Let that be a lesson to other lemmings. You're just a dollar sign to the law-school scamsters. That's doubly true of unabashedly commercial ventures such as InfiLaw.
Just checked the website and got "Website Unavailable" message. Looks like this shit pit has finally gone under. You'd think they would at least put out a statement like Indiana Tech and Whittier. I wonder if the last guy out locked the door and threw the keys over the fence. An ignominious end to the worst ABA accredited law school in history.
ReplyDeletecheck this: http://lawnewz.com/uncategorized/bar-association-wants-trump-to-let-undocumented-immigrants-practice-law/
ReplyDeleteThese lemmings just hit the jackpot, if the school closes they get rid of their loans.
ReplyDeleteA lot of them, however, will be idiotic enough to blow the opportunity by enrolling in another law school.
DeleteNo only the ones in the school or having graduated within 120 days after closure... Losers!
DeleteIndeed, the Harlotte of Charlotte is dead:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/business/dealbook/for-profit-charlotte-school-of-law-closes.html
"Enrolled students and others were not informed by the school that it would shut down, but were notified informally by R. Lee Robertson Jr., president of the school’s alumni association."
The ball-less scamsters didn't have the decency to announce the immediate closure of the school, even to the enrolled students; instead, they let the president of the alumni association do their dirty work. What a fucking disgrace!
That makes three dead law schools in the past ten months. Which will be next? Appalachian? Horrida Coastal?
More on the closure of Charlotte:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.abajournal.com/news/article/charlotte_school_of_law_must_close_north_carolina_ags_office_says
Andrew Howe, who was paying zero tuition (scamsters would say that he had a "full scholarship"), accurately describes Harlotte's harlotry as "par for the course". I wonder only what made Mr. Howe stick with Harlotte to the end. Couldn't he at least have transferred to a fifth-tier toilet? Maybe even a fourth-tier toilet would have taken him.
Students at Arizona Summit (Arizona Scum Pit) and Florida Coastal (Horrida Coastal) should take notice. InfiLaw, which owns those two toilets and the defunct Harlotte, has not bothered to announce Harlotte's closure. Indeed, InfiLaw's Web site continues to list Harlotte as a school in the InfiLaw chain. Do you think that the profit-focused scamsters of InfiLaw will show you greater courtesy when your law skule shuts its doors for good?
If Old Guy were in charge of closures, he would go after the following skules next:
ReplyDeleteAppalachian
Thomas Jefferson
Florida Coastal
North Carolina Central
Arizona Summit
Florida A&M
Texas Southern
Charleston
Cooley
Ave Maria
I don't submit that these will close down, just that they should. And plenty of others should follow them.
If I were in charge of closures I'd make every ABA school reapply for accreditation and adjust the criteria so that most wouldn't receive it. Your list is a good start, but Touro is conspicuous by its absence.
DeleteThough definitely in the lowest tier (http://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.ca/2017/05/the-seven-tiers-of-law-schools.html), Touro doesn't quite qualify for the bottom ten. It's in the bottom twenty, however, and remains a prime candidate for closure.
DeleteSeveral law schools may shrivel up and die because they cannot attract enough students. Appalachian last year had only 38 in its entering class. At that size, it can hardly offer enough courses for all three years, let alone such decadent electives as "Hip-Hop and the American Constitution" (still available at Indiana Tech just a couple of years before the toilet closed). Nor can it readily cover its costs. (Oddly enough, Appalachian is fairly selective, admitting only 28% of applicants. I can only surmise that it gets truckloads of applicants with LSAT scores in the 120s or the low 130s, for admitting a couple of those would drag Appalachian's numbers below Cooley's.) Appalachian has been looking into mergers with various colleges and even into moving to Tennessee or elsewhere. But the fact remains that Appalachian simply is not needed—not where it is, not in New York City, not on the moon. Close it down.
Other law schools are dwindling. The U of South Dakota got only 52 first-year students last year. Ohio Northern got only 58. Western New England got only 70. Concordia got only 44—admittedly a dramatic increase from the previous year's figure of 18. These and other schools are losing their raison d'être and acquiring a raison de fermer.
Old Guy, I'm no defender of the law school status quo, but UNC Central is a public HBCU and a decent choice if one wants to practice in NC and can avoid unsustainable debt (to the extent ANY school outside the very top tier is a decent choice in this day and age...). (No, I didn't go to UNC Central.)
Deleteand LaVerne and Valbareesta...
DeleteI respectfully disagree on the decency of UNC Central. Its LSAT scores are substantially equal to those of Charlotte and Florida Coastal, which is to say that they're perfectly awful (only Cooley, Arizona Summit, and Appalachian are lower, and not by much). A third of last year's graduating class was unemployed ten months after graduation, and only half of the graduates are in full-time, long-term positions—not necessarily in or even near the practice of law (https://www.lstreports.com/schools/nccu/jobs/). Not one graduate in last year's class got a job in a large firm or a federal clerkship—the main sorts of positions that might enable a student to repay student loans that, if used to cover the whole cost of attendance, will run upon graduation to $150k for a resident and $250k for a non-resident. Half of the class pays full fare, and most of the rest get only modest discounts of a few thousand dollars per year off rapidly rising annual tuition that approaches $20k for a resident of North Carolina and exceeds $40k for a non-resident (https://www.lstreports.com/schools/nccu/costs/). Roughly a quarter of the students will fail out in first year, and most graduates, according to Law School Transparency, are at extreme risk of failing the bar exam.
DeleteNorth Carolina Central may have played an important role for Black people in the past, and maybe it still has some good programs, but its law school should simply be shut down.
Countdown to a law dean/professor claiming with a straight face that with these closures we're going to have an undersupply of new lawyers...3...2....
ReplyDelete(Also waiting for someone to propose a new non-profit in Charlotte and/or a law school moving there)
Oh, people have already been squawking about the "need" for a law school in Charlotte.
DeleteWell, Charlotte had a huge one. Just five years ago, Harlotte's entering class had 626 students, significantly more than fat-assed Georgetown and Harvard. Even this time last year, when the end was nigh, it brought in 343. Had there been any way to sustain a law school there, it would have been tried with Harlotte. It's a lot easier to sustain or revive a school than to create one from scratch.
For that matter, North Carolina should also get rid of arch-toilets North Carolina Central and Elon, just for starters. Duke and maybe the U of North Carolina would be plenty of law schools for the Tar Heel State.
LSTC-you called this right-actually the talk began months ago:
Deletehttp://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/politics-government/article126158169.html
Cambell can relacate at Charlette!
DeleteGreat work on this story, Old Guy. Of the ten diploma mills you listed, I would estimate that the average full tuition rate is about $40K per year.
ReplyDeleteGuys have a little heart... where are the Faculty hoing to find jobs this late in the day?
ReplyDeleteI've heard from authoritative sources that there are great opportunities for lawyers in rural Nebraska. One just has to think outside the box. And network. That's how to cash in on the Million-Dollar Degree™.
DeleteOh, sorry, I forgot that many law profe$$ors don't have a JD. Well, such godlike personages will surely find richly remunerated sinecures in any domain upon which they condescend to bestow their glory.
Woo hoo!
ReplyDeleteThe really great news would be federal charges to clawback all the money paid out from such schools, but anyway this closure is a great start.
I hope the professors and administrators have broken lives full of unemployment, just like their students.
Lets hope the students have the wisdom to see they are being given an incredible break to cancel all their student loans.
Does it really matter whether Charlotte's doors are open or closed?
ReplyDeletehttps://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/eb/83/3b/eb833bb4a2a8d1e82598e61b1e01c050.jpg
(Perhaps uncharitable, but how I imagine many of their students)