Privately owned über-toilet Arizona Summit is preparing to shut down. It has offered the ABA a "teach-out plan" whereby the remaining 22 students would finish their studies elsewhere but would still get their degrees from Arizona Summit, which would retain its accreditation for a year or two. In exchange, Arizona Summit has offered to drop its appeal from the ABA's decision to revoke its accreditation.
Back in August, less than two weeks before what would have been the start of the semester, Arizona Summit announced that it would not be offering classes after all. The students were left to scramble for another school that would take them at that late date. Some of them reportedly transferred to Florida Coastal, InfiLaw's only other remaining law school—itself likely to close soon because of financial problems, potential loss of accreditation, and plummeting enrollment. About two dozen students transferred, surprisingly enough, to the U of North Dakota, another über-toilet.
The ABA may accept this plan, negotiate something else, or proceed with its intention to revoke Arizona Summit's accreditation. In any event, it seems that Arizona Summit will be closing down in a year or so. Even if the ABA unconditionally continued Arizona Summit's accreditation (an unrealistic possibility), the über-toilet could hardly come back to life with only 22 students and presumably no professors.
Arizona Summit is becoming the eighth law school to close, if we count Valpo (which is apparently winding itself up).
Great news! Infilaw has long been known as a full-on student loan scam.
ReplyDeleteIn other news, overflowing superTTTTTTToilet Touro just went south of 50% bar passage. It would be mighty nice to see the State of New York step in and put it in some sort of receivership or simply shut it down. It's pretty obvious that the ABA hacks won't do anything.
It's interesting to me how some of these ABA accredited schools are failing, yet many of the non ABA state accredited schools, with even lower bar passage rates, are managing to get by. In theory, the non ABA schools should be the first to fail. They must have a better business model.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point.
DeleteThe state-accredited and unaccredited ones are found mainly in California. Most of them charge a lot less than an ABA-accredited school—sometimes just a few thousand dollars a year, though the course of study may last longer (four or five years). Of course, their degree is worth much less, since it ordinarily cannot lead to licensure outside the state. Some of these schools are correspondence schools, which are far cheaper to operate (payroll represents the bulk of a typical ABA-accredited law school's budget). Conceivably a correspondence school could be operated with only a handful of students, if it could rely on "instructors" paid by the piece to grade papers or speak with students. Many of them do not require the LSAT or even a bachelor's degree, so they may appeal to the sorts of people whom even Cooley might reject on one of its better days.
I haven't investigated the state-accredited and unaccredited law schools in detail, but I cannot recommend attending one. They are, and will be seen to be, ridiculous toilets no better than Cooley and most likely a damn sight worse (hard though it may be to imagine a school worse than Cooley). Standards of admission scarcely exist, as you might guess from observing the many schools that ask not for a degree or an LSAT score but for a short essay on some such theme as Why I Want to Be a Lawyer. Remunerative employment as a lawyer, for the few graduates who pass the bar, is about as likely as being dealt a straight flush: these schools tend not even to provide any information about employment on their Web sites, probably because they do next to nothing to help people to find work and their graduates seldom do find work as lawyers.
I know that only a few states have these state only accredited schools, but it almost seems like that the ABA wants to make sure that 85% of everyone that wants to attend law school should be able to. Then the state supreme courts and bar licensing authorities try to find ways to allow the remaining 15% to attend.
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