Only four months ago, Concordia University's law school in Boise, Idaho, announced that it would be acquired by Concordia University in St Paul, Minnesota. Now the deal has fallen through, and Concordia's law school will not be opening this autumn after all. Count one more law school as dead.
Although the institutions involved decline to provide details, it seems that a $300M lawsuit against the parent university (based or formerly based in Portland, Oregon) resulted in liens that blocked the transfer of the law school's assets. The parent university recently announced its own closure, but of course its assets may still have to answer that nine-figure claim and possibly other claims as well.
Anyone interested in keeping Concordia's law school alive might consider raising money with which to settle or at least secure that claim. A bake sale should do the trick: just make a dollar's profit by selling a carrot cake or a plate of brownies (or red-velvet cupcakes for Lisa Tucker McElroy) to every person in the US! We have helpfully offered numerous other ideas for bailing a law school out. Indiana Tech never tried them, but maybe Concordia can succeed.
Our dear friends at Law School Transparency have already stricken Concordia from their database, so I cannot provide a link to their data. But the entering class of 2019 had only 59 students, and Concordia was definitely deep in über-toilet territory. It achieved ABA accreditation just last year.
What shall become of those 145 Concordians who have been left high and dry? The U of Idaho has tentatively offered to take them in, one and all, if only it can find a place for them. Options include moving them all to the university's own law school (far away in Moscow, Idaho) and cobbling together a temporary place for them at the university's facilities in Boise. Expect plenty of other toilet institutions to come begging for the newly scuppered Concordians, much as the U of North Dakota scooped up much of the jetsam of Arizona Summit when the latter went tits up days before classes were supposed to start.
Twelve law schools have closed in the past few years (if we count campuses of the Cooley chain as separate law schools) or at least forfeited their ABA accreditation in lieu of closing for good:
Cooley (one campus)
Hamline or Mitchell*
Indiana Tech
Whittier
Charlotte
Savannah
Valpo
Arizona Summit
Cooley (another campus)
Thomas Jefferson†
La Verne†
Concordia
Which will be next?
NOTES:
* Hamline and Mitchell merged. Which one closed is difficult to say: arguments can be made on each side. Anyway, the two schools became one, so effectively one of the two closed. The merger was a closure in dignified guise.
† Forfeited ABA accreditation and continued with only the accreditation offered by California.
In more good news, Trump just killed the value of the legal master degree programs law schools have been propping up: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwx3WNIwMfs No more get a master degree to get a pay raise shit at least from the feds
ReplyDeleteIt was Hamline which merged into Mitchell, resulting in Mitchell-Hamline.
ReplyDeleteThomas Jefferson and La Verne have not closed yet, but they have given up their ABA accreditation.
You're right about Thomas Jefferson and La Verne. I'll revise the text.
DeleteAs for Hamline and Mitchell, which one closed is debatable. Let's just say that they merged and that one law school effectively closed. I'll add a note about this.
Hamline University School of Law was a constituent school of the University. Mitchell Hamline School of Law is merely affiliated with the University. So Hamline University School of Law is effectively gone.
DeleteThe Wikipedia article on American law schools has Hamline on its list of defunct schools, for whatever that's worth.
DeleteFound on the Reddit topic discussing this: "I made a throwaway for this. But FUCK all of you. This was my school. I am a graduate of this school so yeah this doesn’t impact me much besides stigma. But fuck all of your entitled asses that think there should only be a limited number of law schools. Those of you that want to keep the profession elite and private. Idaho had one law school before Concordia opened its doors and to attend you had to move to the very north of the fucking state. So really leaving the entire state with one law school is ideal? How could anyone think that.
ReplyDeleteConcordia was filled with amazing professors from all across the country. These professors care so much about their students and success too. My experience of law school was so different from all the stories I see in this sub because of the unique nature of Concordia. The admin grew this school from nothing into a big success for the area in a really short time.
This school did not close due to academic failure at all. It only closed because it had a shit parent university that had been in financial trouble since before they opened the law school. There was a school willing to buy the law school and keep it open, but the original parent university had so many lawsuits and liens against its property that it had to ask for an absurd amount for their purchase price.
Again fuck all of you who think any law school closing is a great thing. These professors now are jobless with two weeks notice. The remaining students are panicking with summer finals looming around the corner. You all are the heartless assholes that give lawyers a bad name.
I just can’t. I’m so sick of this sub thinking that the only way to be a good lawyer/advocate is to go to a T14. Y’all are entitled pieces of shit. Ban me, down vote me, or block me. Idgaf" https://www.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/hfwfav/concordia_law_school_closes_permanently/
Let's go through the checklist:
Delete* Élitism: The charge might have some merit if we were fetishizing the so-called T14, as this person alleges, and sneering at whichever law schools the self-appointed authorities of You Ass News ranked 15th and 16th and 17th. But we have said for many years that even Harvard and Yale are questionable propositions. And there's a hell of a long way from, say, Vanderbilt to Concordia.
* The need for another law school in Idaho: Scamsters and their lackeys commonly claim that every state, every city, every whistle stop needs a law school or four. Sorry to burst your bubble, but Idaho does not need even one law school, still less two. Arguably Moscow wasn't the best choice of location for the state university's law school, but that's how it is. A similar argument could be made against putting everything in Boise. Anyway, the whole area between Minneapolis and Seattle (exclusive) could do perfectly well without a single law school; it certainly doesn't need one or more each in Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota, plus one in Spokane. People in those areas should expect to move for specialized fields of study such as law.
* Big success: The fact remains that Concordia was never better than an über-toilet. It never attracted enough students to sustain itself. It simply was not needed in an era of proliferating über-toilets. Idahoans who were foolish enough to attend law school could easily go to Cooley or Appalachian or loads of other schools of Concordian calibre.
* Poor professors out of work: Cry me a river. Where were those professors when this über-toilet was being flushed? Did they warn their charges to get out while the going was good? Or did they just sit back and enjoy their inflated salaries and benefits?
* Students panicking: Don't say that we didn't warn you. More than a year ago I myself published an article here that named Concordia and a number of other schools as unsustainable.
* Heartless assholes: If that describes us, why do we put our efforts into discouraging the public from attending über-toilets like Concordia?
All the professors are always "amazing." My professors were lazy, snobbish, elitists who were butthurt about having to live in Flyover Country.
DeleteOn a side note, law school hiring committees are REALLY into rankings and elitism: More than half of new law profs come from just 6 schools.
I guess it is a loss that this law school will no longer be refining such eloquence.
DeleteI wonder if these professors caring about the success of their students translated into jobs for most of them?
RE: the reddit post at 2:59; not a complete analogy, but it's become pretty clear that there is a Stockholm Syndrome of sorts for those attending uber-toilet law schools, and this isn't the first example. A couple of years back, when Valpo went under, several 3Ls and new grads were interviewed; one grad had flunked the bar multiple times and was working retail(at the GAP, no less, if I remember correctly). The grad "didn't regret attending" Valpo or taking on all the debt or wasting the three years, etc etc. It's one thing to be reluctant to admit a mistake; it's another thing to completely buy into the scam.
DeleteThe reddit post is example #1 of why there will always be TTTTs, as there is no shortage of 0Ls who absolutely MUST attend law school, no matter what.
"[B]ut it's become pretty clear that there is a Stockholm Syndrome of sorts for those attending uber-toilet law schools."
DeleteThink about who the majority of those going to law school are - They have no other option. Law school is for those students who have no other options. A liberal arts major or political science major, even graduating with honors from an ivy league or other top school, doesn't exactly have a lot of career options. They have a difficult time finding a real job that pays as it is. Law school is a desperate attempt to add some marketability to their otherwise useless undergrad degree, or so they think. They just dig themselves deeper with the JD degree.
See also:
https://theivylie.com.
https://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2016/06/look-upon-your-alma-maters-works-ye.html
Deletehttps://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expensive-law-degree-and-no-place-to-use-it.html?_r=0
The Valponian graduate in question was Sarah Tapia, and she worked at a Meijer store in Goshen, Indiana.
—— She attended Goshen College, where she studied history, and was admitted to two law schools: Valparaiso and a for-profit school in North Carolina, Charlotte School of Law, that won full American Bar Association accreditation only in 2011.
So she got into no school but Valpo and Charlotte, both of which are now gone.
—— Ms. Tapia struggled her first semester at Valparaiso, but she said her grades steadily improved after that. After graduation, she took a bar prep class and threw herself into studying full time, undeterred by her “massive” debt load. When she found out she failed, she took a job in the clothing department of Meijer while she prepared to take the test again this past February. But not long before I showed up, she found out that she had failed that test, too.
She struggled at Valpo, and she failed two bar exams. More on this below.
—— From the perspective of an admissions committee looking to take a chance on a high-risk applicant, Ms. Tapia must have presented a compelling case. She had already defied long odds by graduating from college. She had an obvious passion for the law.
The article explained that racism and a lack of money had held her back. But the only thing that was compelling about her to the admi$$ions committee was her ability to get the federal government to dispense a few hundred grand into the über-toilet's coffers. Graduating from college is not enough. Nor is "an obvious passion from the law". People with an obvious passion for the violin or football are not accepted to conservatories or major-league teams for that reason alone, yet we're supposed to believe that someone who turns sentimental over a television show about a wrongful conviction is ipso facto cut out to be a lawyer.
—— She had that unteachable impulse to succeed that Dean Lyon said she was looking for. Even today, with two strikes against her, she is determined to keep taking the bar exam until she passes it. There is no doubt in her mind that she will one day be a practicing lawyer, and she may well be right.
No, she isn't right. I haven't checked every bar in the world, but I have confirmed that she is not listed as a lawyer licensed in Indiana, four years after the cited article was published.
—— “Why does Valpo have an economic structure that looks like Harvard Law School’s?” asked Mr. Campos, the University of Colorado expert on the prospects of recent law school graduates. “It makes absolutely no sense to do it. It’s why they have to charge Harvardesque prices.”
A more important question: why did Valpo exist at all? Today that question is moot: Valpo is defunct.
—— I asked Ms. Tapia if she ever regretted her decision to go to law school. She said she sometimes wondered if “maybe I shouldn’t have done this, maybe this isn’t what I was supposed to do with my life,” but those moments are pretty fleeting.
Fleeting? How hard is it to see that you are not doing "this" with your life? You cannot even pass a bar exam, still less practice law.
—— “I wouldn’t trade my law degree for anything,” she added. “I would trade the debt.”
There's the line that 10:22 mentioned. She wants the degree without the debt. If she had any sense, she would not cherish that toilet-paper degree that she barely managed to acquire.
Sarah Tapia never should have been allowed to pursue her hopeless fantasy of becoming a lawyer. Had Old Guy had any similar fantasies about becoming a violinist or a quarterback, plenty of people would have set him right a long time ago. But when an unprepared person sees a TV show and decides that she wants to be a lawyer, she gets not discouragement but encouragement.
It's pretty clear that both 4:30 and OG are correct. One the one hand, you've got many liberal artists who are qualified for very few jobs, and believe that going to law school is the only way to be employed, and on the other, you've got quite a few of these who may have that BA, but have no business attending law school; it just isn't going to be a path to employment for many reasons(e.g. failure to pass the bar).
DeleteBut there is one consistent factor: the parasites at the TTTTs who want these 0Ls for one, and only one, reason: $$$; just can't beat those federal loan dollars. The whole TTTT law school charade is nothing but a wealth transfer scam, enriching hackademics who don't give a damn about the dupes, er law students, once the last penny has been extracted.
What else is she supposed to say, particularly so soon after graduating? I thought she spun it about the best way possible.
DeleteHopefully, it gave her some schadenfreude that the whole school went under along with her dream of a legal career.
The article though, hit on all the salient points concerning the state of legal education and the legal profession. Complete with professor who only appears to feel sorry for the tenured professors being dismissed, now she is probably one of them, unless she got picked up by another toilette. These professors should be grateful that they were able to milk the system for as long as they did.
I wonder how much truth there is to the 'value' either real or perceived of having been a cop as to being a defense attorney?
Soon after graduating? She had had the time to take the bar exams twice. Apparently she had been out of law school for a while.
DeleteAnd the dean of the defunct law school pretends to have been "looking for" diamonds in the rough with "that unteachable impulse to succeed". Bullshit. Über-toilet law schools look for little other than money. They do not comb the land in search of 140-grade dolts that somehow can excel at law despite their semiliteracy and general lack of intelligence.
https://www.lstreports.com/schools/concordia/
ReplyDeleteCare to rebuttal this one, Old Guy? https://www.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/hhkywq/for_all_of_the_lower_tier_law_students_that_dont/
ReplyDeleteNot much to rebut IMHO. Whatever firm he worked at got lucky: This is a plaintiff whose doc pled guilty to sexually abusing them and got sentenced to 40+ years.
DeleteAssuming the policy did not exclude A&M, what the heck is a carrier going to do with something like that? They'll drag you through some depos sure, but ultimately everyone knows it's gonna settle for right around policy limits. That was pretty much a fait accompli when they got the demand letter.
Simply put, every awful no-fault/dogbite/slipnfall plaintiffs mill in the world dreams that one day something like this might walk in the door. At this guy's firm, it did. So, he got to have some (as he puts it) low-level interaction with it, and probably got little to no piece of the action financially. Hardly an inspiring story for other grads.
So a graduate of John Marshall–Atlanta happened to get a job at a firm retained on a lawsuit that apparently had a titillating sexual aspect that garnered publicity, and he thinks that that proves that toileteers in general can make their toilet-paper degrees work out.
DeleteSeveral toileteers chimed in to opine that toileteers were on a par with the graduates of Harvard, if not superior to them. What do you want me to say, 7:35?
One of my law school professors told us of a classmate of his at U of Texas whose ambition was to be a solo. He hung out his shingle in Galveston exactly one day before the city was flattened by a hurricane. Every lawyer in the city evacuated except him and he made a fortune for one year.
DeleteA certain number of people will always stumble into the right place at the right time. Anyone who justifies six figures of law school debt on the outside chance it will happen to them, too, has got an asshole for a brain.
What a bunch of losers. Very few of the posters appeared to have careers but they felt encouraged by the 'success' of this 4th tier toileteer. Hard work, grit and experience are all that matters.
DeleteThe thread that followed that one was even more amusing. The initiator of the thread was congratulating oneself on having been admitted to the bar on motion in their state due to Covid-19 as if it were a personal accomplishment. Then went on to add that a friend had been admitted similarly after having twice failed the bar exam which apparently was viewed by the vox populi there as being 'awesome' or some such superlative.
And now that this policy is gradually being implemented here and there, is there any chance it will be reversed, even if Covid is eventually vanquished?
Covid is the best thing that has happened to the toilets since the student loan program was instituted.
Odd times are ahead for the legal industry.
I cannot recommend a career that depends on one's being the only one left standing after a hurricane.
DeleteAs for the "temporary" admission of people without examination in response to COVID-19, I said three months ago that it was nothing but "a back door to skipping the exams altogether":
https://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2020/04/covid-19-used-as-excuse-to-lower.html
At least an argument can be made for temporarily admitting people who have not had the chance to take a bar exam. None can be made, however, for people who have failed a bar exam—or two, in the case that you describe.
Of course, if the bar exams are eliminated, another question arises: why not eliminate law school?
The hard work thing is especially absurd when you take into account how hard and how much low wage minorities work. I'm not going to list a specific minority, but everyone knows of car washes, landscaping, contracting and other work where 10 people are living in a one room apartment and come to work every day at like 4 AM all in the back of a pickup truck, work all day with pretty much no breaks, no days off, doing really crappy work for nearly no pay.
DeleteThe arrogance of privilege is to claim that isn't hard work. The privilege that has never done it and can look down on it. Any middle class person that does that deserves no sympathy when the upper classes likewise sneer down at them, and claim they are stupid or lazy, while said upper class fatcats are in their air conditioned executive board rooms maybe deigning to fill out some paperwork rarely, in between "meetings" with other upper class members.
That's right, 5:50. Hard work is worthless in and of itself, just as it is for a hamster in a wheel. All that matters is supply and demand.
DeleteFunny thing is, we live in an era of abundance. Few skills are TRULY in short supply. Most shortages are actually quite artificial. Your pharmacist knows more about drugs than your doc does, your veterinarian could presumably stitch up a human wound just fine, and your hygienist could easily learn to yank out a tooth or fill a cavity. Similarly, any unskilled laborer could prolly do the work of a longshoreman. But they can't, because they're not in the right guild.
Find a shortage, and make sure someone is protecting that shortage and doing a good job of it. Fail to do that, and unless you get really lucky you will basically be a hamster in a wheel.
Don't rely on a guild to protect you. Look at the shabbiness that is the legal "profession". And increasingly paralegals and others are being empowered to handle minor legal work. As for medicine, much of what used to be the exclusive domain of physicians is now open to physicians' assistants, registered nurses, and even pharmacists.
DeleteI keep reading on some blogs how some doctors in certain specialties make some ridiculously high salary, like $400k+, working only 10 days a month or some other absurd low number of days/hours per month (doctors in the US are the highest paid in the world). How long can something like that continue? MD's have the opposite problem that the legal profession does not: a hyper, overprotective guild (the AMA) that protects and cocoons their professionals from competition - that may come back to bite them in the ass. In the past two years I've been to a clinic where I never met with an actual doctor, just either a nurse practitioner or a physician assistant.
DeleteThe reason this happens, 6:44, is because the business model is based on a fee for service insurance/medicare/Medicaid structure. Because the system pays for volume, not value, the high pay goes to the docs who can churn that volume, both directly and indirectly.
DeleteYes the docs cost an obscene amount of money, but they generate significantly more than they are paid, if they're good at playing the game.
The game is this: Take a hospital for instance. Some docs are actually employees, others are just "privileged" there. They work for themselves or for a physician group. If all they do is use their privileges to perform services at the hospital that they can't do in their office, then they're basically just eating what they kill. The hospital makes money from the "facility charges" they generate, but this is not how you make the big bucks.
If the doc is good at the game, then he or she is contributing to the bottom line via the real lifeblood of hospitals: Referrals.
Although you can't explicitly pay for referrals (it violates the anti-kickback statute) the unwritten understanding is that a doctor who is privileged at a certain place will not just do his own stuff there, but will also refer his patients there for lucrative things he doesn't personally do, like elective surgeries. So a doc can also generate significant revenue from services performed by others, and make sure to paper up your charts with sufficient clinical gobbledygook lingo so that the procedures aren't blatantly unnecessary.
You can recognize this if you know what to look for. Look for someone who is not a full-time hospital employee but has a "medical director" title, for example. Docs who refer a lot of patients will often get ceremonial administrative "medical director" titles, which entail significant pay for minimal administrative duties like going to a few meetings. Basically, just enough "medical director" duties to avoid getting prosecuted for an AKS violation. But everyone knows the real reason for the title and the pay is because you're steering a lot of business in a certain direction. Another popular technique is for hospitals to buy up private practices, essentially generating a captive. Sure the docs who work there COULD refer people elsewhere, but everyone knows the game and the unwritten understanding: Encourage your patients to get expensive treatments, and refer those patients to the place where your bread is buttered. Just get good lawyers to make sure the payments for referrals are sufficiently disguised so as to fit into one of the anti-kickback statute's numerous "safe harbors."
That's the real game. Refer a lot of business in the right direction, but do it carefully enough to stay off the OIG's radar. Do that right, and you can make a lot of coin for not a lot of actual days' work. As to how it will continue? It will continue so long as Medicare and private insurance remain a political third rail. That's why I often say we don't need "Medicare for All." What we really need is something more like "VA for all" so that the government can control the actual services it is paying for, rather than just writing a blank check. That and opening up a bunch more residency slots to bring supply and demand into some kind of balance, and encouraging a lot more use of lower-cost care providers like NPs and PAs.
The waterheads mentioned here deserve 100% what happens to them.
ReplyDeleteNando said it for YEARS on his blog. He made it quite clear in a header box at the top of the blog. See this link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180119173327/http://thirdtierreality.blogspot.com/
The reddit post here makes me wannacry.. Even given all of the above were true about Concordia, it MEANS NOTHING!! Law is all about prestige and the name of the school on your resume, period.
Even OG who did 99% of everything right got the shaft. Why? Because the Eugene's at the Country Club want their own. You need all of what Nando mentioned AND you already have to be in the Club.
If that sounds like a Catch-22, it should - and it IS. Law is an elitist profession. If you look at most of the large firms, really study them, you'll see that most are "zombie firms". They just pass business around from the gov't to themselves, their members revolve in and out of gov't agencies, etc. Again, it's just a club.
They're just milling shitpaper at taxpayer expense. Go see what their practice areas are. They're not getting paid by the Little Guy - they have no money. It's all corporate and gov't and a massive revolving door at the Club.
Interesting further detail revealed in the sublinks: Concordia Portland was the school's previous affiliate, and apparently Concordia St. Paul couldn't buy it because Portland had used the law school's assets to secure that parent university's obligations to HotChalk, which is the company that sued Portland for $300m for breach of a contract by which HotChalk ran Concodia Portland's online programs.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, given that you can't have an online law school under current ABA standards, the problem is created because the old sponsor pledged the law school's assets to secure a mostly-unrelated obligation, namely the parent university's other online programs. Once again, law school as cash cow for the broader university.
Also, even though HotChalk is claiming it's owed $300m, it is worth noting that the Oregon AG was investigating Concordia Portland precisely because of the potentially exorbitant pricing of the HotChalk contract, which resulted oftentimes in Portland giving as much as half of its gross revenues to HotChalk. So, they were being investigated as to whether Concordia Portland was really even deserving of nonprofit status, given that such a huge portion of its revenue went to a for-profit contractor.
In other words, when a contract gets that big (and that long, given the 20 year term of some of these agreements) the contractor may not really be just a vendor and may actually become an affiliate, which puts the two in a joint venture. The tax law surrounding for-profit/non-profit joint ventures is complex, but suffice it to say that if a nonprofit and a for-profit go into business together then you'd better be able to demonstrate that the operation is truly being run for charitable purposes and not with a primary purpose of funneling money to the for-profit affiliate. It comes up a lot with so-called "management services agreements" used by things like hospitals and charter schools, where a nonprofit nominally controls the thing but much of the actual day-to-day business of the operation is run by a for-profit contractor, so it becomes questionable whether the c3 really deserves its tax exemptions under both federal and state law. The IRS is mostly asleep at the wheel on enforcing the joint venture rules these days, but states can still go after it. That's most likely what the Oregon authorities were investigating.
So in addition to the questionable practice of pledging the law school's assets to secure unrelated contracts, they also have this broader question of whether they really even deserved their nonprofit status. Concordia Portland could be facing a big tax bill on top of whatever they owe to HotChalk if their nonprofit status were to get retroactively revoked, ironically because of that same relationship with HotChalk. And since the law school was so closely affiliated with Concordia Portland, it seems the law school's assets could be on the hook there too.
St. Paul was right to conclude that this dog just has far too many fleas, but the point is that it really isn't JUST about a contract with some vendor. It actually goes quite a bit deeper into how the school's parent was operated and run, i.e. perhaps almost as more of a partnership between Concordia Portland and HotChalk.
Congrats to OG, Nando, Duped Nontraditional, the commenters to the law school scam blogs, and all the people who contributed to shutting down another scam law school. Never give up or listen to naysayers who lament that the mission failed because scam law schools still operate. The grifter law school industry takes in hundreds of millions of dollars in student loans every year. The lazy and entitled scam deans and professors are not going to voluntarily shut down this grifter operation and give up their cushy six figure salary jobs. Just like the tobacco companies didn’t voluntarily shut down even though their toxic product causes lung cancer, bladder cancer, heart disease, and COPD. After decades of public health research and advertising warning people of the dangers of smoking, a significant number of people quit smoking or never smoked to begin with. Nevertheless, people still smoke despite the dangers, and there will always be people that continue to smoke. That doesn’t mean we should stop public health anti-smoking campaigns. Similarly, just because a few thousand lemmings like the one quoted above by 2:59 continue to enroll each year, that doesn’t mean the law school scam movement failed. Think about the thousands of college grads who didn’t enroll every year going back almost a decade now.
ReplyDeleteThe economics of education are distorted and have resulted in a complete failure to meet the needs of the people. According to a story last year from Idaho public radio, Idaho ranks 49th when it comes to active physicians per 100,000. Because of the expense of maintaining a state medical school, Idaho does not have a public medical school. Residents can apply to the University of Washington, which has set aside 40 seats for Idaho residents. The University of Washington is the state medical school of Washington, Alaska, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. In 2019, the medical school had an incoming class of only 270 students.
By comparison, law schools traditionally were moneymakers. Schools just needed to pay six figure salaries to Harvard or Yale grads out of Biglaw, to teach massive classes of law students bringing in millions of student loan tuition dollars. In the past, these schools were even allowed to publish fraudulent job stats. As a result, these schools had massive class sizes that oversupplied the legal market. Once the law school scam movement sounded the alarm, the law schools were forced to report accurate job numbers and law school enrollment dropped by thousands of students a year.
Many law schools are now struggling to stay afloat and are now subsidized by their parent institution. Standards at law schools were lowered to bring in more federal student loan tuition dollars. While only 40 spots are set aside for Idaho medical students at the University of Washington, last year the University of Idaho Law school enrolled 128 new law students (they admitted 325). The demand for these law students is weak. According to the law school, only 67% of the class of 2018 obtained a bar passage required job, 2% were employed in non-professional positions, and 10% were unemployed. These numbers are abysmal and reflect the paradoxical outcome of legal education – law grads are less likely to be employed compared to the general population. That doesn’t matter to the powerful people that run higher education. The goal is not to serve the public. The goal is to make money.
Thanks for those comments. Indeed, everyone who participates here has helped to strike a big blow against the law-school scam. Consider that 6% of the ABA-accredited law schools have shut down just in the past four years. Before that, rarely did an ABA-accredited law school close.
DeleteMore closures are needed, starting with Appalachian, the rest of Cooley, Southern University Law Center, Florida Coastal, Vermont, Texas Southern, North Carolina Central, Ave Maria, Touro, Faulkner, North Dakota, Florida A&M, Golden Gate.
I'm surprised that the medical school at the U of Washington sets aside as many as 40 spaces for people from Idaho, a state with a relatively low population. Anyway, if a single medical school can easily cover five states, it should be clear that Idaho does not need two law schools—or even one. There is a real need for physicians; there is not a need for many lawyers, especially the kind that go to an über-toilet.
On that point, it is also worth noting that there really is no such thing as an über-toilet medical school. Even those dodgy medical schools in the Caribbean have real standards, and their graduates do tend to find work. By contrast, even lots of allegedly respectable law schools see their graduates unemployed ten months after graduation at rates exceeding the unemployment rate of the general population (the great bulk of which has not borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars for a JD), and they have been known to admit supremely unqualified people (recall the scandal around the U of Texas when it was caught having admitted people with LSAT scores in the upper 120s).
Absolutely, 9:14. Off top of my head, for example, I can think of at least two people I know IRL who I was able to talk out of going to HORRIBLE law schools at or near sticker price by pointing them to law school transparency. Some people really will listen, which the enrollment declines demonstrate, and every one that does is a life saved.
DeleteMed school is the opposite issue. While the ABA has failed utterly to reign in supply, the AMA (and the GMEC, which accredits residency programs) has reigned it in so much that it is practically unconscionable. I read recently that the average doc in the last year of residency is receiving somewhere between 50-100 job offers. That's destroying lives too: Patients' lives. Especially in rural areas because why would you live in the middle of nowhere if you have 100 offers to choose from? And it's all because the physicians' lobby operates as a guild. It isn't even really so much med school seats as it is residency slots, which have been capped by the balanced budget act since the 1990s and thus opening more med schools wouldn't even fix the issue unless a bunch more residencies for the grads to go into were also created.
Both are unconscionable. It's just that the AMA/GMEC operate for the benefit of existing practitioners at the expense of would-be entrants, while the ABA operates for the benefit of the schools.
Rehan Staton, sanitation worker, gets accepted to Harvard Law School:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/former-maryland-sanitation-worker-accepted-to-harvard-law/2347304/
That's very nice. Unfortunately, I have doubts about Mr. Staton's prospects. Like me and others of undistinguished pedigree, he will be out of place at Harvard. Even if he excels in his studies (as he may), he is unlikely to find and keep the sort of job that could cover the cost of law school, especially at one that now costs almost $400k (at the time of graduation, if fully financed by debt).
DeleteA career in law is not what it used to be. Many (too many) are called, but few are chosen. And the choice typically has to do with factors other than ability and potential.
People don't understand that getting into HLS is not like getting into H undergrad. It's not like they're doing this wholistic review or anything. He just did really, really well on the LSAT. That's pretty much all there is to it. Anyone who can score in the upper 170s has a good shot at Harvard or Yale or Stanford, and will almost certainly get in to one or more top schools.
DeleteAs to how he'll do there? It's Harvard. So long as he can figure out how to put on a suit, he'll get a biglaw offer if he wants one. And once he gets there, sure he'll be a fish out of water culturally. But sanitation workers know how to put in that OT, so he'll do the one thing biglaw truly cares about: Billing an obscene number of hours.
Prolly won't make partner, but as an hour-churning cog in a massive biglaw machine he'll do just fine, and then he'll jump ship for the exit opportunities like most associates do.
The irony. The difference between sanitation pickup and law is one of these two fields actually makes a positive impact on American society and is honest. I would rather drive a garbage truck than be around the trashy people in law.
DeleteThat tale turns out to be greatly exaggerated. Mr. Staton grew up privileged but fell on hard times. So this is hardly the rags-to-riches story that it has been made out to be.
DeleteGot a new one for ya, OG. I just ran across something called an "executive JD."
ReplyDeleteGuess some schools aren't waiting for the ABA (or even the calbar) to allow online JD. Now, it looks like you can take a full 3 year JD curriculum without actually being able to sit for any bar. Not even CA.
Have a look: https://www.concordlawschool.edu/blog/careers/who-should-earn-executive-juris-doctor/
Now you can go to law school, and not just for one of those first year-only MLS things. You get to waste the full-on three years on a JD, but you're not a lawyer and can never become one. Sure it's cheap at 12k/yr, but how is it worth anything at all?
I also note the rather narrow description of "practice of law" in the brochure. They're basically encouraging the misconception that the "practice of law" is limited to actually appearing in court, so I imagine these "EJDs" are out there doing a whole lotta UPL.
Thanks for that. When I saw "Purdue University Global", I assumed that it was the well-known university in Indiana. Turns out to be some on-line purveyor of so-called degrees that operates under the name Concord (Conquered?) Law School.
DeleteTwelve grand a year is not cheap when the merchandise itself is worth so little. As you said, the degree is not recognized for any purpose, certainly not for admission to the bar (even this on-line establishment's JD can lead to admission only in California). And although some people might go in for a one-year make-believe degree, who would be ass enough to put three years into this thing rather than going for an actual JD (Mickey Mouse or otherwise)?
And what's with that idiotic photo? Three unshaven men and two women, all grim, standing with their arms folded before a whitewashed brick wall. Is that intended to suggest professionalism? Not one of those people looks at all like an executive (or a lawyer).
It's hard to believe that anyone could take this shit seriously.
RE: the photo; it's actually a subliminal message to all applicants, that this "executive" JD is so worthless, literally of no value at all, so that volunteering to appear lined up before a firing squad is its practical effect on your future.
DeleteWe need the federal government out of the educational loan business altogether. All that easy loan money is what's enabling the scam schools to operate, whether in buildings or online. What kid with a bachelor's in some useless major, no job, and parents who want him off the couch wouldn't fall for a 3-year reprieve in paying back their undergraduate loans and "the possibility" of a job in the future?
ReplyDeleteMost majors these days are useless. The others will be useless soon enough.
DeleteLaw school these days is generally a bad idea for those who are not rich and cosseted, but undergraduate programs are scarcely better. Think twice before enrolling for a bachelor's degree. Training in a trade may be better.
Training in a trade would be better, for a whole lotta people. Go to tractor-trailer school (self-driving is a lot further off than people think), or do a stint in the army to get vet pref for gov't jobs, or apprentice to become a welder or electrician, and so on.
DeleteUndergrad is not intended as direct prep for any particular job, unless your goal is to become a nurse, K-12 teacher, or maybe a CPA. Even compsci and other vaunted STEM majors are more about the "learning how to think" and demonstrating aptitude for a given subject area (or getting prerequisites for grad school) than about training for a specific job.
People who truly want to broaden their horizons, or who truly do like to learn, should go to college. People who go for the sole and exclusive purpose of getting a job are missing the point, and colleges are all too eager to play into this myth of college-as-job-prep because it enables them to charge what they do. In truth, there's no way a 4+ year program taught by out-of-touch academics can ever keep pace with the EXACT training needs of current employers. It CAN teach critical thinking, it CAN help you show interest and aptitude, and if the school is selective enough it CAN communicate that you are "smarter than the average bear." But it is not and cannot directly prepare you for a specific job outside a very small number of majors precisely because it is not a trade school.
IMHO the root cause of this isn't so much the loans as it is the "million dollar degree" myth which equates all bachelors degrees as equal. It's absurd. Look at BLS: ALL of the top demand/pay jobs are in either healthcare or tech. All of them. And the tech kids can just do a coding bootcamp or get a Microsoft certification or whatever.
DeleteMaybe we should do loans only for healthcare and its prereqs. Millennials and GenY exist to serve boomers, and what boomers need is healthcare. So you either go into that, or you learn to code, or you sign up for Uber. That's about it.
Old guy, I want to talk to you. If you agree, I will call you or you can call me. I'd like to have a real conversation with you about some things you have said on this blog.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I cannot agree to speak privately with strangers about the matters discussed here. Some of us have been harassed, threatened, attacked, and otherwise abused by law-school scamsters. We have to be careful about compromising our privacy.
Delete"Old guy, I want to talk to you. I'd like to have a real conversation with you about some things you have said on this blog." Uh huh. Like the things you have said are controversial. Give me a break. Here are a couple of very important facts about what happens to modern law school graduates in the job market. Factually, many law school grads end up doing "temporary document-review projects" for as little as $22.00 per hour. 4Y college 3Y law school 2 day Bar Exam, character and fitness for temporary work at 22.00 per hour (or 23, or 25, depending). That in and of itself should dissuade many people from law school. Oh, and what if you go to an "elite" law school? Fact: in 2013, top ten law school UVA employed 17 percent of its own graduates in short-term school-funded 'jobs' so they could lie to the next crop of applicants by claiming that nearly all their recent grads were immediately employed. An accountant or practicing lawyer who tried something that profoundly dishonest would lose their license to practice and maybe go to jail. Fact: in my state, Panel Attorneys for the Public Defender's office are paid the same low rate as court interpreters. Speak Spanish? You are just as qualified, with a G.E.D. and that language skill, as an attorney, and are paid just as much. And attorneys fight hard for those low-paid hours. I am a successful lawyer, in part because I graduated from the best law school in my state, and I started back in 1992, when the tuition was reasonable and the job market was pretty good for law school grads. I run into unemployed, and under-employed lawyers all the freaking time. They usually do one or more of the following 3 things: Part-time work for the Public Defender's Office, 22.00 per hour doc review projects, or pro-bono work for the local women's shelter. And finally, factually, the unemployment rate for law school grads is HIGHER than the unemployment rate for the general population. All of these facts can easily be researched and verified, none of these things are false or exaggerated. Going to law school has been a bad idea for most people for the last 15 years or more.
DeleteThose gigs at $22 per hour also require a license, which is expensive to maintain. The temporary document-review monkey is responsible for the annual fees, professional insurance, and continuing education, whether any document-review shitwork comes in or not. And forget about parlaying a bit of document review into a real position for a lawyer.
DeleteIt is worth mentioning that those positions for court interpreters rarely require any sort of evaluation except perhaps one in ethics. The only skill required is the self-declared ability to speak English and another language somewhat well. Judges and lawyers are frequently up in arms about the lousy quality of many so-called court interpreters. Yet these miscellaneous people, some of them servers from restaurants, are paid the same as panel attorneys. Cherchez l'erreur.
Doc review is soul crushing and unreliable work. Projects are extremely competitive to get onto, and even if you "prove yourself" to an agency they can and do just randomly stop placing you, claiming the clients are the ones that select reviewers. Projects can also fall through at any moment, and the agencies can and do expect a one way commitment from reviewers because the market is so glutted that they can do so.
DeleteThe agencies have at times tried to bottom out the rates and use college graduates, but I suspect that never works out because a young college graduate simply does not have the same desperation as a barred attorney that isn't of the protected classes. I know I certainly would have just flipped the bird and left if I was a college grad, especially when regular temp jobs pay more and treat you better.
There's really only one way to make doc review work, and that's if you have an SO or parents to fund you for it. You can also somewhat make a living with it while hustling for solo work, but solo work is also inherently difficult to rely on and that's been covered on these scamblogs before many times. If someone does make it with solo work, they prioritize it, and of course basically flip the finger to doc review and hope that doesn't come back to bite them. It probably won't because despite what the agencies claim, the positions are so unimportant and meaningless it's not even worth keeping a blacklist for. In case a solo gets a real job offer, I've seen them quickly wind down their practices, even if they've had their practice for 20+ years, because even a government job paying $40k/yr is more reliable and better than their solo practice.
I've never done doc review at $20/hr. I'll only ever take something in the $30 range, and even that disgusts me. And I make it my life's mission to never do more than 6 months of doc review a year, to maintain my sanity. I will do any other work, even if it technically pays less than the doc review rate, just to not be available for doc review the entire time.
There are also "higher" level or "career" doc review positions, like project manager, staff attorney, QC, Team Lead etc., but I've rarely been on them and I don't see any connection with performance, experience, or anything else for those, plus even when I've been on those roles it ends the same as any other review. In fact I think it's usually better to just be a "first pass" reviewer on a big and long project instead, albeit I think those aren't so common and become less so as time goes on.
Doc review is better than unemployment and shit law, but only very narrowly. And it is usually a pathway to the same since it's so unreliable. I do think if there were say 75% less law graduates, instead of doc review temp jobs, there would probably be a very limited doc review done by 1st and 2nd year associates in Big Law---with Big Law salaries paid out. It's not just solely the work has little value, most work in today's economy has little value, especially white collar work, it's that it's just such a glutted field that there is no impetus to make things more efficient or provide real careers for people.
Various document-review drudges have written colorful accounts of toiling away in boiler rooms cheek to jowl with unhygienic so-called colleagues and little if any access to such frivolous amenities as toilets, sunlight, and oxygen. Even if exaggerated, those accounts might lead me to turn document review down in favor of harakiri.
DeletePresumably lawyers are hired because of a perceived need to maintain privilege. Otherwise that stuff would all be sent to India or the Philippines.
I've seen evidence of substantially higher rates for document review in languages other than English. Even though I do know a number of other languages well, I don't think that I'd accept that sort of work. There comes a point at which one really does have to draw the line.
"Various document-review drudges have written colorful accounts of toiling away in boiler rooms cheek to jowl with unhygienic so-called colleagues and little if any access to such frivolous amenities as toilets, sunlight, and oxygen."
DeleteSounds like the perfect breeding ground for COVID-19.
I've never worked in those types of conditions, but I have also heard about them. I am very selective on what projects I do take, whereas the people that take these are generally just trying to keep working and need the doc review as their sole source of income. Many however are not at all frugal, and do spend a lot of what they make on frivolities. It is a decent source of easy income and if life is that miserable, I suppose I can understand the consumerism.
DeleteAgain this is why I stated it would be unacceptable for anyone other than law graduates. Law grads are going to be at least of average intelligence or above, and will know how to follow rules because they've been conditioned to it. They're also going to be in debt bondage so will be desperate and put up with just about everything.
Plus there is little to no sympathy at all from the public to young law graduates. The older lawyers do tend to be rather comfortable (or have long ago left the law and still are comfortable), don't have the debt, and just don't care. The public generally says they hate lawyers and think they make money. So you have hordes of young overeducated people caught in a terrible situation with absolutely no sympathy for them and very limited opportunity for a way out. The corollary would be immigrants forced into debt bondage from cartels for getting smuggled into the US, then finding out only low paying jobs exist and then that money has to go to the criminal elements. Doc review is only a cut above that, at least as long as the loan companies will refrain from breaking student debtors kneecaps to collect. I do hear they make nasty phonecalls and send nasty letters however.
Mitt Romney said some years ago that being born in the US is like winning the lottery. He received a backlash for those comments, because quite frankly, he projected his own lucky sperm club onto others and that was apparently enough to actually annoy people. But in truth as long as you avoid all the endless scams the elites run, and law school is one of the most pervasive and damaging of those, it IS still generally better than being born into a poverty stricken drug cartel dominated violent third world country. Of course you'd be even better off being born an upper class WASP in the US or Europe, but all of this stuff is just different degrees. It doesn't mean the law school scam shouldn't be exposed nor that society shouldn't be working for something better. But that's the reality of the world, especially the capitalist mindset where wealth is designed to be concentrated in the hands of the few and the rest suffer varying degrees of scarceness.
I'm over the whole "system is against normal people" angle. The US still works far better than most countries. All you have to do to get ahead is live on less than you make, save for a rainy day, make good investments, and avoid debt. The problem is that we no longer teach young people these things, especially how to handle money. Ignorance makes them easy targets for scammers, and once the debts are acquired they are a bitch to work through. The future belongs to the thrifty.
DeleteIt's from last month, but USC was hunting for a new dean. It's an interesting read:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.thestate.com/news/local/crime/article243629242.html
"“Our percentage of alumni who give to this law school is dramatically less than it should be — among the poorer percentages in the country,” Hubbard said. “We really need to think of a strategy to make sure more of our alumni give back. ...”
Another financial issue is finding “some stopgap money to at least get through this year” for fully funding the law school, Hubbard said.
The law school now gets a “subsidy” of about $7 million each year from USC, and “one of the new challenges of the new dean is ... to protect that,” Hubbard said.
Federal Judge Michelle Childs asked Hubbard since each law school class graduates about 200, and only about 50 of that number are highly sought after for top legal jobs, what were his plans for the remaining 150 graduates to try to get them good jobs?"
Actually, the percentage of alumni that give to that toilet is more than it should be—for it should be zero. South Carolina does not need one law school, let alone two.
DeleteThe three-year debt-financed cost of getting a toilet-paper JD from the U of South Carolina (which uses "USC" even though that is much more commonly applied to the U of Southern California, another jumped-up toilet institution) is $139k for residents of the Palmetto State and $272k for everyone else. How much money are graduates going to have for donations after being rooked for that much?
The question about finding decent jobs for the unwanted three-quarters of the class is a good one with no good answer. Local need is limited, and a law degree from the U of South Carolina is not readily portable beyond perhaps the neighboring states. On top of that, most other law schools too are finding a lot of their graduates to be unemployable in law.
Rather than tolerating internal scheming that siphons a $7M annual "subsidy" off for a toilet law school, the university should consider closing the law school and putting that money towards better purposes. Then again, it would probably just waste the money on idiotic male football and basketball teams.
Yeah but the school was founded in 1867. I can understand older alums donating. They got to experience a time when tuition was negligible and jobs were plentiful.
DeleteBut asking alums who borrowed six figures to attend, who likely got a negative ROI, and who will be paying this crap off for most of the rest of their working lives if they even ever pay it off? It is unconscionable to even ask.
@6:44PM. Those alumni are moving through the system and towards retirement, or the more permanent retirement. Eventually the grads that paid cheap tuition and had good careers are going to pass on, and the new alumni are too broke, too underemployed, and probably not in the mood to be generous even if they could afford it.
DeleteOld Guy's will specifies that his law school shall NOT receive anything.
Delete@11:02: True, but the "old economy" isn't really as far in the past as it may seem. Tuition was pretty reasonable until probably sometime in the 1990s, which also happens to coincide with the rise of the internet and the decline of high-pay-low-skill jobs that meant more regular people could actually afford legal services, and needed them as there were few DIY options.
DeleteAlso, stuff in the pre-internet era took longer and required a lot more humans. You needed a dedicated and expensive westlaw terminal or a trip to the law library to do legal research. Doc review was a pile of bankers boxes. Contracts were a matter of endless faxing back and forth.
There were also about 20 law schools founded between 1985 and today, and someone who graduated at 25 in 1985 would only be 55 now.
Point is, there are a lot of old economy lawyers still practicing. We will indeed eventually reach a point where no one still around remembers the pre-scam era. But overall, law school was probably a pretty good bet for most until sometime in the 1990s. Law school did a lot for those people, and it didn't cost them very much in the long run. They'll be a good number of them still around and willing to be hit up for donations for at least another decade, probably more.
Actually 55 to 60 year old attorneys are already retired and living off of their pensions if, like myself, they attended a toxic burn pit law school, and made a career in government. People at that age are planning to provide for their children, grandchildren, and have little interest in donating to an institution they last had significant contact with 35 or 40 years ago.
DeleteAdditionally, even back in the late 1980s, students attending cesspool laughingstock law schools knew the game was over for us before it even began. It wasn't yet defined as a "scam", but even then you realized your prospects were limited. At least in that era there were government and small firm job opportunities. Nobody got rich. Clearly law students from 1996 onward have it much harder.
DeleteFinally, although tuition was still sane in the mid-to-late 1980s, middle class law graduates still had student loan debt (albeit dischargeable), which had to be paid from a starting government attorney salary. There were not many luxuries then, nor now. Still given current circumstances, I consider myself fortunate.
DeleteI wonder if the new ICE policy of people with student visas having to go back to their countries if their schools goes online for the fall might help save a few schools like Appalachian: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/07/06/888026874/ice-foreign-students-must-leave-the-u-s-if-their-colleges-go-online-only-this-fa?fbclid=IwAR3FTE_MnFzxCpHd6Cp--_4hgM--vOBU1tNPZ2vaK166obaa2QA5ybSaep0 Some of these places are going to some of the few easy green cards schools lift for the fall over this hysterical reaction to a flu.
ReplyDeleteI'd love see more law schools go under, but it looks like the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) threw a lifeline to some soon. Appalachian got 350k to 1 million in April 2020. New York Law School got 2-5 million, Savannah Law School got 150k - 350k (I thought they closed!), Vermont Law School 2- 5 million, etc. Reports are here: https://sba.app.box.com/s/wz72fqag1nd99kj3t9xlq49deoop6gzf
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile small businesses got $1-100. MURIKA!!!
DeleteA school like NYLS can piss through 2 -5 million pretty quickly, though.
DeleteI doubt $2 million would cover the faculty Christmas party if you included the tip.
DeleteI agree with 5:16 PM.
DeleteThese schools burn through money like women on TV shopping channels.
For 'ordinary people' like us, we could turn that $2 million into $3 million with an index fund. For douchebags like law prawfs and law school administrators, who've never worked a real job in their lives, that money would be gone almost before they laid their hands on it.
"Federal Judge Michelle Childs asked Hubbard since each law school class graduates about 200, and only about 50 of that number are highly sought after for top legal jobs, what were his plans for the remaining 150 graduates to try to get them good jobs?"
ReplyDeleteGood question Judge Childs. But here's an even better one: If only 50 out of every 200 grads get the type of jobs that justify the time and expense of attending law school, why not cut class sizes down to 50 students per class?
lol and did you read the dean candidate's answer to that question? It was basically "well I'd call around and try to convince people to hire them, but really you should hire them, and/or convince your friends to do so."
DeleteA socially responsible answer would have been to say that he would right-size the class and bring the school's operating budget into line with a markedly reduced class size. But that would hugely reduce revenue so there's no way he'd get hired if he said that.
Just goes to show: Schools care only about one kind of demand: The demand for seats in the class. The demand for graduates is not their concern.
Well, Hubbard said a bit more than that. He said that he would speak to different employers about individual graduates in a "holistic" way and that his political connections would persuade employers to "take a flyer" on the weaker students.
DeleteDoes anyone seriously believe that the overpaid scam-dean of that toilet law school would call his precious political connections to discuss 150 individual graduates—people no longer paying tuition?
It is also offensive and incorrect to assume that the ones that do not get jobs are necessarily the weaker students and that what they need is a "holistic" presentation of their merits. Hubbard obviously does not understand that there simply are not good jobs for three-quarters of the class at that toilet, no matter how favorably the graduates are portrayed.
I think I acknowledged that he said he'd make some calls. But yeah, if there's only jobs for 25% of the grads then that is what it is.
DeleteAs to "holistic" I think what he means is that he's asking them to consider more than just grades/class rank. But even if they did, and so someone hired one of the "weaker" grads, all that would do is take the job away from someone else.
Fact is, there's a fixed number of jobs and they aren't in any way correlated with the number of grads. Grades get used, in large part, because employers simply don't have anything else that's objective to go on. And 1L grades in particular, because that's the year where everyone takes the same classes so it's the closest thing to an apples-to-apples comparison that exists.
The typical JD has no work experience, an irrelevant liberal arts undergraduate career, and (unless a summer associate) a couple of unpaid summer internships at governments or nonprofits that lead to, at most, a writing sample and a reference letter both of which will be pretty similar to what everyone else has.
What law school you went to and how you did there relative to your classmates is pretty much all there is to compare one applicant against another.
PPP was bungled. 500 employees is small? C'mon, that makes you the biggest business around in huge swaths of the country. And having banks lend it? C'mon. Of course they're going to lend it to their biggest qualifying customers first. Those are the most trustworthy and they have to treat it as a loan until it's truly forgiven, which depends on actions the banks can't control and requirements that hadn't been fully fleshed out. It only makes sense for the banks to give it to people they could trust would be able to pay it back if they had to.
ReplyDeleteThe $600/wk should teach a similar lesson: State UI programs were overburdened, understaffed, and using outdated systems.
Just knock it off with the damn middlemen already, and knock it off with the nonsense of trying to help workers by "trickle down" thru their employers. The IRS one-time stimulus wasn't perfect, but overall it worked a lot better. It just shouldn't have been one-time. Cut out the middlemen and use the IRS to essentially just deliver a universal basic income for the duration of the crisis.
To answer the last question in the original post: My money is on Florida Coastal for next on the chopping block. Infilaw has already closed two of its original three law schools, and it's private equity owned. The whole business model of PE is to grow a company with debt and then sell it off once such growth has made it sufficiently attractive.
ReplyDeleteEveryone knows a house-flipper cannot make the mortgage payment for long, and so the flipper must quickly buy (with debt) fix (with debt) and re-sell the property for a significant profit before the time comes to pay the piper. PE can usually manage to service its debt for a lot longer than a house-flipper, but eventually the same thing happens: Every PE-owned company must eventually either grow & get acquired, or go bankrupt. Infilaw has not only failed to grow, it has shrank.
PE owners are looking for the exit strategy from day 1. If there is none, then it's like that scene in Goodfellas where they say that when the day finally comes when you cannot borrow another dime, you "bust it out and light a match."
Florida Coastal is an excellent candidate. It faces stiff competition from Western State College of Law (now part of something called Westcliff University) and Appalachian. Several other contenders appear to be vying for the honor of being thirteenth to go tits up.
DeleteThe InfiLaw scamsters will indeed want to dump their last über-toilet law school and put what's left of their money into something else.
Law unfortunately is still maintaining its status as the plan B option for unemployed/underemployed BA graduates:
ReplyDeletehttps://abovethelaw.com/2020/07/law-school-applications-on-the-rise-thanks-to-bad-job-market/
They're up 0.1 percent. They're way down in the Midwest, though.
Deletehttps://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2020/07/law-school-applicants-are-up-01-with-biggest-increases-among-southeast-165-180-lsats-and-those-who-d.html
Not surprised. Law school is pretty much the perfect refuge from a bad economy, and three years is a nice long time to be able to hide out. You can't go back to UG and get prereqs for something truly in demand, because even if you can finance the tuition there's no gradPLUS loans for undergrad and thus no way to pay your room and board without parental help. Other graduate programs, meanwhile, will require prerequisites and/or work experience that, as a liberal arts major, you probably don't have. And your parents will think it's practical and support your decision.
DeleteLaw school has perfectly positioned itself as the ideal refuge from a bad economy for anyone with a BA, in anything, from anywhere. It has no real competition in this space.
Sure when you come out you'll be pigeonholed into a shrinking and glutted field, and deeply in debt. But in the immediate term it's three years of not having to worry where your next meal is coming from. If all you're giving up is a gig waiting tables at a restaurant that closed from COVID and may well never reopen, that can feel like an offer you can't refuse.
Actually, that is already going on, and has been going on for years. I personally know a guy who borrowed his way through 4 years of college getting a worthless BA. He then moved home and decided to "work" for a year, but he didn't like working, so he went on a three-year long all-expenses paid vacation in sunny Florida. He called it law school, financed my yet more student loans. He didn't even bother to sit for the bar after he graduated, moved back in with his parents, and does not plan on paying the "student loans" back. As the higher education scam plays out, this will become more and more common.
DeleteThomas Jefferson Skool o' Law is on a "teachout" program - they got their federal accreditation back until 2023, so the hope is that TJSOL will burn through their final collection of students and close. The school is down to renting space in an office building in downtown San Diego and their only competition in the area is the undistinguished law school attached to USD, a private Catholic university - they are going to close.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.abajournal.com/news/article/under-teach-out-plan-tjsol-has-aba-accreditation-three-more-years
Thanks for that. But they're not going to close: "Amid its ABA accreditation problems, the school sought and received California accreditation in 2018, and it intends to operate as a state-accredited school after its ABA accreditation ends." And the cesspool's Web site says "Thomas Jefferson School of Law is excited to announce that beginning Summer 2020, the Law School will admit new students for a JD degree as a California Law School accredited by the Committee of Bar Examiners of the State Bar of California."
DeleteSo it seems that Thomas Jefferson Über-Toilet of Law has just received three more years of accreditation from the ABA, for nothing.
Yup, the "teach out" will just enable everyone who was already enrolled before the accreditation got yanked to finish up and still have an ABA degree. So, you will be eligible to sit for the bar anywhere in the country OR just in California, depending on whether you enrolled at a time covered by the teachout or not.
DeleteThe kids who graduate during the next 3 years or so, i.e. during the teach-out period, are essentially grandfathered in to the rights of ABA graduates. They'd better keep documentation of this, because it could be interesting explaining this to bar examiners 20 years from now when no one remembers the exact date it switched from ABA to Calbar or the exact provisions of the teach-out agreement. I doubt every state in the country is going to keep precise records of this when trying to figure out if someone graduated from an accredited school or not. The school might not either, especially if it does eventually close and the transcript records get handed off to some contractor or government agency to archive. In short, the grandfathered graduates could be explaining this for the rest of their lives anytime they want to move to another state and get licensed there.
To both Old Guy and Anonymous: The school is at its end, no matter what happytalk they make in the press releases. Who wants to get a JD solely in California law? It's too easy to go to Los Angeles and attend a real law school. The law school at USD does Federal law, and if you con tolerate working on a private Catholic campus, the degree is yours. Everything is working against TJSoL; they are in a rented space after losing their dream building and the law library across the street, their name is dirt if you have been following the saga of the collapsing American law school system, the competition is endless. This thing is done by 2024.
DeleteI applaud the authors of blogs of this sort. They have exposed the scam, run the numbers to show an awful ROI, and given potential applicants more realistic avenues for success (join a union, become a doctor if possible, start a business, anything not involving debt).
ReplyDeleteWith 2020 coming up, there is another calculation the scam movement must make. Which candidate will eliminate the scam? It appears the Left will not do so. The Right, with its disdain for expensive humanities degrees and "cultural elitism", has more oxygen to end federal loans. If the right voices can get to the President, we can drive a stake through the heart of the scam.
The "left" and the right are just the same shitty wine in different bottles.
DeleteOG is exactly right. Trump has been in office for 3+ years, and has done exactly zero about the scam, following the footsteps of all of his predecessors, "left" or "right". Same song, different day; to quote The Who "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss".
DeleteDeVos, the 'Education Czar' under Trump, is married to the son of an Amway co-founder and the 88th richest family in America. She's invested in student loan servicing co's etc.
DeleteNo one is 'for' shutting down / changing / reforming the Higher Ed Scam because too many pockets are being so well-lined.
Well.. no one but Leona Helmsley's "Little People" - the ones getting screwed by it. And so, as they are needed for the Scam to prosper, no one cares anyway.. Someone(s) has to lose..
That's "The American Way".
Numerous states have granted a "temporary" exemption from passing the bar exam, but not Montana:
ReplyDeletehttps://missoulian.com/news/local/montana-supreme-court-denies-law-school-grads-bar-exam-exemption-request/article_62661a47-9471-5ebd-83f6-d30b2cc8bd8c.html
My firm has been conducting layoffs and pay reductions during the Covid period. The results were predictable: the lowest performers have had their pay reduced and the best performers are getting make-whole bonuses.
ReplyDeleteIt’s a harsh reality. This is a business for those that want to work for the next generation. If you don’t want to do that, you made a big mistake.
I saw myself in one of the younger associates that not only is keeping his job, but is excelling. His father died last Wednesday. He went to the wake on Tuesday for two hours and came right back to the office to start billing. He worked all through the night on Tuesday and he did not bother going to the actual funeral on Wednesday. He has three beautiful children and they will appreciate his sacrifice. I asked him what keeps him going and he confided in me that he realizes the world is going to get tougher and tougher, and he wants his children to have the best.
What other options did you people really have instead of pursuing law? For most of you, the answer is nothing. Your lives are going to suck whether you work as lawyers or not, the difference is that you are going to transmit the disease of failure and mediocrity to the next generations because you didn’t want to work hard in law school or work hard after law school so that your kids would have something better.
And I don’t want to hear the idiots on here advocating teaching, trades, etc. Most of you wouldn’t have had the heart to succeed in most of those jobs (trades and police work), and would be complaining if you became teachers because you would know that the privileges of that job are coming to an end, and even though your life would have been somewhat leisurely, your kids would be screwed.
As for me, as I am nearing the end of my career, I am happy with what I am leaving behind. I sacrificed and the next generations are going to be all the better for it.
You are a troll and a knob. Your anecdote - if it's true - is a disturbing example of failing to fulfill duties in the name of career. Humans have been holding vigil for the dead and funerals for their loved ones for 100,000 years. Failing to do so is a shocking breach of family duty.
DeleteHow is it a financial gain to bury yourself in student loan debt and then work yourself to death for nothing? Good financial habits are the key to financial security, and you don't need a high income to learn thrift, savings, and wise investments.
- Debt-free and proud.
It's always impressive for a Master of the Universe like 1:14 to take time from his busy schedule to let us all know what ciphers we all are. I, for one, genuinely appreciate it.
DeleteTo sum up: You're all worthless and weak.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uvFpqbfB4c
That younger associate will still very most likely lose his job, and it will get tougher for him all right. Law is a profession for masochists.
DeleteWith that work schedule, that younger associate will also most likely end up divorced, and very badly, losing a majority of his accumulated assets and with heaps of alimony and child support. Being the male, he will most likely lose custody of his kids and be alienated from them. Really sad actually. Being a "successful" lawyer is not conducive to having a healthy and normal family life.
DeleteAh you again. You were exposed last time and went into hiding, licked your wounds, and are back now, with added condescension and vileness to replace the honeyed poison of your previous attempt.
DeleteI'm sure you'll get torn up again. What's the matter, worried that you'll lose your law school scam admin position if you don't work the next gen of student loan conduits?
Good riddance 1:14. Your baby boomer ilk and rotten ethical values are why our country is such a miserable place to live. Not attending your father's funeral is not noble and greed is not a virtue. Enjoy your misery.
DeleteUmm. . .that was a deeply negative post. . .and I seriously question its accuracy. . .you make a lot of assumptions that don't make sense. . .for example, there are many people who work very hard in law school and still end up somewhere in the lower half of their graduating class, and many of those pass the bar without difficulty and become successful lawyers, or at least, that was the case back when I attended law school in the early 90's. In those days, your competition might be a couple of M.D.'s, some folks with PhD's in hard sciences and so on, and you can "work hard" all you want and never come close to their academic level of performance. In addition, you pooh-pooh other options--I have a family member who is not intelligent at all, and has an OK work ethic, I suppose. She studies for 4 semester to get an AA and secure a job as a Radiation Tech. She was immediately hired at a good salary (of course) and went on to earn six figures with her two-year Associate's Degree. So there are a LOT of VERY GOOD options for people who realize that law school is a scam. . .respectfully, don't be closed-minded.
DeleteIn my mid-law days I quickly figured out that success would only come at the expense of keeping pace with people who didn't care whether their marriage failed or whether they saw much of their children. If skipping his father's funeral for a few hours he could make up on the weekend is the price your associate is willing to pay then God be with him, but he is a very sick puppy.
DeleteLOL...I am probably older than you, but I realized early on working for a large firm meant working with and for people like you. Life is way too short for that. I have enjoyed law and I have been more successful at it than I ever expected. Of course, I started my own practice decades ago before competition from the large advertising firms became intolerable. I feel bad for that associate in your firm who is throwing his life away, and for what again? They say that about 10% of lawyers are Sociopaths, and once a lawyer accepts that about other lawyers, it makes it much easier to deal with your type. We just pass you off as another drone sociopath...and go on having a real life in our small firms instead of a fake life, living in a bubble, where you are absolutely clueless about how worthless your life really is, even in the eyes of your children. As Trump would say...bigly sad.
DeleteSome scam-tout expects us to believe that improbable account whereby the bereaved son, one of the chief mourners, allegedly skipped his father's funeral and set his own grief aside in order to rack up a few more billable hours for Scam-Tout & ASSociates. And rather than telling the employee to go to the funeral, our hero left him to work all night long.
DeleteOf course, the small children "appreciate his sacrifice". They must have jumped for joy to see that Grandpa's funeral and their own bereavement paled in comparison to work that deprived them of their father until the next day at the earliest.
Old Guy finds this account a bit hard to believe.
Note also that the readers and contributors of this blog are tarred with one brush: "you didn’t want to work hard in law school or work hard after law school so that your kids would have something better". How many unwarranted assumptions can you spot? Let me try:
1) None of us wanted to work hard in law school. Well, somehow Old Guy kicked ass at one of the most prestigious law schools (the fact that he thinks that the prestige is undeserved is neither here nor there). Other people here also worked hard in law school but did not find good jobs, or any jobs at all.
2) None of us wanted to work hard after law school. Numerous people have reported poor results despite their hard efforts. Some people here have left the legal "profession" and excelled in other domains, including medicine, that call for hard work. Of course, people cannot prove their willingness to work hard if they never get work at all.
3) We all have children. Unsurprisingly, some of us do not. And since the "world is going to get tougher and tougher", to the point of our having to sacrifice our very humanity on the altar of Pelf, wouldn't it be intolerably immoral to bring children into this world?
4) We want to hand those children a cushy existence that we can never have, to the point of skipping funerals and toiling away all night long on the off chance that those children might gain something unearned in a world that "is going to get tougher and tougher".
"I realized early on working for a large firm meant working with and for people like you."
DeleteThis.
"They say that about 10% of lawyers are Sociopaths, and once a lawyer accepts that about other lawyers, it makes it much easier to deal with your type."
And this.
The type of people that rise to the top in law today are, sadly, most likely sociopaths, neurotic and seriously mentally defective.
"His father died last Wednesday. He went to the wake on Tuesday for two hours and came right back to the office to start billing. He worked all through the night on Tuesday and he did not bother going to the actual funeral on Wednesday."
DeleteYou posted this on the 19th (Sunday). How could the father die last Wednesday, have a wake on Tuesday (before Wednesday), and a funeral on Wednesday (the day that he died)?
The 'Trust Fund Brood' probably got COVID-19 and brought it back to the US.
ReplyDeleteCal Western students suing because the school is raising tuition despite resorting to virtual learning.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/cal-western-school-of-law-students-upset-over-rising-tuition-costs-during-pandemic/2368301/
What happens when you sacrifice for the next generation.
ReplyDeleteI've Been Spending My $1.8 Million Inheritance on Prostitutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI9lIBfAg5M
Fall LLM enrollment plummets, blasting a hole in law school finances.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.reuters.com/article/lawyer-coronavirus-llm/fall-ll-m-enrollment-expected-to-plummet-bruising-law-school-finances-idUSL2N2ER20A
Good news.
DeleteLLMs, especially those sought by foreign students, are usually paid for in cash. They typically cost more per year than JDs. LLM students often take a lot of the same courses that JD students take, so an LLM program costs little to deliver but brings in a heap of money. In other words, it's a cash cow. But the milk seems not to be filling the pail now.
Who hires these people with these LLM degrees?
DeleteLOL. I remember my "elite" law school adding a few extra spots in regular law courses for some foreign LLM students.
DeleteI didn't think of it at the time but that's criminal genius. Charge Werner or Pierre an extra $10k for the privilege of sitting next to Chad and Susie in Torts
The LLM is mainly for people with law degrees from other countries who want qualification in the US and can get it (in some states only) by obtaining an LLM from an ABA-accredited law school. It may also be helpful for people with law degrees from the US who specialize in taxation. Other than that, forget it.
DeleteRight OG. I imagine the foreign apps are declining because a lot of the classes are going to be online due to COVID, and DHS has said they're not going to grant (or will revoke) student visas for schools that go all-online. And they can't hang onto that money by keeping the LLMs in-person, because for the most part they're just taking classes already offered to JDs.
DeleteNo US citizen in their right mind gets an LLM unless it is in tax and from either NYU, GT, or (for some reason) Florida. Particularly with NYU and GT, many of those kids are essentially hoping to whitewash a lower ranked JD. You're limited to tax specialties, but it gets you another shot at OCI. At NYU Tax the biglaw placement rate is a lot better than most middling JD programs, but far less than a real top JD. So you're basically paying 100k for one more spin of the roulette wheel. It works out well for some, disastrously for others.
But if the LLM is not in tax or is from anywhere other than those 3, it really is just flushing that money down the toilet. Literally no one cares about any other LLM. Like, at all. Foreigners are different. They're in it for the student visa and for the ability to take the bar, usually the New York bar specifically. They either already have jobs or are otherwise independently wealthy, which is why it's all cold hard cash.
"Some for-profit colleges double dip in both PPP and CARES coronavirus stimulus"
ReplyDeleteNobody said the scammers were stupid...as the article points out, several have faced scrutiny for years, but they are still in operation, still vacuuming up that federal loan $$$-plus PPP and CARES.
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/some-forprofit-colleges-double-dip-in-both-ppp-and-cares-coronavirus-stimulus-120450698.html
Maybe it's time to open the OTLSS school of higher ed, with UG, law school, cooking school, art school and every other scam for-profit school.
If you can't beat them, join 'em.
We should have gotten in on the racket ages ago. Alas! our integrity stood in the way. Now it may be too late to open the OTLSS Scam-Skule of Law, Underwater Basketweaving, & Everything Else.
DeleteWell technically, it isn't double dipping right? The PPP loan is to keep you from laying people off, and will be treated as a loan if not used for that purpose. The CARES Act funding is 50/50: 50% has to be given directly to students, stuff like helping them pay for books or child care and such. In fact, the letter agreement you have to sign actually says you hold that portion in trust for students and have "fiduciary duties" to the students. And the other 50% has to be used for costs associated with changing modes of instruction, i.e. basically to help schools move online.
DeleteSo, three purposes: Keep employees employed, support students directly, and support schools moving online. That's not really double dipping; it's just different money for different purposes.
All three do combine to help keep schools in business, and many of those schools shouldn't exist. But they do exist, so there's a legit question about whether now is the right time to single out the one's that shouldn't exist.
It kinda reminds me of when FFEL loans were abolished during the Obama administration. One of the arguments against cutting out the private lenders was that it would cost jobs at those lenders. Of course, it didn't really because most of them just transitioned from making loans to servicing them, but still, there's no easy way around the fact that no matter how nefarious a given business may be, it may still employ a significant number of innocent people.
So if you shut it down, there will be innocent people who end up as collateral damage. Some secretary at a diploma mill is not complicit in the scam, but the salary pays that person's rent or mortgage and puts food in their kids' mouths nonetheless.
Instead of enriching the wealthy so that we can give crumbs to these "innocent" workers, we should just do UBI and pay the "innocent" workers directly. That way their hands won't be as dirty exploiting others.
DeleteIncidentally, at what level does someone stop being innocent. If I work for the mob, am I innocent, or does that not count as innocent?
"If I work for the mob, am I innocent, or does that not count as innocent?"
DeleteSee Henry IV, Part 1, I.ii:
PRINCE HENRY: I see a good amendment of life in thee, from praying to purse-taking.
FALSTAFF: Why, Hal, 'tis my vocation, Hal. 'Tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.
@3:40: With the mob, that line is easy to draw. The mob always has both legitimate and illegitimate lines of business. They have to, else they'd be unable to launder their money. If you willingly and knowingly work on the illegitimate side of things, even if you're just the accountant padding the balance sheets with laundered cash, you are a criminal. But if you work for the side of the business that runs a pizza shop or whatever and have no involvement with the illegal side, you're probably an innocent even if you might be vaguely aware that some shady characters seem to hang out there a lot.
DeleteWith the schools, it's a bit harder line to draw. The business is legal so we're talking only of moral culpability. The secretaries and janitors and whatnot clearly have no such culpability, and everyone from the deans on up are clearly culpable, as is anyone whose job involves spewing the misleading statistics and glossy marketing materials that entice students to enroll.
The gray area is with the faculty.
I would argue that non-tenure track adjuncts pretty clearly have no moral culpability, and might even be fellow victims themselves. They're not paid much and may even be glorified temps.
The tenured profs are a tougher call to make. They're paid to teach and to write law review articles so that's what they do. They don't set the tuition and they (usually) weren't involved with students' decision to enroll.
For me, the line for a tenured prof lives at how seriously you take the teaching side of the job. How much do you teach, and WHAT do you teach? If you fight to keep your teaching load low and dominated by silly "law and...." liberal arts seminars, you are part of the scam.
But if you teach real and relevant courses like evidence, and you are passionate about these subjects and see teaching as your primary responsibility, then you can probably sleep at night. You're still going to have to publish because that is what your employer expects of you, but if you see that as secondary and do as much as you can to make it relevant to actual practitioners, that's different. Do you keep good office hours? Do you provide meaningful feedback? Do you avoid being a Socratic-method-dickhead as much as possible? Do you appreciate that your grades (particularly in your 1L classes) are going to make or break people's careers, and put real effort into grading? Do you cultivate connections that will help you students find jobs, and do you pick up the phone and try to help them where they can? If you haven't really practiced law, do you make connections with people who do and bring their perspectives into your classroom?
At the end of the day, how do you USE the immense freedom that tenure has given you? Do you use it to do the best you can for your students given realities that are beyond your control? Or do you use it to lead the cushiest life you can, focusing on esoteric subjects that pique your interest without regard to relevance outside the academy, with teaching being an unpleasant annoyance to be minimized as much as possible? That, to me, is how you draw that line.
Interesting idea. I'd have to agree that anyone who is paid $200k per year to teach "Hip-Hop and the US Constitution" or scribble cretinous scholarshit about "the Open Road" should be well aware that the sinecure is made possible by a scam, particularly when most of the students are as dumb as a sack of hammers (which is the case at half or more of the ABA-accredited law schools). On the other hand, you seem to draw a distinction between such fakes and those who teach serious courses on law. I'm not sure the distinction is important. Practically every full-time profe$$or of law nowadays (at the ABA-accredited schools) teaches only a course or two per semester. Even if those courses are Contracts or Evidence or Constitutional Law, the position is still obviously a sinecure—light on work, heavy on salary and benefits.
DeleteIn other words, EVERY job in a law school depends on the scam.
It's not JUST teaching the real classes. That's necessary but not sufficient. You can be the guy at the faculty/administration meetings advocating for higher teaching loads and in general for teaching being the top priority. You can be the guy who tries to cultivate connections and help students. You can be the guy who offers to teach 4 classes if they'll let you even though the contract says you only have to do 2.
DeleteYou can be the guy who says "First, foremost and above all else, we are teachers, and what we teach is a trade. We are losing sight of both those things." Heck, you can even talk about the scam like Paul Campos did. Tenure protects your freedom to say and do such things without getting canned, so I think it entirely possible (albeit rare) to use the security of tenure to fight for good from within, and/or at least genuinely caring about providing the students you teach with a worthwhile experience.
And what about being the guy (or gal) who says that the über-toilet should be shut down?
DeleteA true hero could indeed do that, and someone who feels that way probably SHOULDN'T quit because if they did, someone who isn't so anti-scam would just step right in to the role.
DeleteCan't really expect it though, and such a cantankerous sort would probably lose so much credibility that they'd be ignored completely. Probably better to advocate for stuff like smaller class sizes, lower tuition, and more selectivity, as well as higher teaching loads and lower and more practical publication expectations, than for outright abolishment of the school. If only so that people wouldn't just ignore you completely.
10:56-who are these "guy(s)"? My recollection is that the last time prof tried this-it was at an infilaw school, I think-he got fired. Nobody has done it since-so the "guy" you refer to doesn't exist.
DeleteAnd Campos? Well, he's still drawing his salary at Colorado-but what has he done lately...as in the past several years? Take a look at his blog; he's done nothing.
Everybody at a scam school needs to find a new job, since all the scam schools need to close, immediately. Will that happen? No, but it should.
We don't know who they are, it's not like there's some database. But I've got to figure there's got to be some lawprofs out there who genuinely care about teaching and about their students.
DeleteI agree that Campos needs to get back on the horse. I think he stopped posting on the inside the scam blog because he said something to the effect that he had said all that could be said on the subject, but I don't really think that's true as this blog demonstrates.
A law professor who genuinely cares about teaching and about the students is still very much part of the scam. Campos at least admits that. So does Tamanaha.
DeleteYeah, but he also assuages his guilt with pretty much exactly that "force for good" argument. I'm just saying that argument is not without merit.
DeleteAs he put it on his blog in early 2013:
"In some very concrete, practical ways, reform is much easier to achieve from the inside. I’m proud of the fact that, as of this coming fall, my law school is on track to have cut tuition in real dollar terms over the past two years – something which perhaps no other ABA law school will be able to claim. I’m proud that CU Law School, which two years ago was publicizing highly inaccurate employment information, is now one of the most transparent schools in the country on this score. I don’t happen to believe that I would be more effective working for reform as an ex-law professor. Still, even if I did believe this, I’m well aware I wouldn’t have the moral courage to quit. That makes my belief suspiciously convenient -- but it doesn’t make it false."
I don't buy the "force for good" argument. For one thing, cutting real tuition at the U of Colorado isn't enough: the students are still being saddled with unmanageable debt, for which the public is largely footing the bill. Campos's scam-school should be closed down. I don't blame him for holding onto his overpaid sinecure: I'd do the same in his position. But cut the crap, Campos, and admit that your belief is more than "suspiciously convenient".
DeleteAnd let's be fully realistic: 9:17's entry quotes the blog from 2013. Here we are in 2020, he's still a professor at the law school, and has clearly lost interest in the scam, as his blog has moved on to other things. And those things of which he was "proud"...well
Delete2020-21 annual COA in-state $54,120/annually; OOS $61,738-yep, a real bargain-and note those are the law school's numbers, which are probably very conservative. And per its numbers, 80% of 2019 grads had bar passage jobs-in other words, jobs as attorneys. So 20% paid close to 200K to not be lawyers.
Yes, there's a lot to be proud of there. And yes, it's still a scam.
I agree with this sentiment. If tenured prawfs are so "secure" why did he post anonymously, at least until he was found out? Answer: Tenured prawfs aren't as secure as most people think they are. Google "fire a tenured professor". There are ways and/or ways after situations are manipulated to allow it.
DeleteAnd yes, he and others are still gainfully employed. The Scam rolls on and now, in 2020, prices are even higher and employment lower. Outcomes, both short and long-term are much worse.
Oh yes, there are certainly ways to get rid of tenured profs. Fundamentally tenure is just an employment contract, the main term of which is that they need good cause or financial exigency to terminate or nonrenew it, and when such cause is claimed there's probably going to be all sorts of due process hoops.
DeleteGood cause can of course be found or manufactured if the school thinks it worth the fight, bad PR, and potential faculty revolt over "academic freedom." But that makes terminating you enough of a pain in the ass that it won't be done lightly. What they'll try to do is buy you out. If you refuse, the express or implied threat is that they'll eventually find a reason to end your contract anyway, but they may or may not be bluffing.
Point is, of course tenure is not absolute security. But it is as close to it as it gets so you can get away with a hell of a lot.
Expect even more incompetent lawyers:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.amren.com/news/2020/07/by-easing-its-bar-exam-score-will-california-produce-more-black-and-latino-lawyers/
On top of that, Louisiana is exempting this year's graduates from the bar exam.
DeleteOld Guy is tempted to recommend obligatory disclosures of transcripts and scores on the bar exam, with a recommendation that clients ask to see these before retaining counsel.
Thing is, most "poor people legal problems" are not exactly rocket science, and people with complex problems and the money to deal with them already do their due diligence.
DeleteI say go ahead and give diploma privilege. Grades and bar exam may say something about general intelligence, but they aren't terribly practice relevant and most "regular people law" calls more for street smarts and hustle than book smarts anyway.
But, the privilege granted by diploma ought to be some kind of learners permit type thing: practice only under supervision until you get a certain amount of experience etc.
TJSL - look at this pic:
ReplyDeletehttps://tinyurl.com/y4nw49v9
(shortened the massively long URL for obvious reasons..)
They have a full-on white Creeper Van out front. Gotta love it!
Ask people to describe the geography of a law school, and you'll probably hear a description of buildings, most likely of brick or stone, on the leafy campus of a university. You won't hear about space in an office building or a strip mall.
DeleteThomas Jefferson "School of Law" is ridiculous to the point of obscenity. Merely expressing an interest in the über-toilet demonstrates unsuitability for the study of law.
Gotta get those dollars...the scam that is "higher" ed...
ReplyDeletehttps://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/for-profit-schools-america-144317896.html
Higher education or hire education?
DeleteThat particular scam was made possible by federally guaranteed student loans that evidently were available upon submission of a forged high-school diploma or a forged GED. The law skules are doing more or less the same thing—not actually having buxom women drive around low-income areas and solicit men off the street (though that wouldn't surprise me), but roping in thousands of people who clearly don't belong in law school. The desperate antics that we have seen include raffling off a "scholarship" to people who hadn't even decided to apply for admission, temporarily reducing tuition to zero, and of course whoring after unprepared racialized students in the nominal interest of "diversity". Only because the "students" can borrow the full cost in whatever amount the law skule sets can this particular scam operate at all.
Sheesh. Even in an environment where the regulations are essentially written by the regulated, there's still people who feel the need to break what few rules there actually are. Even mob casinos were (usually) able to figure out that there was no need to literally cheat because the Law of Large Numbers will mathematically guarantee a return pretty much equivalent to the house edge so long as people simply play enough.
DeleteSo it is with stories like this. The standard relating to having a high school diploma or GED is called the "ability to benefit" requirement. A school already CAN enroll someone without a high school diploma or GED, if they can pass something called an ability to benefit (ATB) exam.
The ATB test has to be DOE approved, but it is offered by private vendors who probably wouldn't be in business very long if too many people failed it, and those vendors have to compete with each other. So I'd bet the ATB is probably significantly easier than the GED test, otherwise there'd be no reason for it to exist.
For example:
https://wonderlic.com/student-admission-assessment/placement-insight/ability-to-benefit/
Once again, why do people feel the need to cheat when the rules are already written by their own industry? It really wouldn't have been that hard to get these kids to pass an ATB test rather than forging GEDs. Stupid, greedy criminals like in this article are low-hanging fruit and they distract from the real scam going on every day at supposedly legitimate schools.
Edward Wayne Rene, former assistant dean of Texas Southern, has been charged with theft for ripping the über-toilet off using scams related to admissions and "scholarships".
ReplyDeleteNo honor among thieves. Scamsters should not be surprised at being hoist on their own petard.
And the beat goes on...but will anybody listen? Probably not.
ReplyDelete"Lawyers frustrated and depressed":
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/new-lawyers-frustrated-depressed-by-student-loan-debt/ar-BB17MVdK