Faithful readers, we are still here. We have been relatively quiet only because there has been little news to report on the law-school scam, thanks in large measure to the disruption resulting from COVID-19.
One new development is the shift to on-line instruction. Since March, on account of the virus, law schools have closed their campuses and switched to lectures delivered via the Internet. Harvard recently announced that it will do the same for at least one more semester, once classes resume in the autumn.
What does this development mean for the law-school scam? The very viability of teaching law in this way casts doubt upon the putative need for expensive buildings, libraries, and, above all, faculties of overpaid professors. Now that the entire student body at Harvard can complete a semester from Paducah, Peoria, or Phnom Penh without getting dressed, why not complete all of law school in the same way? And if students can do so with nothing but some Internet-based lectures, can Harvard not slash its faculty and support staff? The lectures themselves can just be recorded once and for all; students anywhere can attend them at their convenience. A few adjuncts can be hired to grade exams on the side.
It might be argued that the students have to write a paper or two, using the library's resources, or perhaps conduct a moot. But that doesn't justify three years on campus: the students can just show up for a couple of weeks and stay at a hotel if necessary while they do the little bit of work that must be performed on site.
Harvard has long been regarded as the bellwether of the law-school scam: what Harvard does, every über-toilet is sure to imitate. (For instance, every über-toilet teaches law as if its charges were slated for Global Leadership™ or litigation before the Supreme Court.) Now that Harvard can operate entirely via the Internet, other law schools will do likewise. And why shouldn't they? Why maintain the costly, old-fashioned mode of instruction when a cheap and efficient substitute can be rolled out even at Harvard?
The implications for the law-school scam are harder to predict. On the one hand, the widespread introduction of on-line instruction may shore up many a toilet law school by facilitating enrollment. Students no longer need feel constrained by geography: wherever in the world they may live, one toilet is accessible as another. That fact may foster competition among toilets, but it may also help them to put lemming asses into virtual seats. On the other hand, the on-line medium will sap law school of much of its mystique and prestige, thereby discouraging many a prospective student. And even some of the thickest lemmings may call into question the fancy price tags attached to JDs. That could drive the cost down significantly.
Will COVID-19 prove to be good or bad for the law-school scam? Share your thoughts below.
It's not just law schools, the entire American education system needs to be reformed.
ReplyDeleteCovid 19 has revealed that education needs to be reconstructed from scratch
by John T. Reed:
https://johntreed.com/blogs/john-t-reed-s-news-blog/covid-19-has-revealed-that-education-needs-to-be-reconstructed-from-scratch
If I was Harvard, I would open up my admissions. I would break it up into different programs. Harvard Gold, Silver, Bronze or something like that. The traditional standards for the highest level, then cover everyone else. Why not just collect all the law school tuition money instead of spreading it around?
ReplyDeleteThey can use the same lectures for everyone. No need to fill classrooms, you can have an infinite number of people watch the lectures, it will scale up. Then just hire people to grade.
This would kill off most other schools. Most of them shouldn't have existed anyway. All they really need is one WC, one EC, one mid-north, one mid-south. 4 law schools in the entire land.
Then anyone who went to Harvard would be asked "Gold, Silver, or Bronze?", and obviously only Gold would be regarded as a sign of distinction. On the other hand, plenty of people would be happy enough with Silver, Bronze, Tin, Lead, Plywood, Plastic, or whatever else they could get. After all, tens of thousands a year flock to the toilet law schools. Maybe Harvard should indeed buy Cooley out and turn it into Harvard Cardboard.
DeleteHarvard already gives away various courses on the Internet. And for many years people have paid for a short on-line course just so that they could claim on a résumé or elsewhere to have attended "Harvard Medical School". Prestige-whoring is big business.
Univ. of New Hampshire, Franklin Pierce School of Law, a supposedly well regarded school for IP and patent law, already offers their JD program online:
Deletehttps://law.unh.edu/hybridJD-DIA
As you obviously understand, no law school is "well regarded" in any particular area. There are good law schools (very few) and bad law schools (the vast majority). The nonsense about being "ranked fourth in the promising field of law & hula hoops" is just that—nonsense.
DeleteThe U of New Hampshire is not well regarded as a law school; it is rather a mediocrity on a par with Drexel. And its alleged strength in IP and patent law is a myth. If you have your heart set on those fields, you are far better off with a Harvard, a Vanderbilt, even a U of Iowa.
lol Harvard already has that at the undergrad and MA level. It's called the Harvard Extension School. It's open admission to enroll in the first few classes and if you score at a certain GPA then they admit you to a degree granting program. The classes are mostly at night but are typically taught by "real" Harvard profs.
DeleteHarvard's official resume guidelines actually allow you to describe the degree in a somewhat misleading way, too. Employers that are smart enough to check or who know what the extension school is aren't fooled, but people who leave the region and get jobs in faraway areas of the country often get away with it because people that don't regularly see many Harvard grads have never heard of the extension school.
So yeah, getting an ALB or ALM from the extension school and then searching for jobs somewhere far removed from the places "real" Harvard grads normally go can actually work as a pretty effective back door for using the big H brand to beat out other applicants.
I used to work with someone who did this (in non-law industry before law school). Our boss used to love to brag about how he'd been able to snag a Harvard grad. She hung the diploma on the wall so I could see that it was from the extension school and thus not really much more selective than a community college, but I figured hey she beat the system it's not my place to rat her out. Employer was totally clueless though.
If the extension school had a JD, well it wouldn't work in biglaw of course, since they ALWAYS check transcripts. But I suspect a lot of smaller places in middle America wouldn't know any better or might even be willing participants just because it would allow them to say they have someone who went to Harvard on their website.
People have managed to get jobs as lawyers without being admitted to any bar or even having a degree in law:
Deletehttps://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2020/01/the-fake-lawyer-scam.html
So why shouldn't people get away with passing an extension school off as the selective and highly coveted regular programs of Harvard University?
Bad for the law schools' bottom line. Students (many of whom occupy the lower end of the IQ spectrum) will question why in-person instruction is necessary, particularly because the ABA already allows a portion of credits to be taken online. Faculty will push back and say ridiculous things like,"going fully online requires new pedagogical techniques and we cannot adapt to such a cataclysmic change." Administrators, under pressure from the university, will make up some dumb argument that "in-person instruction facilitates a more robust, ongoing dialogue that enables us to effectively fight for social justice." The ABA will do nothing because most members of the council and house of delegates are afraid of their own shadow. And somehwere in this messaw schools will interject concepts like implicit bias, disparate imapact, and otherization, and try to force them into the argument.
ReplyDeleteUltimately, more law schools will close and we may get back to a period period where only intelligent people are being admittes to law school.
For greater verisimilitude, bolster your quotations with some hackademic jargon, such as narratives, intersectionality, experiential, and critical thinking (or is it thinking like a lawyer?).
DeleteA lot of the students are pissed off about the Harvard decision for the fall. Almost all law schools allow for a leave of absence, and I bet that's going to happen a lot this fall.
ReplyDeleteLooks like Charleston is about to be flushed, Old Guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/gzia6f/in_case_theres_anyone_on_here_who_attends_csl_and/
ReplyDeleteThanks for that; it had escaped my notice. Several other über-toilets received similar notices around the same time. I shall post an article on this subject soon.
DeleteFrom Forbes:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2020/06/09/the-future-of-law-school/#3016b7917e45
Law schools have relied heavily on the Socratic Method, especially during the first year of law school, for many decades. See, e.g. 1L by Scott Turow and the accompanying movie and TV series "The Paper Chase". If classes go on video, will professors realistically be able to put students on the spot to see if they have done their assigned reading, are prepared for class, and understand the law? Many idiotic law students are known as "gunners" for repeatedly raising their hands, calling on the professors, and trying to show off their knowledge of the law to the professors and fellow students. It has been reported that some "gunners" literally do fist pumps and shake their hair after responding to a "cold call" from a professor. Apparently they spew out a bunch of law and the seek to celebrate and congratulate themselves. . .while this all may sound trivial, student-professor interaction, and student-student interaction, are a very important part of law school. Some schools even have mandatory attendance policies and grade students on class participation. Some professors are sadists who seek to humiliate and mock students during cold calls for being unprepared or not knowing the law. Given that there are no quizzes, midterms, labs, or papers for most law school classes, just class participation and a final exam, getting rid of the whole class participation aspect and telling students to just watch some videos and take a test after a few months seems deeply unwise. . .
ReplyDeleteIt's a captured system. So long as the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar gives their rubber stamp and the Department of Education continues to underwrite those exorbitant student loan amounts, the scam will continue regardless of whether classes are taught online or in-person.
ReplyDeleteFun Fact: The ABA is dying and losing members like a beast.
DeleteAs with so many other COVID-related changes, people are going to call to make the ones that "seem to work just fine" permanent. Current ABA standards don't just mandate various facility and library things, they also state that no more than 1/3rd of total credits, and no more than 10 credits in the first year, can be via online classes.
ReplyDeleteNow, of course, some schools will say online delivery worked just fine during the crisis so the standard should be permanently changed, paving the way for the first fully-accredited 100% online law schools.
That'd be fine in theory. I mean the JD is already 100% classroom based, with any kind of field experience or moot court being entirely optional. And as OG said, no one uses the libraries anymore anyway except as a quiet place to study.
Problem is, the online schools should be dirt cheap as their costs would be massively reduced. Office space in some strip mall to house the financial, IT and recordkeeping functions an online school needs, a few professors to sit in front of Zoom and deliver lectures and grade exams once per semester, contracts with companies like ProctorU to keep people from cheating while taking exams at home, plus marketing budget and maybe some compliance people to deal with the regulators. That's about it. Should be able to run a school on a couple million bucks per year. Make it 4.5m so you have a nice margin. Assume a class of 100 kids so 300 across all three years and you should be able to rock and roll charging like 15k/yr, which is like a third or less of what schools are currently charging.
So sure, go ahead. Let online law schools happen. But don't do it unless the schools are prepared to both reduce their costs massively, and pass those savings on to the students. That is the part that'll never happen, alas.
Yes. Even with borrowed money, people aren't going to want to spend 50K a year to watch a bunch of videos. More like 5K a year. So if law schools say no more lecture halls, no more live classes, just watch some videos and pay us 150K for three years, people will say nope, not gonna do it. Maybe the scam will finally come to an end.
DeleteWith tuition often exceeding $50k or even $60k per year at schools ranging from Harvard to Cooley, law school is already so expensive that one could hire private tutors for less. Maybe we should institute private tutors instead of fat-assed bullshit hackademic establishments.
DeleteCalifornia already allows private tutoring to qualify for the bar exam, with some testing along the way.
ReplyDeleteCould it be that Kim Kardashian is the future of legal practice?
lol yes. Right now, only a couple of people per year, at most, qualify to take bar exams this way in states that allow it (I think about 7 states do). They almost never pass, and no one would hire them even if they did.
DeleteBut if law firms wanted, I see no reason they couldn't do this as an organized activity and charge participants. I'm sure that whatever lawyer is teaching Kim is billing her for the time. Could be a nice source of revenue for the firm while still charging a lot less than law school. There'd be no loans so people would have to pay out of pocket or finance it on a credit card, but there's probably plenty of people who could cough up 5 or 10k/yr if it meant they didn't have to borrow 200.
If enough people did this, such that it started to become more widely known and accepted instead of this weird antiquated thing that just sorta remained on the books from a time before there were law schools, and enough of those people were smart enough to actually pass the bar, maybe we'd start to realize that apprenticeship was probably a better way to teach this stuff all along.
It's just that the dominance of the classroom model has ensured that only a vanishingly small number of people (mostly dolts and/or crazies) attempt it. But smart people apprenticed to good tutors, I think, could probably produce better (and much more practice-ready) lawyers at a far lower cost than law school, and they would do so in far fewer numbers in much better balance with supply and demand.