Today the US Department of Education announced that Florida Coastal is ineligible for student loans. Specifically, Florida Coastal had failed to meet the standards of financial responsibility, fiduciary conduct, and sound administration. It earned "the lowest possible score", namely –1.0, for financial responsibility. InfiLaw recently dumped its 98.6% stake (InfiLaw no longer even operates a Web site), thereby leaving big concerns about solvency. Insufficient "competency and integrity" also contributed to the decision.
Florida Coastal is looking into the option of appealing against the decision within the next ten days. Already, however, the Department of Education is planning actions to take "if Florida Coastal School of Law closes precipitously"—a likely eventuality indeed. With no significant source of money for operations, the worst possible financial rating, a reported lack of integrity, and an evident propensity for "profiteering off students", Florida Coastal may well go tits up any minute now. Charlotte notoriously locked its doors without a word, and Arizona Summit canceled classes and shut up shop about two weeks before the start of the academic year, so I shouldn't put it past an über-toilet of InfiLawvian heritage to leave its toileteers high and dry.
Florida Coastal seems ready to become the fourteenth law school to close its doors within the past five years. Which will be #15? Nominate your (least) favorite below.
Wonder if the school makes its past their exam period still intact?
ReplyDeleteExams were in progress and apparently ended yesterday, so I'm afraid that the über-toilet did survive that long.
DeleteThe Web page about financial aid is very short: "At this time Florida Coastal School of Law is not eligible to participate in the Title IV student loan program." Is that all that you have to say about financial aid, Florida Coastal? Why not offer a "merit-based" "scholarship", fully funded by InfiLaw, for anyone with an LSAT score above the 140s?
So this is a rather weird case. Usually, and with other Infilaw places like Summit, the loss of student loan eligibility comes as a secondary consequence of losing ABA accreditation. But here, as far as I can tell the school is still ABA and the DOE's action was independent.
DeleteWhen ABA yanks accreditation, they usually provide for teach-outs or the school arranges for visiting status at another school so that anyone who was enrolled when it was accredited can still finish with an accredited degree if they want to, though you probably shouldn't want to since you can often get a closed school loan discharge if you don't finish.
But here, the DOE took the initial action, not the ABA. So the question becomes whether the DOE will or can allow current students to keep borrowing till they graduate, like the ABA would do, or not. And in addition, that raises the question of whether you can get a "closed school discharge" if the school doesn't close and the ABA doesn't yank accreditation. They probably will close eventually, or the ABA will feel like they have no choice but to yank accreditation too. But for right this moment it sounds like existing students are free to stay and new students are free to apply if they have some way of paying outside of federal loans. It's still ABA, after all. So a fully accredited school that is nonetheless ineligible for student loans is something I can't remember seeing before.
Addendum to prior post: Just found on their website that the ABA will require a teach-out for anyone that had the DOE participation agreement terminated, and they do say that they plan to close once the teachout is completed if they have to do one. Looks like they're still trying to get reinstated though, and using the private equity divestiture as the basis, because the problem was that the private equity firm was unable or unwilling to make itself directly liable to DOE:
Deletehttps://www.fcsl.edu/consumer-information-aba-required-disclosures/
Interestingly, if they do have to do the teach-out, the question becomes how in the heck the students will pay tuition and living expenses for their remaining time to graduation if they cannot take more loans to do so. Even if FCL agrees to reduce tuition/fees to zero during the teach-out period, these kids still have to pay for rent and food somehow.
It also seems unclear whether the kids would be able to decline (or be forced out of due to inability to pay for) the teachout and get a closed school discharge.
Summit was much more straightforward: The school closed abruptly and the only teach out was to take visiting status at another school following which Summit would print off its last degrees based on credits issued by the teachout school as part of its wind-down, meaning people clearly had a choice between that and closed-school discharge because the school had actually closed. This is weirder and probably all the more confusing for its current students, who are likely particularly ill-equipped to navigate such complexity.
Florida Coastal is a stubborn turd indeed
ReplyDeleteI hope they flush twice
As we approach the imminent flushing of this foul turd, congrats to Old Guy and everyone in the scam blog movement. Congrats to everyone who has contributed over the years with their comments on the scam blogs.
ReplyDeleteSome of the commenters here are too harsh, claiming the law school cartel won because of all of the toilets still standing. Despite all of the public education campaigns warning that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer, esophageal cancer, stomach cancer, renal cell carcinoma, bladder cancer, emphysema, atherosclerosis, heart disease, and abdominal aortic aneurysms, people still smoke! The tobacco industry was not going to just shut down their billion dollar industry because people are dying. But the fight is still worth fighting despite the fact that Phillip Morris and Altria are still standing. The public education campaigns and warnings have significantly reduced the rate of smoking. We are never going to convince everyone not to smoke. But we still warn people of the risks of smoking to save lives and reduce morbidity from smoking.
Similarly, the scam blog movement was never about putting the entire law school industry out of business. This is a multimillion dollar industry that will do everything possible to stay in power. This may not be a for profit industry (except for Infilaw) like the tobacco companies where shareholders are rewarded with dividends. But the law school cartel is very much a for profit industry for the deans, administrators, and lazy law profs posing as “not for profit” educators, raking in six figure salaries. These people did not give one damn about all of the students who took on six figure debt for a horrible education and poor career opportunities. These people had tremendous power and sympathy given their status as “educators.” They had access to write OpEds extolling the virtue of a legal education, they had access to publish garbage studies proclaiming a JD confers a million extra dollars in life time earnings, they had the media on their side churning out TV series and movies about wealthy lawyers working out of fancy offices.
Despite these advantages, the law school scam movement brought about serious reforms. The law school scam movement successfully warned a lot of people about the law school scam. Thanks to the law school scam movement, law schools had to stop publishing the fraudulent job statistics proclaiming 99% employment rates with average salaries of $100k+. The scam conditional scholarships were exposed. Thanks to the law school scam movement reforms, tens of thousands have been saved. The law school scam movement cost the law school cartel millions, resulting faculty layoffs, educed faculty hiring, and closure of additional campuses. Many deadbeat law profs, faculty, and administrators had to get real jobs. And on top of all of that, the scam blog movement took down 15 law schools.
Thank you. There's something to your analogy: in the cases of smoking and law school, we can persuade a few individuals to stay away or even to kick the habit, but the real solution is political. The US could ban tobacco or, more realistically, phase it out. Bhutan banned it long ago; why not the rest of the world? Only the political will is lacking. With law schools, too, the US (and the several states) could regulate standards, costs, and access to funds.
DeleteInstead of decisive action, however, we get half-measures, such as higher taxes on cigarettes and restrictions of venues in which smoking is allowed. This is because the government puts private profit ahead of public interests. Likewise, with the law-school scam, the government hasn't done much. Law school is big business.
The anti-scam movement has played a major role in bringing down 14 of some 200 ABA-accredited law schools in the past five years, and I don't think that we're done yet. More could be achieved if the government were not controlled by billion-dollar toxic interests such as the tobacco racket and the law-school scam, but that's a more difficult (if worthy) battle.
Smoking is now like lotto tickets: A huge tax on the poor. Smoking is now hugely stigmatized in all but the lowest social circles, but those who still do it pay massively in taxes. Governments are as hooked on that revenue as the smoker is to nicotine and neither is going to give it up.
DeleteTherein lies another similarity to higher ed. The feds probably no longer make money on these loans, but few borrow six figs so it probably operates at a manageable loss. What matters, though, is that these schools create entire economies in the (often small) towns where they're located. Think of all the apartment complexes and bars and restaurants and more that wouldn't exist but for the school and the mix of parental and student loan dollars it injects into a community. It also supplies a ready source of low wage part-time labor for those same restaurants and whatnot, or even no-wage labor in the case of internships and such.
Doesn't matter that those students graduate unemployable: A fresh crop of them, flush with student loan cash and parental rent guarantees comes in every year.
Simply put: The scam makes money for more than just the scammers, just as tobacco makes money for more than just its manufacturers. Thus, the sacrificial lamb approach is the one to use: Every once in awhile you need to find an egregious violator and make an example out of them, but too many palms have been too well-greased to shut it down entirely.
Yes, the ones who can least afford to smoke are the most likely to do so, throwing thousands of dollars per year away on something that only harms them. And the state irrationally promotes the practice because of the taxes generated. Even if we consider only dollars and cents (as is standard practice under late capitalism), we can fairly ask whether the losses on health care, firefighting, productivity in the workplace (why exactly are the smokers allowed to go out for their fix ten or twenty times a day?), crime, and the like are offset by the revenues made off the backs of the lumpenproletariat. (I'd care less if the very wealthy were the primary smokers; after all, early recovery of estate taxes could offer real advantages.)
DeleteThe same goes for the law-school scam. Scamster wannabes in Shreveport, Murfreesboro, Peoria, Fort Wayne, Anchorage, and countless other towns have demanded a law school of their very own, in large part because it would bring money into the area. Never mind that the money is essentially stolen. Never mind that most of it ends up in the pockets of upper-crusty scamsters. Just give us our share of the pork barrel here in Bumblefuck!
Your mention of estate taxes comes close to another key point. By killing off smokers before their time smoking saves a lot of money for Social Security and Medicare. Few people understand that while Prohibition was a law enforcement disaster and built up organized crime in America it was a public health grand slam. The incidence of cirrhosis of the liver did not return to pre-Prohibition levels until the 1960's.
DeleteIt's true that the state can save money by facilitating the early deaths of people. I don't see that as the most appealing policy, especially when in practice it is directed at a disadvantaged segment of the population.
DeleteInteresting observation about Prohibition. I didn't know that the incidence of cirrhosis of the liver stayed down for so long. Imagine the gains for public health if cigarettes were likewise banned.
The school has shockingly few professors. One of them spends time devoted to passing the Florida bar exam. Law school on a shoe string at a very expensive price. Their building looks ok, although on a body of water that some might say is swampy. My brother, an economist of some fame, was told by a millennial that the law schools suffer from capitalism. He corrected and said no, what they suffer is from Government cronyism. This law school shows why - once the federal loan money is pulled - the school will collapse. Without the federal subsidy, we could be down to what - perhaps a 100 law schools, and in time, a far smaller pool of lawyers would exist which would address the supply and demand problem. The academic complex in general, but particularly law school, are bigger rent seekers than public employee unions - quite a feat.
ReplyDelete"Without the federal subsidy, we could be down to what - perhaps a 100 law schools, and in time, a far smaller pool of lawyers would exist which would address the supply and demand problem."
DeleteUnfortunately, massive numbers of people keep applying to law school, which helps to keep many law schools open and keeps them alive. It will be a very long time before the lawyer supply and demand problem is corrected.
Various über-toilets have had a dean whose primary or exclusive responsibility was to get graduates to pass the bar exam. A year ago the scam-fostering ABA finally imposed a "standard" whereby at least 75% of those graduates who do take a bar exam must pass within two years, so now many toilets make commercial bar-review courses obligatory, even for all six semesters. That risibly weak standard is subject to numerous exceptions, though, and I don't expect the ABA to enforce it meaningfully unless it needs to slaughter a Florida Coastal in order to appear to be taking action against the scam (of which the ABA itself is a central part).
DeleteI don't give a damn about a law school's building. Any über-toilet can piss money away on a building that cannot be justified: Thomas Jefferson is the poster child of that. Of course, law schools typically use a flashy building (if they have one) in marketing materials to play to lemmings' emotions.
The easy availability of student loans in any arbitrary amount chosen by the school is a big cause of the law-school scam, but another is the lack of real regulation. Anyone who would go to Florida Coastal is too damn stupid to belong in law school and should be kept out. In the US, though, everyone belongs in law school so that scamsters from profe$$ors to InfiLaw robber-barons can grow fat off the public coffers. A dozen years ago, You Ass News even published an article by scam-professor Frank Wu entitled "Why Law School Is for Everyone" (which article sparked Nando to create the anti-scam blog Third Tier Reality). No ability required; just add a third of a million in student loans and stir. Such is the stupidity by which the US is run.
Florida Coastal is taking an appeal from the decision. In the meantime, it has reportedly submitted the required "teach-out" plan to the ABA. Its two InfiLaw partners-in-crime, namely Charlotte and Arizona Summit, simply bolted their doors, so I wouldn't put it past Horrida Coastal to do the same. Perhaps the U of North Dakota will scoop up the jetsam of Horrida Coastal, as it did with Arizona Scum-pit.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, hang it up, Horrida Coastal. Stop pretending that you put your so-called students first. The jig is up. Even InfiLaw has abandoned its 98.6% stake. You had a long run of milking the state and sticking the taxpayers with the losses. It's over.
I'm sure Infilaw is losing no sleep. Indeed, they saw the writing on the wall and divested themselves, which in fact raised solvency concerns and helped trigger the death spiral, but not before I'm sure the PE investors made back their investment many times over.
ReplyDeleteThis is how private equity works. We're all taught in law school that stockholders get paid last, but a PE-owned shop will pay a dividend before it'll pay the electric bill. Indeed, they even like to do something called a "dividend recapitalization" which is a procedure by which, for some reason, lenders will lend a company money KNOWING it will only be used to pay a special dividend. That's the "PE way": Put a company in debt up to its eyeballs, Hoover every possible dime up to the owners, and then divest before it's time to pay the piper.
Not saying the nonprofits are saints. They're not. But PE isn't even conventional for-profit. It's something even worse.
Yes, InfiLaw has made out like a bandit on its three über-toilets. They used to have a few thousand dolts a year at tens of thousands each. That's around a hundred million a year, or a billion in a decade.
DeleteA basic maxim of real estate is that slum landlords usually view their properties as waste properties. They carry no insurance, they buy on the cheap and then just collect rent with minimal maintenance until the building burns down. They often prey on minorities.
DeleteSound at all like Infilaw?
Yeah, that's a good analogy. Law-school scam = slum lords.
DeleteAnother similarity is that slum lords rent to people they know can't afford the rent. They just want the first/last/security and whatever months the person squeezes out before defaulting, but the point is that they rent planning to evict from the minute the lease is signed. That's the expected eventual outcome of every single tenancy. Just as buy-here-pay-here auto centers loan for cars knowing that repo is inevitable. They're just in it for the down payment and any actual monthly payments they get are just gravy. Heck, I've heard subprime auto dealers brag that they have nearly no inventory cost because they just repo and resell the same cars over and over.
DeleteLaw schools are in a similar position to get money upfront and not have to care about long-term outcomes, save for the laughably generous bar passage rate standard. If they care about USNWR they might also need to play games on the employment rate, but if all they want is to stay accredited then all they need to do is teach to the bar and weed out enough likely failures to bring themselves back into compliance when they inevitably fall out of it from time to time.
Über-toilet Mississippi College failed the ABA's "standard" for passing the bar last year but barely scraped through this year, so now everything is hunky-dory, according to the scam-headquarters that is the ABA:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.abajournal.com/news/article/legal-ed-again-rejects-florida-coastals-teach-out-plan-another-law-school-demonstrates-316-compliance
Oh, the humanity:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cnn.com/2021/05/26/entertainment/kim-kardashian-law-exam-failed/index.html
The California bar exam is supposedly one of the hardest but is it? Is that perception based on the failure rate? With 12-13 state accredited toilets and a bunch of unaccredidated ueber toilets and the ability to skip law school altogether and do an apprenticeship I would expect the fail rate to be pretty high regardless of how tough the test itself is. Do they publish school-by-school pass/fail statistics? It would be interesting to see if the rates for ABA accredited schools are comparable to the rates in other states with supposedly easier exams.
ReplyDeleteGood observations, 4:01. California's unusual circumstances (loads of state-accredited and even unaccredited schools, not to mention candidates who have "read law") could easily be responsible for the lower rates of passing. California also happens to have lots of Toilets-by-the-Sea, which tend to attract shittier students. Law School Transparency has proven the unsurprising fact that good students tend to pass and bad students tend to fail, so we might expect that the dolts (many not from California) of Thomas Jefferson, Whittier, Golden Gate, Pepperdine, and many another shithole might drag down the results in California.
DeleteWhen there are multiple jurisdictions with different standards, some jurisdictions have to have more exigent standards than others. So what if California happens to have the highest standards (and, like you, I'm not convinced of that)? That doesn't imply that California's standards are too high. If California weren't at the top, New Hampshire would be, or Arkansas, or some other jurisdiction. Necessarily there is a jurisdiction somewhere that can be the subject of whining about high standards. Those who clamor for a lowering of the cut-off score in places where it is relatively high seek nothing but a race to the bottom.
Here are your stats from CA:
DeleteCA accredited(3 year): http://www.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/0/documents/admissions/Education/MinimumPassRateStandardCumulativePassRates.pdf
All(Oct 2020 only):
http://www.calbar.ca.gov/Portals/0/documents/OCT2020-CBX-Statistics.pdf
4:01 here, thanks, 11:18. Looks like my theory was correct, the ABA accredited school graduates pass at a rate that is fairly typical in other jurisdictions.
DeleteAt least the unaccredited schools get weeded out by the baby bar, but Calbar schools could definitely drag the rate down since they aren't subject to that. So could the fact that they have no reciprocity or admission on motion. Experienced attys from other states can skip the MBE if they want but would still be pretty rusty on essays in areas in which they don't practice.
DeleteI think it's a mix. Would the pass rate be higher if they didn't have so many toilets? Probably. But things like refusing all forms of reciprocity despite the majority of the country doing so do reek of protectionism. They are aware that the lawyer glut is particularly acute in CA and they do seem to be trying to manage it somewhat by letting people get all the way to the bar exam and then flunking them out after they've already made the investment, rather than trying to reign in the schools. So I think the rate would come up if the toilets went away, but it'd probably still be a lower pass rate than a lot of other states.
Your theory makes sense 4:01. California and New York are often touted as the two states with the toughest bar exams. In the case of New York the reason often given is that New York includes intricate and esoteric federal commercial law subjects such as securities and bankruptcy, which a lot of states omit. I'm not sure what California necessarily includes on the exam or does on the essay portion to give it the reputation of being such a tough state for ABA accredited schools to pass the exam.
DeleteSometimes states make the test "harder" without changing it by simply upping the passing cutoff. Indeed, a state could use the multistate tests for everything in which case they would be involved in neither question development nor scoring, but could still be harder because they still retain the ability to determine what overall numerical score constitutes "passing." I think Cali is known for having a high cutoff, in fact.
DeleteWell, 6:08, my point all along has been that there is a perception of a high cutoff in California but that the real issue is too many state accredited or unaccredited toilets and the ability to read law. The statistics provided by 11:18 show a pass rate for ABA schools comparable to other states which seems to refute the high cutoff argument.
DeleteThe deadline for the appeal passed days ago. I wonder how long it will be before Horrida Coastal is definitively rejected.
ReplyDeleteReply to 1:04 and 1:21, near the top of this thread:
ReplyDeleteYes, the DOE took the lead here, and the ABA followed suit after smiling repeatedly on the toilet. Florida Coastal has already submitted a couple of teach-out plans, which the ABA has rejected. Why were those plans unacceptable? We can only speculate, but I imagine that they amounted to dumping the students à la Arizona Summit or reducing operations to the bare bones. After all, there's no money now: InfiLaw recently washed its hands of Florida Coastal, so who exactly is paying for this pig?
I don't know how the InfiLaw robber-barons managed to divest themselves of their 98.6% interest in Horrida Coastal without someone else's acquiring it. That sounds very fishy.
I predict that Florida Coastal will go down much like the other two InfiLaw über-toilets, which, as you said, simply locked their doors. The ABA, in my assessment, won't accept any teach-out plan that Florida Coastal puts forward, and the DOE won't allow Coastalite lemmings to draw student loans. Result: Florida Coastal goes tits up, and the students are left high and dry. At least, as you correctly pointed out, they should then be eligible to have their loans discharged, though very likely a lot of them will run off to the U of North Dakota or any other dump that will take them in.
They divested without an acquirer, most likely, by simply donating their shares back to the school itself as a corporate entity, the expectation being that the entity would be applying to become a 501c3 standalone which of course cannot issues shares at all. But then I guess that wasn't approved by ABA or DOE or whatever so what you're left with is a stock corporation that owns all its own (now worthless) shares.
DeleteIt's telling that the ABA (which was founded to standardize and professionalize legal education in the US) turned a blind eye to the problem, and let someone else make the hard decisions. The ABA is a worthless organization that has abandoned all responsibility in favor of being a racket. That's all it is now, a racket.
DeleteTechnically, Summit et al didn't "just" close their doors. It's that their approved teach-out was that if another school accepted the kid as a visitor, Summit could issue a JD based on courses taken at another school and that JD would still be considered accredited.
DeleteIt's kinda weird. The school wasn't technically closed, but rather in an approved teachout, even though its doors were locked so the only thing it was really authorized to continue doing was, quite literally, printing JDs after people finished up their credits elsewhere:
https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/18-oct-arizona-summit-teach-out-plan-notice.pdf
The students would have been foolish to go for this, and every last one of them should've just declined it for a closed-school discharge. But unfortunately, I bet few did.
Yes, 11:26, that may well be what happened. The DOE gave Horrida Coastal the lowest possible mark for financial viability, so it apparently has hardly any important sources of money other than the student-loan gravy train, and it cannot secure financing except by passing itself off as a viable law school eligible for funding from student loans.
DeleteI fully agree, 12:07, that the ABA is a goddamn racket. It is near the heart of the law-school scam.
And you're right, 6:08, about Arizona Scum Pit's reduction to a diploma-printing entity. Charlotte, by contrast, did just lock its doors—before even notifying students or others of its closure.
Interestingly, one of the standards in the Higher Ed Act requires that for-profit schools must derive at least 10% of their revenue from non-federal sources. It's known as the "90/10 rule."
DeleteGiven that nonprofit schools don't have to meet this standard, I wonder if that factored into their thinking that going nonprofit could save them.
Funny. The Bronx DA and Old Guy. What a pair :)
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/grads-sue-brooklyn-law-school-charging-school-fudged-employment-stats-article-1.1018685
I haven't seen the papers for that lawsuit, so I shall not comment on the plaintiffs' prospects. But we exposed Crooklyn as a scam-school in 2015, if not earlier:
Deletehttps://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2015/07/brooklyn-law-to-offer-refund.html
The courts so far have rejected the claim that people were misled into enrolling at a Crooklyn or a Cooley by deceptive data on employment. I have only a vague memory of the decisions of the various courts, but a couple of lines of thinking come to mind: 1) The plaintiffs presented little evidence showing that they had signed up because of the data in question. 2) The data were often strictly accurate, with disclaimers about what they did and did not include. 3) People signing up for law school, and for six-figure student loans that cannot be discharged, should be expected to investigate the facts better than by reading the schools' self-reported data so naïvely.
The last of those positions strikes Old Guy as the weakest. He is inclined to think that prospective toileteers should be presumed to lack the intellectual sophistication needed to make a rational decision about attending law school, and that therefore they should not be allowed to sign up for some such toilet as Brooklyn Law School unless that presumption is overcome. At a minimum, disclaimers—initialed one by one—could form part of the contract: "The Lemming hereby acknowledges that the Toilet makes no representations about employment and that the risk of ending up with hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of non-dischargeable student loans for attending the Toilet, and being marginally employed, unemployed, or even unemployable, looms large." But the real solution, as has been pointed out here countless times, is to yank the federally guaranteed student loans and to institute meaningful standards of admission (which will mean taking accreditation out of the hands of the rotten ABA). In other words, shut the Crooklyns down.
Sorry, I just noticed that that announcement was from 2012. Back then there was a stronger case for the law schools' lying about employment, as many of them in fact did lie, which is why the rules for disclosure of employment were changed not long after that (though they're still not great by any means).
DeleteI think the actual data collected is pretty good, and the ABA may have taken some cues from Law School Transparency which I think invented the idea of defining a real "law job" as full time, indefinite duration, bar passage required, not self-employed/solo and not school-funded.
DeleteThe problem is that disclosure is just disclosure. Far as I know, you can't lose your accreditation for bad employment numbers, only for bad bar passage rates which is a really easy standard to skirt by just buying some higher LSATs with scholarships and flunking out more likely failers for a year or two.
The 509 disclosures, meanwhile, operate like the fine print on an infomercial. No one reads that "results not typical" fine print that appears when displaying those glowing anecdotes from the one or two people who had great outcomes. It's not front-and-center in anyone's decisionmaking and 509 is not a standard a school can pass or fail.
I too remember those old cases, and the results. What I recall is that the thing most persuasive for the courts was what you rightly see as the weakest ground: Essentially the idea that these students are "sophisticated consumers" just cuz it's grad school so every applicant is a college graduate.
DeleteIn another era, when a BA in anything from anywhere put you a cut above, that might've made sense. But the days are long-gone when I could rely on anyone with a BA to be a good critical thinker. Heck, many of them seem barely able to string a sentence together.
Nonetheless, those courts seem to have adopted a standard that so long as a statement is true in the narrowest and most literal sense, it simply doesn't matter how misleading it is. At least, not if the student managed to finish a degree in underwater basket weaving from Directional State University or Online Diploma Mill University.
I agree that a BA these days doesn't mean anything other than payment of fees in full. The law schools, however, admit damn near anything, and the government guarantees student loans in any amount demanded by the law schools. It might be hard for the courts not to regard law students as "sophisticated consumers" under those circumstances.
Delete