Two years ago, when fools in the Pelican State were talking about opening a so-called law school in Shreveport, Law School Truth Center wrote a feasibility study showing what a goddamn stupid idea that was. Now, however, the project is proceeding: über-toilet Southern University Law Center is opening a branch in Shreveport.
Southern University is one of the rare law schools that make Cooley look good. Its LSAT scores of 143/144/146 place it dead last among ABA-accredited law schools outside Puerto Rico. It is now the only non–Puerto Rican law school (there were many just a couple of years ago) whose LSAT score at the 75th percentile is below 150. In short, it is a fucking dump. Yet somehow it drew in 336 first-year students last year.
Opening this über-toilet-to-be will allegedly cost between $8 million and $10 million, but Old Guy expects the real figure to be much higher. Already the state government has pledged to flush $500k down this toilet. The building that houses a public library in downtown Shreveport has been earmarked as its new home.
And this branch of the nascent Southern University chain of über-toilets is being planned around a four-year curriculum. Why four years, rather than the usual three? On the reasonable assumption that the students will be too damn stupid to finish on schedule? Will there be an entire year of bar review? Who will sign up for this trash heap when its program is a third longer than that of any other law school?
A local politician justifies the foundation of a new über-toilet on such ridiculous grounds as these: “Corporations and companies looking to move their headquarters and things like that, they want to know if their senior staff would have access to professional degree programs.” First of all, just exactly which corporations are eager to move their headquarters to Shreveport? Be serious. Second, no corporation is going to want to send its “senior staff” for a “professional” JD at the local four-year über-toilet. But of course the local boosters have to tout their shabby-ass little city and its shabby-ass little state however they can.
Public money thrown down this rathole will simply fund a monstrous embarrassment. Louisiana, like most of the other states in the region, doesn't have a single decent law school. With four mediocre to utterly contemptible law schools already, it certainly doesn't need another. This ill-considered venture will be Indiana Tech redux, with the notable difference of state funding to perpetuate über-toiletry in northern Louisiana. Even Cooley has been closing campuses one by one; but Southern University, the new Cooley, is expanding into nondescript pseudo-urban sites. Expect this to end badly. In the meantime, you can bet your ass that many a recently cashiered hackademic scamster from Florida Coastal will be applying for a cushy job at La Toilette Shreveport.
Louisiana as a state is a disaster in terms of K-12 education and healthcare for all its citizens. And OG is right; the seemingly-small allocation of $500K of state money will undoubtedly grow before this TTTTT is finished, probably into the millions of taxpayer money. And when it gets to the point of failure-and that's assured-additional taxpayer money will be sought to bail it out. With LA having the second highest poverty rate in the nation, wasting a single taxpayer dollar on this vanity project is a true outrage.
ReplyDeleteSchool officials in South Carolina say "Thank God for Mississippi" because sometimes the Magnolia State lifts the Palmetto State to 49th place on rankings. Louisiana is another shit pit.
DeleteBy the way, what is true of primary and secondary schools seems to be true of law schools as well. The Southeast is chock full of über-toilets. Don't believe me? Look for yourself.
Five hundred grand is the thin edge of the wedge. Soon enough it will balloon into millions. And someone will have the sense to wonder why what is arguably the worst über-toilet in the US gets to expand its super-shitty operations on the public purse. Of course, that sort of protest won't be tolerated.
I think your blog should focus more on average outcomes of law school grads. There is a huge uptick in law school applications without an understanding of how difficult it is to get a job with lawyer responsibilities in an organization that pays comparably to what a teacher with the same experience level and in the same geographic area earns, and how hard it is to hold that job long term. After losing a full-time, permanent legal job close to the start of the pandemic, I am at a loss to get meaningful long-term employment as a lawyer for a salary. My earnings from temporary work and what I could cull together have been in the low $20,000 range. I worked my tail off in that job and still lost it the minute the pandemic hit. I have a degree from a top 7 law school and years of experience that would be helpful to law firms or in house employers. I have looked long and hard for a job since then and have gotten nothing but rejections, save for tiny bites of temporary work without exposure to people at those organizations who can actually help me work long term. One of the problems is that I am no longer young. The warning to people who are celebrating acceptances to high ranked law schools should be of the extreme risk of attending. You may find yourself without meaningful employment opportunities on a long-term basis. Yes, I had a job in big law when I was young, but those jobs last only a few years for most people. After that, I and many other top law school grads were left with worthless degrees, even from the top half of the top l4 law schools. Proceed carefully, lest you end up with high debt and poor job prospects from a top 7 school.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry about your situation. I too struggled for years to find work despite finishing at the top of the class at an élite law school. Age was an obstacle for me and, I'm afraid, will prove to be an obstacle for you. I wish you well but cannot claim to be optimistic about your prospects.
DeleteYou're quite right that even the so-called top law schools are risky bets for many people, especially those of us who don't come from money. For years I have advised caution even at Harvard and Yale. A review of my older writings here, which go back to 2015 or earlier, will confirm this.
The lack of data about what type of jobs graduates of each law school held in 2019 or 2020, let alone now, is a big problem. People on these websites like toplawschools or lawschoolnumbers view getting into a law school of their choice as a life and death matter and a big victory. They do not understand that the economics of attendance today are not so good for most graduates. The fact is that at least half of the graduates of the last many years who would still be in the labor force if they could choose are not accounted for in legal jobs. Some of these people may have decided to quit to raise children or write books, or do something else, and some have good jobs that do not require a law degree, but most probably have jobs where the JD is of minimal help and the debt from law school is high. Instead of a profession where the median income is over $100,000 a year, you probably have the median law school graduate whose median income is a fraction of that. The results may get worse as a graduate gets older. The lack of this type of data, so no one can see what the older graduates of their dream law school are doing, results in bias of applicants. They see a few successful people and assume they will be like those successful people. They don't see the vast majority of grads with outdated social media profiles or website listings of self-employment in the legal profession that fail to disclose the person is hardly ever working as a lawyer, if at all. Even lawyers earning high salaries in good jobs are often one step away from long-term unemployment because the job market for experienced lawyers is so much smaller than the supply of experienced lawyers with elite or even strong records, and legal jobs often end for reasons beyond the lawyer's control.
DeleteI was fired in 2010 for missing my billable hour goals. After that it was temp jobs and unemployment. By 2014 I'd had enough and got a job in a factory that made construction materials and pre-fab doors like what you can get at Home Depot. The pay was terrible but I got health insurance. They didn't want to hire me, but I lied and said I couldn't practice law due to an alcohol issue. That made me employable.
DeleteI'm sorry this happened to you. But, it's structural, not cyclical. It's not coming back. Right now, light manufacturing, logistics, and warehousing are desperate for labor. Drive to the nearest "Industrial Way" or Development Park in your region and count the Hiring signs. It won't be professional work, but it will be honest wages. Just tell them your practice collapsed and you went Bankrupt. Say it with a smile.
I wish I could brag and say that I endured it all stoically, but I didn't. I was a seething cauldron of fury and resentment for about 4 years. But, it didn't help. I had to slog it out. "Work on in despair" and all that. Good luck, we are all pulling for you.
Old Guy is still in law. He doesn't like what he does, but after years he did finally carve out a shitty little niche for his unwanted ass.
DeleteI'm not sure that I'd recommend lying about problems with alcohol or finances, but desperate times do call for desperate measures. If you try to find work outside law, you may wish to make it clear that your legal career is over and that you aren't going to go back to it. Maybe "I'd prefer not to discuss the details, but I've left law for good. Now I'm looking for work of the sort that you do."
Old Guy too has not endured it stoically, but at this point he has given up on law and indeed the whole tottering economy. He plans to retire in a few years. He should be able to wring some money out in the meantime. He has resigned himself to doing nothing of any consequence, to practicing a bit of shit law for a few years and then giving up.
DeleteOne of Old Guy's professors said that the key to law school is to lower one's expectations. That's also true of the legal "profession". Especially if you've passed your late twenties, expect to get nothing but some shitty little job if you get any work at all. Be pleasantly surprised at anything better.
Credited. Do not even consider law school if you are older than about 26 or 27.
DeleteAnd there is nothing worth seeing for at least a 250 mile radius around shreveport.
Confirmation Bias. Idiots who got a useless degree in sociology, and are living at home, sitting in Mom's basement, working at McDonald's, desperately want to believe that Law School is a Golden Ticket to a great job. Factually, it will let them put off repaying their loans for 3 more years, and they can use some of the loan money to move out of their parent's house as well. They will end up right back where they started, working for joke wages, deeply in debt, with their parents, but nothing you say will convince them of this until long after they have graduated. Law schools work hard to lure suckers in, and keep them there, promising them jobs that don't exist. Once the final tuition check clears, they will have nothing to do with the hapless sucker, they are already hard at work recruiting another class of gullible idiots.
DeleteTrue, dilbert113, except that the law skules abandon their students long before the final check clears. Why shouldn't they? What are the students going to do about being snubbed and abandoned?
DeleteThey employ a few sleazy tricks to minimize drop-outs. For example, law schools typically won't release Fall 1L grades until February, well into the second semester. By that time the marks have paid tution, bought books, etc. The ones who realize whoops, got some C's, those BigLaw dreams are over are told they should stick around, they are already fully vested for the entire first year, and the Sunk Costs argument will be employed to keep them from leaving.
DeleteIn addition, the reeling 1L's who got their fall grades back will realize they aren't top 10 percent (really one must be top 5 percent to be confident of an offer in Biglaw in most modern law schools) and they won't grade onto Law Review, which typically allows only the top 10 to get on, even if the rest of the class has a slim chance to "write on". So the Law School Faculty employs another con, and tells the hapless suckers, well, if you DIDN'T get top ten percent/Law Review, but you DID make top 1/3 & Space Law Journal, that's pretty much the same thing, right? And desperate, gullible, indebted law school students will agree, sure, telling a potential employer that I am in the top 31.535 percent at an OK law school, and write for the Space Law Journal, Riparian Law, Social Justice Journal etc. will definitely get me a job. . .
Deletedilbert113, these are excellent points that haven't been made for a while. I remember in the spring of 1L everyone was waiting for grades, but for sure we didn't get all of them until it was too late to drop out without losing tuition. There's a reason Toilets do that. They are such crooks.
DeleteOne guy had the guts to drop out before he got all his grades - to this day I occasionally think of him and wonder what he moved on to after that.
Nobody gives a tinker's damn about Space Law Journal or Hip-Hop Quarterly or any of that other small-time shit. Only the law review matters—and not half so much as you think.
DeleteTop third is better than bottom third, but it isn't distinctive. "Top third" can't be higher than 26%, because otherwise it would have been "top quarter" or better.
It was so long ago by now but I seem to recall not getting all of my 1L Fall semester grades until two weeks into the next or 1L Spring semester and after my tuition was paid, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to attend classes. In my case I didn't know if I was going to flunk out of the school. But I finished my first year with a GPA of 1.963 and was placed on academic probation. (It was and I guess still is a 4th tier school.)
DeleteBut here we are ten years later and has anything really changed? I mean, from the time Kimber's picture was in the NY Times to now, how many others eventually ended up with no career in law to speak of or the impossible debt or how many managed to avoid it all? On the other hand, how many did just fine?
Over time I dropped the JD from my resume and that was how I got back into the regular job market. As for the debt I will likely still have it by the age of 70 (not all that far off) when I hope to retire. But I can't stress over the law school scam anymore. Stress will raise the blood pressure and after having had a heart attack two years ago, I just hope I can live out a normal life span. So I try my best not to look back on those very unhappy law school days and wasted years and yes I was older when I started. A bad move. A really, really, bad move. Going to that law school I mean.
Yes, your bottom-of-the-barrel law school is still a bottom-of-the-barrel law school. Law schools, realistically speaking, are stuck wherever they are; there's practically no movement upwards or downwards. Harvard will always be élite, and Cooley will be an über-toilet until it finally shuts its doors for good.
DeleteI'm sorry that you didn't do well in law school. Academic probation should have been a shot across the bow: even if you graduated (as you did), you could not expect to succeed as a lawyer. Yes, I've heard the silly old line to the effect that the A students become professors, the B students judges, the C students millionaires. It is true, if at all, only at the élite and perhaps the near-élite law schools—where many of the C students were millionaires before they even enrolled. Toilet institutions such as the one that you attended produce mostly inferior lawyers and lots of non-lawyers. And anyway you weren't even a C student at that point. Dreams are fine to a point, but they become delusions when they are divorced from reality. Millions of people dream of being professional musicians, novelists, athletes, actors, astronauts—but not many meet even the minimal requirements, and those that do are still unlikely to break into such highly coveted lines of work. Law, contrary to the propaganda of the law-school scam, requires a certain level of ability, and people who land on academic probation at an über-toilet should seriously consider whether they would make good lawyers even if they managed to graduate and to be called to the bar.
I'm also sorry about the heart attack. You're right about moving on: you and I both made a big mistake by going to law school, but we've picked up the pieces and done what we could to carry on with life.
Thanks OG. But I'm not all that uncommon. My windowmaker or left anterior descending artery was ninety nine percent blocked and I was poised for a massive second heart attack. Having felt chest pains for a few years, at work and home, I decided to see a Cardiologist. Since I couldn't get an appointment for a few weeks or more it was suggested I go to the ER just to get checked out. Lucky for me because of the blocked artery along with two others. After three balloon angioplasties and three stents the blockage is all clear and of course going forward lifestyle is very important. The lower heart muscle was damaged slightly but healed itself.
DeleteIf I could just add this: Law or rather being involved with law, starting with school can be quite stressful so if in the middle of a stressful life one feels chest discomfort do not ignore it. I really didn't think what I thought was some kind of angina was all that bad. Of course there are other factors in heart disease, such as heredity as in my case. Diet, alcohol, smoking are all factors.
That said, knowing what I know today, I had no business going to that law school. Issue spotting and arranging an essay were shown to the class but I never had the knack and like you say one has to know when to give it all up. A friend said to me that someone from the bottom of the class is called "Counselor" one day just as someone from the top of the class and silly as it sounds, little lines like that kept me going just as the old saw about A students teaching and B students will work for the C students. Stupid folklore suitable for a story book but not real life practical especially with the dire consequences of a lifetime of inescapable debt in the balance which stresses one for a lifetime. It is just an awful feeling one carries in a heart and soul for a lifetime. Debt always there, never ending, world without end amen :)
Back in the 70s, before all these fancy whiz-bang computers came along to muck things up, I remember getting my first semester grades in the mail during Christmas break. I also remember getting back to school for spring and finding out that several of my classmates had been invited not to return. So grades were definitely out before spring semester got started.
Delete4:49 reminds me of that old Scott Turow book about 1st year where he claimed that Harvard (of all places) flunked out a third of the class (prof says "look to your left and your right, one of you won't be here next year.")
DeleteFrom what I can gather, elite law schools were once ruthlessly difficult and proud of it. Now, no one flunks; the worst that can possibly happen at top schools is you get a "low pass" at Yale or a B- at Harvard; that's the bottom of the curve.
Places like Cooley do still weed out the bottom of the class in an effort to keep bar passage rates up, but no one fails out of "good" schools anymore unless they don't even show up for the finals. And since biglaw hires much further down into the class ranks at HYS, you're left with the rather ironic reality that the worst schools are in many ways the most difficult ones: At the toilets, they need to make sure those couple kids at the absolute top of the class are head and shoulders above the rest, the clear victors of a cutthroat contest and clearly identified as such, as those 1 or 2 people are the only people who stand a chance at a good outcome to put in the viewbook.
The reason they're disregarding the feasibility study is that the feasibility study focused on demand for lawyers, when all they really care about is demand for seats and the student loan dollars that come with them and in turn flow not only into the school but into the pockets of local landlords, bars and restaurants, and so forth. Plus jobs at the school itself not just for profs but for the politicians who spearheaded the effort, their friends, and even some secretary and janitor type jobs for regular constituents. And then there's the contractors who will bid on whatever building improvements need to be made, and so on.
ReplyDeleteLocal politicians really wanted this and they wanted the study to support them. But when it didn't, it's not hard to see why that didn't dissuade them.
It's worth noting that law schools have apparently become the politician vanity project of the new century, just as post offices were back in the early 1900s. Spend a ton of taxpayer money on bricks and mortar-no matter if it's a total waste or not-and maybe they'll eventually name the library or cafeteria or (more fitting) the inappropriately-designated "placement" office after you.
ReplyDeleteIt's a scam, a complete waste of money in a state sorely hurting for everything else(healthcare, K-12 education, roads, bridges, the list is endless) but what do the politicians care? And this doesn't count the soon to be financially destroyed lives of the marks, er students, and the millions of federal dollars stolen in loans.
Unbelievable...but with craven politicians, everything is believable.
I don't even really fault the politicians; they're simply responding to incentives like any other rational economic actor. If a law school brings millions into your community every year, you have no incentive whatsoever to care where that money comes from so long as it's a legal source. They don't represent students or the taxpayers throughout the nation; they represent their own district and whatever is good for the district is kinda what they're duty-bound to push for.
DeleteThis problem is created because the feds will loan in any amount for any school that's properly accredited. The local politicians didn't create that system and they'd be kinda foolish to leave money on the table that could be stimulating their local economy. On top of all that, a law school doesn't need labs or affiliated hospitals or anything really besides a building and books and staff so it's one of the easier ways of accessing that cash.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. The feds created this problem and the perverse incentives associated, and only they can fix it.
Unfortunately, trying to limit the number of schools by limiting loans based on demand for grads sounds like the government deciding what dreams people can or can't pursue based on some central government bureaucrat deciding how much of this or that the market needs. That, in turn, sounds like communism and is never going to fly.
Rational economic actors? The phrase turns up regularly in defense of capitalism, but how many decisions are rooted in rationality? We all know perfectly well that people are manipulated by advertising, that choices are heavily constrained, that we're a long way from Adam Smith's simplistic model of small-time producers' flogging their wares at the local market.
DeleteHere the reference to rational decisions seems particularly strained, since the politicians who fund these pork-barrel vanity projects are doing so with money that isn't theirs. The fact that they "didn't create that system" doesn't mean that it isn't corrupt, any more than the fact that someone has left her purse unattended means that I can properly steal it.
The least that can be said is that "the perverse incentives" created by irresponsible federal underwriting of student loans are inconsistent with rational economic activity. You seem to agree on that.
Saying that something "sounds like communism" is no valid criticism. The field of medicine is limited by the number of residencies, something largely under the state's control, so a proliferation of über-toilet medical schools accepting all and sundry isn't possible. I haven't heard many complaints about the role of "some central government bureaucrat" in limiting access to the medical profession, to military academies, to clerkships at federal courts, to teaching positions at public schools, and to many other avenues of employment. Perhaps people see bureaucracy only when they want to.
In addition, the talk of letting people pursue "dreams" plays right into the hands of the law-school scamsters. If people must be allowed to pursue the dream of becoming a lawyer even though their chance of success is remote or even nil, shouldn't they also be allowed to borrow $300k or $400k at public expense for the purpose? Shouldn't über-toilets cater to their "dreams"? Again, I don't see much rationality in wasteful expenditures on training that won't lead anywhere. If matching supply to demand "sounds like communism", so be it.
The number of residencies isn't really under the state's control. It was capped by a balanced budget amendment in Congress in the 1990s. But it is absurd and it does limit the number of med schools, albeit on more justifiable grounds given the need for training programs in very expensive hospital facilities whereas law school you'd be pretty openly doing it just to "match supply with demand."
DeleteI actually have no problem with such matching and agree with you, we should do that. If the feds are going to pay for something then they should be able to make a centralized determination of whether there's demand. I'm only saying it'd never fly in Congress: Democrats would hate it because it would "limit access to the disadvantaged" (which is always the card toilets play) and conservatives would hate it because it sounds like a communist style, centrally planned labor market.
Both objections are false. Access to the disadvantaged is no access at all if all it enables them to do is go deeply in debt for a credential they won't be able to use, and some degree of central planning is appropriate under the proverbial "power of the purse" on student loans. If schools want to charge only what people can pay out of pocket they'd be free to continue to exist, and they'd have to actually compete on price, but for loans there needs to be some kind of "certificate of need" for the school's existence. I'd love that to be the case. I just know the objections that'd be raised and that they'd be sufficient to stop any such effort in congress.
Yes, we'd get the lie of "opportunity" from Democrats and idiotic reds-under-the-beds propaganda from the Republicans.
DeleteTo the former I'd say what you said: extending the "opportunity" of law school to the disadvantaged is really just a form of exploitation masquerading as progressive policy. To the latter I'd say that it's strange that the "free market" should have to be subsidized with trillions from the public coffers.
In much of the world, attending university costs next to nothing. The US makes it extremely expensive—a law degree nowadays commonly costs $300k or more—even though it has become almost a necessity. What the hell can you do with a high-school diploma? Forty years ago there were lots of well-paying jobs that didn't require even graduation from high school. Today we find many people with advanced degrees pouring coffee or running cash registers. We have this combination of circumstances:
* Hardly any job other than a dead-end one can be had with nothing but a high-school diploma.
* Propaganda from the baby boomers drives people to pursue bachelor's degrees and advanced degrees.
* Those degrees cost a fortune, commonly a six-figure sum financed with expensive, non-dischargeable debt.
* Many people never can use their degrees. They may end up scrambling for the same unskilled jobs that people get with nothing but a high-school diploma (if that)—but they are often saddled with student loans.
That's how the US is today. Under the circumstances, degrees of any kind are usually a sucker's bet. Look into trade school instead.
Agreed. You can pursue a career in the military with a high school diploma, but even there, to advance, you're going to have to go back to school eventually. As to the education: yes, of course, one can get all kinds of good, high paying jobs very swiftly with trade school or an associate's studying nursing, dental hygiene, to be a radiation tech or a wide variety of other things. BUT. . .students see college as a 4 year party, and want to take easy classes that earn them worthless degrees. That isn't going to change anytime soon. The best way to meaningfully change things would be to tie student loans to employment outcomes, in college/law school/MBA programs etc. If the ROI doesn't justify the loans, then cut the loans back until it does, and if it turns out the school is just a diploma mill, than bar it from participating in the Federal Student Loan Program.
DeleteIn addition to that, law schools are self-selecting dumber and dumber students each year, and the Bar Pass Rate keeps going down. Smart people know it's a scam. People who honestly believe that going to law school is a good way to get into big law are simply not that smart. Cursory research would show them that 90 percent of the students at most law schools will never, ever, even get an interview for such a job, in their lives. The top 5 percent will get offers, and below that it gets tricky. Again, basic research would also show them that the average time a first-year associate stays with his firm in BigLaw is 4 years. In fact, Biglaw "Careers" of 24-36 months are not uncommon at sweatshops like Cravath. So even for the very few students at the very top of the class who get these coveted positions, they will spend a few short, miserable years earning around 50 bucks per hour, with no overtime, for 60-70 hours a week before burning out or being let go. See, e.g., "Getting Latham'ed." People who are not smart enough to understand that before putting pen to paper on a law school application aren't smart enough to be good lawyers, generally speaking.
DeleteWe alraedy have plenty of data showing that many law schools perform abominably in the department of employment. Unemployment among the latest graduates of many law schools is several times the rate for the general public, most of which didn't take on hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for the privilege of winding up out of a job. Employment typically doesn't last, doesn't pay, or doesn't involve the practice of law. Why should the state underwrite hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loans per person for the sake of such shitty outcomes?
DeleteKick toilet law schools off the student-loan gravy train and limit the amount that can be borrowed. The cost of law school nowadays often exceeds that of private tutors: for less money, one could hire people to teach one the law. The whole thing is a pork-barrel boondoggle favoring the law-school scam.
I'd also raise the standards for admission—and that goes for the undergraduate programs, too. People who can barely read, who can't write worth a damn, who don't understand rudimentary arithmetic are being ushered into universities by the millions. What the hell is wrong with the US?
There is a lot wrong with the US. I started out getting a B.A. at a large state university in the late 1980's. I swiftly realized that the school's leadership cared more about its football team, its basketball program, fraternities and sororities, and other trivia than academics (except for the Engineering program). The "students" were, by and large, just there to get drunk, have sex, go to football and basketball games, and have a good time. Attendance of 25 percent or so was common for Friday morning classes. While this allowed me to do very well academically with less effort than it would have at a school where the students actually studied and actually cared, it was still very disturbing. Dropping out, failing out, or graduating, moving back home, and getting a job at or near minimum wage was very common. There is an awful lot wrong with this country, there has been for a long time, and I expect the USA to break up and end like the USSR did, sooner rather than later. But that's just one man's opinion. The politicians in both parties will just keep cranking up the printing press, pumping out currency that is more worthless by the day. Why shouldn't students take out massive debt that they cannot, and will not, and don't even plan to ever repay--their federal government does the exact same thing, and has been doing it for many decades. Law schools are just being clever by taking advantage of the situation, and using Fraudulent Inducement to con gullible people into their programs. If these so-called "law students" were intelligent, they would have sued these school into bankruptcy years ago.
DeleteIs there any benefit to getting a law degree for the "intrinsic knowledge or prestige" it offers. I have a friend who got into Stetson and has to pay almost sticker price, its ranked 112. He's convinced it's gonna help him in his life, even though he knows nothing about law work...help me talk him out of it.
ReplyDeleteWe won't succeed, but here's a try:
DeleteStetson is a fifth-tier toilet. Fifth-tier toilets meet this description: "Don't go near these unless you are independently wealthy, crave a little wind-up-toy law degree, and are too dumb to get into a school in a higher tier even after exploiting your rich connections."
https://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-seven-tiers-of-law-schools.html
No—repeat, NO—prestige attaches to Stetson. What attaches to it is a stench that will cling to your friend for years, if not for life.
Sticker price at this foul toilet is $45k per year just for fees. With the cost of living thrown in, the place is likely to leave your friend owing $225k at graduation if he finances the ill-considered venture with student loans.
You'll seldom find Old Guy disparaging intrinsic knowledge. But how can it make sense to spend three years of one's life on a full-time idle pursuit of "knowledge" unconnected to any concrete ambition or passion, while racking up non-dischargeable high-interest debt approaching a quarter of a million dollars? If your friend wants to learn a bit of rudimentary law, let him borrow a few books from the library.
If your friend is prepared to do something so foolhardy as signing up for Stetson, at least try to persuade him to spend an hour or two reading OTLSS.
Median earnings of a Stetson JD is $54,000. That means HALF are pulling less than that. Median debt is 3X that amount. The curriculum for law school is outdated and irrelevant to the practice of law, never mind relevant for "life."
DeleteYour friend will be a pathetic debt mule, with financial problems that will bleed into every other aspect of life. A divorce caused by financial troubles is no joke.
Check the Dept of Ed's College Scorecard for the financials.
Yeah. Coming out of Stetson and having a good outcome is going to require SERIOUS connections and/or being like top 1 or 2 people in the class.
DeleteThe fact that he's paying nearly full tuition means both are unlikely to apply.
People with connections don't tend to need to go into that kind of debt for law school because some rich family member will pay their way, and people likely to end up top of the class usually came in with better numbers that were purchased by the school with a big tuition-discounting "scholarship."
People who came in with numbers that are low for the school tend to be the ones who pay full boat, and they are the least likely to end up top of the class which is already 98% unlikely to happen regardless.
To answer OP's original question: Yes, there are people who go to law school on a lark or who just want to be able to say they're a lawyer. But the only people who should do that are the people for whom the money is inconsequential for one reason or another, and who have no need or expectation to actually make a living off their JD.
For example, there was a guy in my class who was a retired cop (keep in mind they can retire in their early 40s) and who had also just come in to a significant inheritance. He was paying his tuition in cash and didn't care whether he ever actually worked as a lawyer, his pension was ample and he "just wanted to know how this side of the system works." Figured he'd hang a shingle after school and just take on the occasional case for the heck of it and only if it seemed fun or interesting, but he had no need whatsoever for his JD to actually pay any bills and he wasn't going into debt for it. He really was just going for the intellectual stimulation. That's an example of someone who I can understand going.
Ironically, from what I heard his subsequent solo practice did better than he even wanted it to. Turns out that being a seasoned former cop who was extremely well-liked in the department ended up getting him a lot of good referrals as a defense attorney, and knowing his former colleagues inner workings so well helped him do an effective job to boot.
This person barely got into Stetson. He's really more of a Charleston or an Ave Maria über-toileteer. One of those would have offered him a discount just to buy his poor LSAT score, but instead he tried to climb the toilet ladder as high as he could, and Stetson was his top rung.
DeleteAnd he expects to find "prestige" at Stetson. Some people really won't be told.
OP here, after some clarification, he says his dad is more than willing to pay tuition. I agree with everything you all have said though. I told him to ponder the following; "If I had to pay for this law degree with my own hard earned money, would I really want to go to a TTT?"
DeleteIf Daddy has a quarter of a million to flush down that toilet, Baby belongs to the upper crust and therefore qualifies for Old Guy's exemption to the general ban on attending fifth-tier law schools like Stetson.
DeleteThey just keep lowering standards for becoming a lawyer.
ReplyDeleteOregon Might Do Away w/the Bar Exam Altogether:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KG3XK2ctjo
Can anyone comment something otherwise interesting so as to jump start this post? It is a shame to see how the law school scam movement is fading away like this, unless it rightly should. Maybe a lot of everything posted here in the last few years is false?
ReplyDeleteI seem to recall the unified scamblogs going along when Paul Campos, his stature and memory somehow deified here, came in like Ross Perot and effectively squashed it all.
In subsequent years many trillions have been thrown around by congress in the name of stimulus so maybe, just maybe, the total outstanding student debt in the US of some 1.6 trillion is not really all that much money to worry about and if not, then for sure the student loan "conduit" and one commenter used to say over and over, will flow well and strong like a healthy artery possibly for quite a while longer with oh....you know....the SLABS and assets on the big books being quite healthy. Finance in a macro sense having been way over the heads of the gang and relevant professors here.
Still though, one must think logically and if getting out of law school over the last few years gave rise to other jobless juris doctors if you will with some modern day sympathetic Tamanahanas and Camposes and all, where are the blogs or voices or do we all just spin down the drain for the rest of our lives, muttering and mumbling and complaining and just generally miserable for the rest of our days? My suspicion is yes because the Ross Perot character was on the job and did his work well for those pieces of silver and as I say 1.6 or 1.7 trillion of debt for a higher ed. will grow over a decade or more even though Biden has good eyes and he is a good man and I see kindness (so much care and love) in his face and hope for mankind.
Oh I forgot Debra Merrit. Precious Love for humanity and beautiful mind and her dear heart is as boundless as the sea.
I take it badly of Campos though for not chiming in here or maybe he is out there as the great human voice and my eyes fill up with tears to think so. He too has such love for all of us you know.
So let us think about the just and the good and the care and the kind. Let us all click off this blog kind of cross eyed and confused and make resolutions to do nothing and thereafter be ineffective and failures for the rest of our lives and call it blessed, and good. With our hearts. WITH OUR HEARTS!!! Amen, though I doubt this will be posted.
In many ways, worthless Master's degrees-even from the "elite" colleges-is a much a scam as TTTT law schools.
ReplyDeleteThe scam has many tentacles...but there are two consistent pillars: easy loan money for worthless or marginally valuable degrees, and dupes, er students, who can't seem to realize that borrowing a quarter million dollars for a degree that may or may not get you a 60K/year job is a bad idea. From WSJ:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/financially-hobbled-for-life-the-elite-masters-degrees-that-dont-pay-off-11625752773?st=ef9geqi4tustpkl&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
I ran across that WSJ piece too. Great article. Note the part about how the problem is actually worse for these worthless masters degrees, even though the regulators have been targeting the for-profit schools which are mostly undergrad mills. Note also how it points out that unlike undergrad, there is no cap on lending whereas Stafford loans have annual and lifetime limits.
DeleteCongress and DOE have got to wake up and start paying more attention to graduate school. They're so focused on undergrad that the taxpayers are getting robbed blind by schools that have figured out how to milk gradPLUS. A lot of the elite schools, for example, are VERY good at meeting financial need for undergrads. It talks about how Columbia waives all tuition for a bachelors if your parents' income is below a certain level, for example.
Then they just turn around and recoup that in the graduate programs. It works because congress and the regulators have focused all their attention on "college" on undergrad, and are barely even aware of graduate degrees and the shenanigans that can be pulled with them.
Earlier this year, Old Guy recounted the evolution of schools in the US over the past hundred years or so:
Deletehttps://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-law-school-scam-is-just-one-ugly.html
Within living memory, even high school was unusual. Within Old Guy's lifetime, bachelor's degrees were uncommon. The proliferation of advanced degrees is even more recent.
What has motivated the change? Why, in this money-oriented society, do people go in for worthless JDs and a whole range of ridiculous master's degrees? In large measure, because a bachelor's degree has become about as useful for finding employment as a certificate from the local nursery school. As late as the 1980s, people would just take their new BA and get a well-paying job. Few would bother with another degree unless they needed it for particular career-related ambitions. But now that college graduates struggle to find a job pouring coffee, "distinguishing" oneself with a further degree seems more attractive. And the universities have not hesitated to profit from a proliferation of rubbishy degrees.
I, too, highly recommend the WSJ article. It's the law school scam redux. Now, if only the reporter and others would realize that what's going on with these worthless master's degrees is what is STILL going on with worthless law degrees, but only on a much larger scale.
ReplyDelete(Of course, not that it will matter, because as previous post noted, law school is "free," but we can only hope. Lookee, is that a windmill?)
I don't know, this stuff never gets mentioned here but politically, there is much going on now as far as student debt forgiveness or relief goes and it is really a complicated issue. Schumer and Warren are prominent currently with solutions that are being passed around. You know, some demographic groups are said to be harmed more than others be they under or master grads.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that it will be a decade or more before the student debt issue will be taken seriously for whatever degrees at whatever place and borrowed by whatever group.My hunch is that 2022 will see the Republicans back in control of Congress after reading the most aggressive FOX news plus citizen commentary. Republicans have no care about student debtors. After 2022 millions more will be retiring with student debt and well nigh starving and having Social Security garnished as a result of the terrible mistake of getting a higher degree and my crystal ball says that then and only then will there be some creep journalist to say: "Gee" Like the Lemonade man maybe, but he does write accurately about how it is all going and I give him that.
Forgiveness is the wrong tree to bark up. Akin to bailing out a boat without plugging the leak.
DeleteThe real question is why we're lending it in the first place. Any other loan has underwriting criteria. The house has to appraise for the mortgage, and so forth. But for school we pretend that all degrees are equal. It's absurd.
At some point, we should stop even bothering to calculate a balance. Income based repayment is rapidly becoming the default repayment, which essentially operates not as a loan but rather an indenture: Pay a certain percentage of your income for a certain amount of time and you earn your freedom.
Maybe the schools should have to take THEIR funding, that way, as a percentage of future earnings as opposed to getting paid in full, upfront, and regardless of outcome. But if we just issue some blanket nationwide debt forgiveness jubilee the debt will just pile back up again.
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DeleteKeep an eye out for when Application info by school is available. Applications are up 28 Percent, but it is not going to be up across all law schools. It's going to be way up at super-elite law schools, and up 4 or 5 percent at the trashcans like Marquette, DePaul, and the like. Those schools are having some serious financial challenges. Trashcan colleges with toilet law schools are going to have a rough couple of years. Concordia tanked, and several more law schools will be going down with their garbage universities.
ReplyDeleteYes, reportedly the demand at the élite schools has gone up dramatically, to the point that many people are bitching about low rates of admission at those schools. Will someone who a year or two earlier would have been competitive for Harvard accept a Vanderbilt as a consolation prize? I doubt whether the cascade of people settling for less will continue all the way down to the worst of the über-toilets. If, as you suspect, the surge of interest in law school turns out to have been top-heavy, the toilets and especially the über-toilets may indeed be in trouble.
DeleteOne has to wonder if many more years will pass before the grievances expressed on this blog will or will not be resolved in any substantial way. Among the multifaced and rather complex complaints, high to low tier, is the notion of student debt and I apologize to our more zealous above all that commenters here for having brought it up. Still, I feel I should since the Times or was it the Journal says half of the 1.7 trillion or so is owed mostly by law and medical grads.
ReplyDeleteAs always I ask, as I have been asking for years by now now: how much of that 1.7 trillion of money said to be owed by all is due to compounded interest and penalties of a nature unfair? No one has ever been able to answer that question or has tried to.
My other question has to do with a sort of wonder over how a school of education--law let us say- can continue to lend with no underwriting criteria- with a wink and a nod as for the possibility of the loan ever being paid back? Surely a percentage of every yearly incoming class, deluded or not, will be served in such a way, but for how much longer?
The state stupidly guarantees those loans in any amount set by the school, to any nincompoop whom the school chooses to admit. With that guarantee in place, why should the school care about underwriting criteria? The state blindly underwrites everything that the school proposes. We can't blame the school for taking advantage of something stupid that the state is ass enough to offer.
Delete