♪ Charleston, Charleston,Made in Carolina.Some sham, some scam,You'll take it up the vaginaDown in Charleston, Charleston,Lord, how they can swindle!Ev'ry time they pullO'er your eyes the wool,Don't believe their bull:They've made pocketsful.Damn sham, flim-flam,Will be a back number;But at Charleston, yes, at Charleston,That scam school's surely a comer!Some time they'll bilk you one time,The scam school called Charleston,Made in South Carolin'. ♪
Law School Truth Center posted this little twelve-year history of Charlatan Charleston. Largely accurate, it did go astray with the prediction that Charleston would be the second law school to shut up shop. Since LSTC's article came out, fourteen law schools have gone tits up, but unfortunately Charleston isn't among them.
Recently Charleston gloated about a proposal to charge no tuition. While its scamsters dream on, its graduates keep failing the bar exam: this year only 46% of those taking South Carolina's exam in July received a passing score. That's the lowest rate achieved by the graduates of Charleston since 2008, when Law School Transparency started to keep records.
Scamsters will trump up excuses galore, but the fact remains that a class drawn from the 140s on the LSAT can be expected to fare poorly on a bar exam. And when the law school is a bullshit unneeded upstart from the present century, it doesn't compete with Harvard for students.
Will the ABA do anything about this shit pit by the sea? Let's just say that Old Guy isn't waiting with bated breath. Earlier this year, just months after Charleston missed a new nominal standard for maintaining accreditation, the ABA cheerfully conferred its rubber stamp of approval on the über-toilet. Expect the scam-fostering ABA to exercise its "discretion" in the direction of covering up for this would-be InfiLaw scam-school and all of its peers in über-toilet territory.
In the meantime, O aspiring toileteers, if you are ass enough even to consider applying to this stinky dump, tell us one thing: what exactly do you plan to do if you get your Mickey Mouse degree only to find, like so many of your fellow Charlatans, that you can't pass any bar exam?
It's hard to justify a law school outside of the top 10, even the bottom half of the top 30 is going to be a very difficult proposition. The fact that there are more schools than that, and they charge such insane tuition rates, and that people still go to them all this time later truly boggles my mind.
ReplyDeleteEspecially with all the better options available to young people these days. You're far better off jumping on WallStBets, becoming a streamer, or trying your hand at crypto. All of those options are considerably lower cost and have a higher likelihood of bringing a benefit. Even if you can't manage to make a living off any of it in 3 years, you'd still be so far ahead of the vast majority of law graduates and you could actually teach the career centers how to network, the only thing they actually tell you to do in law school anyway.
That's the funny thing about Standard 316. It's a two-year passage rate which can be up to 4 attempts. As noted in the LST link you posted, under that standard it jumps to 74.2% which is just a hair away from the 75% compliance standard.
ReplyDeleteBeing that close provides ample justification for the ABA to let them "improve," which is usually done by some combination of buying better LSATs with tuition discount "scholarships" and failing out more of the bottom of the class.
They'll be fine. At least under this standard, they will. Of course, if it takes someone 3 or 4 tries to pass the bar they're unlikely to have much in the way of job prospects, but that is not the ABA's concern apparently.
Don't forget bribing graduates to refrain from taking the bar exams during the two-year period in question.
DeleteAh yes tricky tricky. Had to look it up as I didn't know this, but now I see that 316 does say it is in fact a percentage of graduates who sit for any bar, not just a flat percentage of graduates. So yeah, you could make up a few of those school-funded pseudo jobs, it's just that now the duration would be two years instead of the 9 month USNWR window, and a condition of employment would be that you're not allowed to sit for any bar during that time. Maybe they'd pitch it by saying they'll also pay for aggressive bar prep during that time or something.
DeleteIt's perhaps one of the more expensive options for the school, but it could be done.
RE their zero-tuition idea, it isn't impossible. According to their website, their endowment is respectable. It'd have to be a pretty small staff and a significantly contracted class, but it would be possible to run a law school off donations and the investment returns from the endowment in potential perpetuity.
ReplyDeleteIt may well be a dream of the dean's though. Hard to imagine whomever his board is giving up all that cash. But it could be done.
We have a desperate shortage of truck drivers, we have an urgent need for nurses, and there are all kinds of other careers where a short period of schooling, ranging from about six months to two years, will immediately lead to multiple job offers, possibly with a signing bonuses. Generally speaking, employers are looking for qualified warm bodies for these jobs and do not care where the applicant went to school, or what their class rank is. On the other hand, one can spend 4Y in college, 3Y in law school, and pass a challenging 2 day Bar Exam to get no job at all. Some law school grads work for 22.00 per hour doing "temporary document review projects." So, I am starting to conclude that most people enrolled in/applying to law school today simply are not very smart. They're not going to get a job. . .they appear to be going because law school as always been their dream, or they simply don't want to work, and so three years of time off, funded by student loans they will never repay, appeals to them.
ReplyDeleteThe legal profession too doesn't care much about class rank and school when the candidate doesn't fit the discriminatory requirements of the job, including youth (30 is already over the hill). Old Guy is the poster boy for that.
DeleteI'm not confident in the long-term prospects of truck driving, but it's true that one can get the requisite training in a few months and start working. Nursing is also an attractive option.
Law, however, is a fucking wreck.
30 is definitely way over the hill Old Guy. I think this site should put up a post about age discrimination in entry-level attorney hiring. I'd be happy to share my experience as someone who foolishly thought that 34 wasn't over the hill and walked away from an engineering career.
Delete9:55, You are right about the desperate shortage for other careers outside of law. The Department of Education College Scorecard website provides data on median earnings and debt by field of study. The salary data only includes the earnings of students two years after graduation who received Federal financial aid. Take the university where I attended a second tier toilet law school for example.
DeleteGraduates of the toilet law school reportedly have median earnings of $65k, with an astounding median total debt of $138k. This does not include undergraduate debt. Compare the law grad data to the undergraduate data. Nurses graduating with merely a bachelor’s degree have median earnings of $66k, with only a median total debt of $25k. Accounting majors have median earnings of $61k. Management information systems majors have median earnings of $66k. There are numerous majors that provide comparable salaries to law graduates, with a fraction of the debt.
Law is an advanced degree. Compare law to some of the masters programs. Nurses graduating with a masters degree have median earnings of $98k, with a median debt of $59k. MBAs from this non-elite business school have median earnings of $87k, with a median debt of $62k. MPHs have median earnings of $62k, comparable with law grads, but graduate with less than half the debt at $50k.
I can speak to the large hospital I work at. The hospital is short nurses, is struggling to hire more nurses, and has to employ temporary traveling nurses. There is also a shortage of nurse practitioners and PAs, who perform a lot of physician tasks because there are not enough physicians. Not only do NPs and PAs manage patients on the floor, in the ICU, and treat patients in the ED and clinics, they perform basic procedures too.
Well, 11:58, I've been writing here about age-based discrimination in the legal "profession" for years. That's how I came to be called Old Guy (that name was actually assigned at Paul Campos's old blog). If you'd like to share your experience, feel free to post comments; I may collect them and create a separate article on the subject.
DeleteMy admittedly cynical view is that most attend law school, especially the TTTTs most often pilloried here, not because it's their dream, but because it seems to be the easiest way to respectability and a decent income. Nursing pays well for a four year(even a three year community college AA, for that matter) but it's actual hard work-cleaning up messes, dealing with sick people face-to-face all day every day, and being on your feet 8+ hours/day. Truck driver? Yes, there's such a shortage that companies will now pay for you to get your CDL. But you won't make that 160K salary so often discussed, won't be saving the baby whales, and nobody creates TV shows about truck drivers...and it's hard work and mind-numbingly boring. And as you get older, that fed-required physical can put your CDL license in jeopardy. In other words, it just a real job-and requires real work.
ReplyDeleteThe unpleasant truth is that most law school applicants are liberal artists with zero options, so they pile on debt to what they've got, since that won't be repaid anyway. And they may think they'll save the planet, but they really don't care: being paid to go to law school sure beats working a real job at $15/hour. And all of them harbor secret thoughts that they are the exception, and will get that 160K(actually it may be up to 180K) associate job right out of law school, even if it is Florida Coastal. And those doc review jobs that pay $22/hour? Well, that won't be them(and they're probably right, as those jobs require bar passage, something so many at these schools will never achieve)-see above with the pathetic and genuinely outrageous disastrous bar passage rates.
"Baby whales" as an area of practice is a myth promulgated by the law-school scam. Hear it from Old Guy: ain't no goddamn lawyer saving no baby whale. And if there were, it wouldn't be your jive ass from Florida Coastal, Appalachian, Vermont Law School, Cooley, or North Carolina mother-fucking Central, let alone Larry's bullshit fake state-accredited never-has-had-more-than-half-a-dozen-so-called-students mockery of a law school upstairs from a defunct Mexican restaurant in some nasty-ass strip mall in Bumblefuck, California. If you're stupid enough to pursue law because you expect to be paid $180k per year to save baby whales, get your dumb ass to the nearest school of truck driving.
DeleteWant to know what the practice of law is? Old Guy can tell you. Let's start with civil litigation, since so many of these whale-saving Cooleyites fancy themselves latter-day Atticus Finches. In civil litigation, opposing counsel is almost invariably an idiot. This is true in dipshit settings like traffic court, and it's also true at courts of appeal and everywhere in between. This is because the bar is chock full of idiots—and crooks, swindlers, lazybones, and good old-fashioned all-purpose trash. If you happen to be a capable lawyer yourself (rara avis), you'll feel like Gulliver among the Lilliputians when you go to court. And if you're one of the many self-important morons, well, Old Guy has no advice for you. Fuck off.
Or is family law your bag? First of all, this is a pink ghetto, favored by women who want to "have it all" by raising children while they maintain a sort of half-practice. The men who go into family law are mostly Cooley-style losers. The first thing to know is that this "field" is really not law at all. Just yesterday a law student told me that she was interested in family law because it offered great opportunities to apply jurisprudence. I barely suppressed a laugh. You could spend ten years in family court without hearing case law mentioned even once by bench or bar. It's essentially a sort of namby-pamby social work masquerading as law.
How about wills? The vast majority of wills, in Old Guy's informed opinion, are incompetently prepared. Perhaps you can get good service if your estate is worth $5 million or more and you go to an expensive, specialized law firm. But if you opt—and, admit it, you do—for the cut-rate package advertised by some glorified used-car salesman in a polyester suit, you'll get a page and a half of boilerplate with the details filled in by a secretary. Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that won't occur until you're dead, at which point it will be too late to do anything other than suing the so-called lawyer—who probably will have moved on long ago to some other racket.
Old Guy is embarrassed to call himself a lawyer.
And yet, financial aid rules actively discourage career switching. Take your nursing example. Pretty straightforward path if you know that's what you wanna do from right out of high school. But if you come to that realization later, you will face a number of hurdles.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, you'll need to get your prerequisites which there's no organized way to do (or financial aid for) as a non-degree-seeking student who just needs certain classes. That'll take a year at least, likely more if you have trouble finding availability in these often very popular courses for which a non-degree student has dead last priority.
And even if you do get into a nursing program, it's still a second bachelors. This means no GradPLUS, and your Stafford limits (which are LIFETIME limits you can't even pay down) have likely already been eroded. And even if you can find a way to pay tuition & fees, you still don't have GradPLUS to actually pay your rent and food.
The system actively discourages second bachelor degrees, but that's exactly what most JDs need, as they tend to have majored in liberal arts so they won't be seen as having had adequate undergrad preparation for any graduate program besides their JD.
3:53, you are absolutely correct about the difficulty of switching careers. In addition to the hurdles of obtaining financial aid and loans to switch careers, I would just add that if you already have significant student loans, those loans will balloon with interest while deferring payments to attend school.
DeleteI am not advocating this path. But the only way I was able to overcome the bleak post graduate job prospects of a non-elite liberal arts degree and a second tier toilet law degree, along with $150k in student loan debt, was the military. I graduated during the supposed economic boom of the mid 2000s, when my toilet law school claimed my class graduated with 99% employed and six figure average salaries. Of course that was a lie. I enlisted in the Army after law school. The Army gave me a signing bonus, student loan repayment, and a tax free Iraq deployment with no place to spend my money, allowing me to repay my student loan debt. I had the 9/11 GI Bill, allowing me to career switch and go back to undergrad and take the courses needed to apply to med school. The GI Bill provided a monthly stipend for living expenses and money for books. The Army helped me to become a doctor and have a real career. Something law never provided for me and many others.
I still have a lot of friends in the Army. And because I have been so fortunate to go from a toilet law grad who attended legal career fairs in which big law firms flat out refused to accept my resume, to an enjoyable career in medicine, I became a physician in the Army Reserves.
Old Guy couldn't defer all of his debt from undergraduate school; some of it had to be paid immediately, so there was no question of going right into law school or any other further degree program. By the time Old Guy had paid all of that debt off (at 33), he was much too old for law.
DeleteYou're right to observe that joining Uncle $am's imperial army of oppression is not for everyone. It certainly isn't for Old Guy. I don't blame you for doing it, but I never would have.
JD/MD: It's pretty clear that your story, if not truly unique, is close. There just aren't many people who would be able to start over after spending all the time and money for college and the (worthless) JD, let alone make an assessment, and then join the military based on that assessment. Between your self-directed post bacc(to get your required courses) and your MD, you spent I'd estimate another 6 years after leaving the military. You are highly motivated and goal directed; thats not true for most liberal artists(myself included) who went to law school as the path of least resistance.
DeleteAnd joining the military...well, I write this as a veteran: think very very long before joining, for any reason. I saw more people get into trouble due to an inability to adjust. There's one cardinal rule: it's the one job in the USA you can't quit..well, if you try they put you in jail.
So your story is amazing, and perhaps it will inspire someone who reads this blog. But I would caution anyone thinking of joining the military to remember: It's the one job you may be required, legally, to kill someone-and you may be killed by someone with the same job requirement.
6:20: All very true, plus the armed forces have age limits and I think OCS even more so than enlisted.
DeleteIt seems to me that in general, the key to career switching is to realize the need for it EARLY. Ya gotta know when to hold em and when to fold em, Like JD/MD apparently did. He didn't keep on pointlessly plugging away after those firms all rejected him, he saw the writing on the wall and found another path.
Looking back on it now, I think to myself wow. When I finished my JD I was only 24. I still had my whole life ahead of me. I should've just said who cares about the student loan balance, it's just numbers on a spreadsheet. Happiness is more important, so I'm gonna find some way to do something else.
At the very least, I should've ditched law when IBR came along a couple years later, as that really did turn the student loans into a quasi-fictitious number. But the other problem for liberal artists who gravitate to law school is risk aversion. Another reason to take an easy BA major is because you don't have to worry about not getting good grades or not finishing, because it's freaking easy. That same risk aversion carries over after law school and taking the plunge into something else with so much already invested seems like a huge risk, even though in reality it's just the sunk cost fallacy at work and sticking with the miserable profession of law is really the bigger risk. Wish I'd realized that sooner.
Often of necessity, people nowadays change professions several times. They can't make all of their changes of profession by age 24.
DeleteFifty years ago, you could have expected to choose a profession at age 24 or earlier and stay in it until you retired. Hell, very likely you would have stayed with the same employer and received a gold watch upon retirement, along with your pension. Not so if you're of Generation X or a later cohort.
The best thing that ever happened to this school is dodging InfiLaw despite its founders being insane and watching Charlotte, Savannah, and FCSOL going down the drain. The luckiest law school in America.
ReplyDeleteYeah, that was a close call. InfiLaw very nearly snapped it up. As I recall, Charleston ended up having to pay InfiLaw something like $6M to get out of that acquisition.
Delete@anon JD, MD 10:11 You keep rehashing how you became an MD through the military, but should your real message that the military can be a path to extinguishing previous student debt? I mean not everyone is cut out to be an MD although you may think that. But if the military is a way to eliminate the student debt and then starting over with a new career, wouldn't that be enough? There are other careers than MD or nurse or dentist. Or does this only work for those selecting a medical field specialty since the military highly prizes these fields? That is, does the military only extinguish the debt for those choosing and qualifying for health specialties?
ReplyDeleteNot everyone is cut out to be an MD, and not everyone is cut out to be a myrmidon in Uncle Sam's imperial army of conquest and genocide. Some people are happy enough to enlist, but the fact that mortgaging oneself to that particular destructive enterprise has become the most attractive for many people says a lot about the US.
DeleteCarefully planning-and being incredibly motivated-my allow the average enlistee to extinguish debt and gain benefits for further education.
DeleteBut keep in mind: while the length changes, you are looking at a four year enlistment in the military where you can't quit, and where your job description is killing, with the chance to be killed yourself.
@Old Guy at 12:26 I agree with you. I wouldn't advise anyone to join the military unless they are physically fit and emotionally stable. But try saying you weren't cut out for it to your draft board between the years of 1940 - 1973. Or see how easy life was in those years with a 4F classification or Dishonorable Discharge.
DeleteMy point was though that JD MD seems fixated on the military being a pathway to becoming an MD when I am asking whether his central point should be that the military is a pathway for expunging student debt? Or is debt only expunged when proving oneself capable at a health specialty? And with the military potentially downsizing, are these debt forgiveness programs even still available?
The US's armed forces are glorified with lots of star-spangled bunting, fancy uniforms, and rhetoric about "defending our freedom"; but at bottom they are about killing, torturing, subjugating, and destroying unquestioningly for the sake of imposing the US's will on one or another part of the world. (Listen carefully, boys and girls, for today's civics lesson: when the people of another country elect or support a government that our wise leaders don't like, those people are known as commie pinko terrorists; but when we overthrow their government and install a puppet régime that will do our bidding, that is known as democracy. Study this distinction carefully: there will be a test on Wednesday.)
DeleteIndeed, staying out of the military has often led to ostracism, denial of employment, and other oppression—unless one was born with a silver spoon up one's ass, in which case one may well be elected president.
People who do opt for this path seem to have a number of options for professional training, not just in the medical realm. But perhaps few other options would afford an income sufficient to pay the student loans run up in an ill-fated attempt to establish a legal career.
The central point I take from JD/MD isn't the military or the MD, it's simply the utility of cutting one's losses early. Yes militarily-supported med school is the path he found, but I don't see him anywhere saying that's the only way out. He simply gave up on law when he couldn't find a decent job in it, and cut that cord fast. What he did instead as an alternate path is secondary to that core lesson. He could also have gone out and got his CDL or something. What matters is he gave up before he dug himself in too deep to do so.
DeleteIf you're fresh out of LS at a traditional age (usually mid-20s) with no spouse or dependents, and you didn't get a good job in law, the simple fact of the matter is that walking away won't be easy, but it is never going to get easier than it is right then. It may not feel that way, largely because you're broke and the last of those student loan advances is probably drying up fast. But the longer you wait, the more responsibilities are going to attach and the tougher it's going to be to escape this miserable profession.
That's a little harsh, OG. When talking about the military as a whole, it is a tool like any other which can be used for good or ill. And when talking about its myriad subcomponents, they have so many different missions that it's impossible to think of everyone as a combatant or even supporting combat. Heck, the public health service is technically part of the uniformed services. So is the Coast Guard.
DeleteAnd finally, when talking about individuals serving, they obviously run the gamut and there are tons of "occupational specialties" that don't necessarily have any relationship to combat.
Now I'll admit, a job you can't quit and that basically expects you to blindly follow all lawful orders can put you in some situations where you find yourself obligated to do things you abhor. But I don't think those situations are all that common nowadays. I do agree that we engage a bit much on the "military worship" sometimes. If anything, military recruiting can be predatory. For enlisted, they often set up shop in poor neighborhoods and deliberately look for people without other options and make them offers they can't refuse, a la squid game. But the military is just far too vast to make sweeping generalizations about it being good or evil. It is inherently neither. There are heroes in it. There are villains in it. And in between, there's a bunch of people for whom it's just a job and a means to some other end such as GI Bill money. And then higher up, there's people who would use it for good and those who would use it for ill. And we probably spend too much of our GDP on the whole apparatus. But overall, across the whole ark of history, it is a force for good even if it sometimes or even often misses the mark.
Well...first of all, the public health service is NOT part of the military. It is a uniformed service that has nothing to do with the military, just like NOAA. Comparing it to the Coast Guard is completely misleading and factually incorrect.
DeleteAnd the Coast Guard has had a couple of homes over the years; it started with Treasury, and is now with Homeland Security(given to the DOD/Navy when requested). But it's always been an armed service, and comparing it to the health service is inherently misleading and factually incorrect.
And let's get things straight: while many, many are not immediately sent to the front lines, just about everybody in the military-cooks, bakers, computer geeks, et all-is considered a "combatant". So again, your post is misleading.
It's my experience that it's generally the politicians who misuse the military. That said, let's not misrepresent what it's all about. Once you join, you can't quit, and for virtually all service members, the requirement is being ordered to kill, and to be potentially killed by the other side. Generally, only medical/chaplain are non-combatants-and yes, JAG is considered to be a combatant.
Well, all I can tell ya is that when I needed to go to an army base with a high-ranking colleague in the USPHS, everywhere we went on-base all the guys running around seemed to have some kind of rule where they had to stop and salute him based on the various insignia on his uniform. He was certainly treated like whatever he had was a military rank.
Delete@8:16 I noticed 4:58's equivocation of the PHS and the Coast Guard but didn't think it was necessary to call 'they' out on it. Certainly not in the red in face way you did. But you are correct if you meant that the Coast Guard is one of the Armed Forces, despite not being part of DOD, and the Armed Forces are a subset of the Uniformed Services. Look it up here, it's easier than me typing it out.
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniformed_services_of_the_United_States
To get back to the point, let's talk about cutting one's losses early. Old Guy had what appeared to be a promising career, but it ended abruptly when he was in his early thirties: there were few jobs to be found in his line of work, and after a couple of years he gave up and had to look into other things. Eventually he stumbled into law—and that was a terrible mistake.
DeleteHow exactly was Old Guy supposed to cut his losses early when he was past 30 at the first sign of trouble?
Red-faced-while typing at a computer? Geez, people around here must really be in bad shape. But flat out wrong "factual" observations, as in this case, need correction, as they're the heart and soul of the scam.
Delete3:42-the USPHS guys parade around in Navy uniforms, so yes if on a military base things can get interesting. But they aren't military, period. One of my siblings, virulently anti-military, used USPHS money to pay for med school, and enjoyed yanking military chains by parading around the local Navy base as a lt commander.
and 5:16-I actually served, so no need to look up anything. The original post might as well as mentioned the Post Office as a uniformed service-maybe FedEx and UPS, too. And let's not forget the NOAA folks; they wear Navy uniforms, too. Being a uniformed service has zero to do with being in the military.
What's the difference? If you're in the military you can't quit; and yes just about everyone is required to kill.
And getting back to Old Guy's point: the bias against older job applicants is real and virtually insurmountable. The only exception is possibly teaching, and that depends on a willingness to a. pay more $$$ to get the master's necessary and b. a willingness/ability to teach math/needed foreign language/science.
There are plenty of teaching jobs available in these fields and they welcome career changers, but it requires more education debt and the jobs don't pay very well.
If cutting your losses means expunging the debt, then JD MD's route is one of the few available. Otherwise, win a lottery. Or emigrate to another country where US debt does not follow you.
DeleteTo me cutting your losses means dropping out after 1L or Semester 1. But as others have noted, I too did not fully realize my folly until some years after graduating from law school.
Yes, the time to cut one's losses is at the beginning of the second semester of your 1L year. If you don't have the grades, GTFO! At my Toilet, I only knew one guy who had the courage to do that. (I had drunk the Koolaid and thought it was only bad grading that got me a 3.3 GPA. Guess what I wound up with. 3.45!)
DeleteI stuck it out thinking my hard engineering degree and decade of experience would translate to a profitable second career in patent law. Boy, was I wrong. I graduated at the hoary age of 35, unemployed and with a new baby. I achieved this lofty status despite sending hundreds of resumes to law firms, having a few contacts at local patent firms, etc. I even offered to work for free.
I spent the next 2 years trying to cobble together an income from various sources like patent searching, handyman work, dog walking, selling crap on craigslist, etc. What a colossal waste. I spent $100,000 on tuition and even worse, lost 5 years of an engineering salary of ~90K/year.
And I'm not the only one. I estimate about 50% of my classmates that were older and had some engineering work experience either never used their law degrees or only quasi-used them, taking jobs in Regulatory or working at the patent office.
DON"T GO TO LAW SCHOOL IF YOU ARE OVER 26! The age discrimination will lock you out entirely from the job market.
I'm sorry that that happened to you, 1:05. My experience is similar, only I was quite a bit older and went to an élite law school. Finishing among the top few students in the class didn't help me at all. I applied for hundreds of jobs but rarely got so much as an interview. I did get a federal clerkship, but after that I couldn't find a job. Finally I found a position on the other side of the country that ended up lasting less than a year because the tiny little firm went down the drain financially, and after that I had a few short-lived jobs doing shitwork, punctuated with long periods (a full year at one point) of unemployment. Now I am working in the legal field but am decidedly unhappy with what I'm doing. I plan to retire in a few years and make do with what money I have.
DeleteTwenty-six is indeed just about the maximum age at which anyone should think about enrolling in law school: a person of that age would expect to graduate before 30, and that might still be young enough for the tastes of employers in a climate of ubiquitous age-based discrimination.
Not many people would regard themselves as over the hill at age 27, but that's reality in law and some other lines of work. I don't know what to suggest nowadays, other than not being born in the US.
Old Guy could teach math, sciences, and certain foreign languages, but he doesn't have a relevant master's degree, and he isn't so sure that jobs abound in this area. A friend who tried to become a teacher late in life was rejected on the grounds of not complying with some dipshit curriculum that was about feelings rather than learning.
ReplyDeleteThere's no question that you'd be able to qualify as a teacher, but the requirements state by state vary wildly. Many states have "alternative" teacher certification programs that would get you in the door, but some cost money and some don't. And most states these days require a Master's to get permanent certification.
DeleteI looked into this years ago, and actually applied to and was accepted in an alternative Master's program; there was the application expense plus the national exam(can't remember the name of that) expense. When I went to the interview they told me that dozens of attorneys had applied to their program, so the weren't at all surprised I was there. I should have attended, but came to the realization that I didn't have the patience to be a teacher.
The route above is for public school certification. In many states, private schools set their own rules-and many don't require teacher certification.
And it there's demand for you subject matter-math/science and certain foreign languages, for example-many states waive some or even all of the requirements, give you a "provisional" license, and then pay you to teach and pay to get the required coursework for a permanent license.
Thanks. I looked into teaching about twenty years ago, and I gave up because it was bullshit. The local university stated in its own promotional materials for a degree in Ejookayshun™ that graduates couldn't expect to find a job locally, or indeed a regular job in teaching at all; one might be left with nothing but substitute teaching here and there for years on end. Fuck that.
DeleteAlso, the program seemed to have little to do with teaching and much to do with administrative shit. Substantive courses took a back seat to Drug Abuse in Our Schools and such crap. Teaching appeared to be a sort of social work with a veneer of educational content—which is what it is, I suppose, nowadays.
For elementary and high school teaching, it seems to fall into two camps. On the coasts where teachers unions are strong, being a high school teacher is a sweet gig. There's tenure, salaries in the six figs, and it's incredibly difficult to get fired even if you're terrible. Read about new york's infamous "rubber rooms" for example, where teachers accused of misconduct would sit around all day collecting full pay for no work while an incredibly lengthy and byzantine appeals process winds its way through, often for years. In these states, OG is 100% right. For every full time "real" teacher in a public school, there's 20 substitutes trying desperately to get in, with little more chance to become a full time teacher than a doc reviewer has of becoming an associate.
DeleteOn the other hand, you have poorer states. Here, the teachers aren't unionized and they go annual contract to annual contract and can be nonrenewed for cause. Or at increasingly popular "charter schools" that like to pretend to be public schools just because they get public funding, you're just a straight-up at-will employee. Here, pay is shockingly abysmal, think like 30s and 40s. You'll still get summers off, but you'll prolly have to spend em working at walmart to make ends meet. Not too hard to get certified and get these jobs, but you won't want them.
So, pick your poison I guess. It's pretty much either a great job that you can't get, or a terrible one that you can.
Old Guy went to high school in one of the poorer states. Some of the teachers moonlighted during the school year. One worked as a waitress at a rednecky restaurant. Another was a clerk at a store.
DeleteAnother option, 9:10, is to teach at a tony boarding school with fees running to many tens of thousands of dollars per year. This, as someone mentioned, doesn't usually require certification. Long ago, Old Guy applied for a position at one of these places: he thought that he might have a chance because the job required both math at a high level and a language that isn't easy to find, and also because his degree from an élite university would make him presentable to rich parents. But no dice.
Yeah gosh imagine the embarrassment for the teacher if one of your more obnoxious high school students comes in to the restaurant where you moonlight and now they're a customer so you have to kiss their ass. A lot of those poorer areas are also small towns so I'd imagine it happens a lot.
DeleteAnd surprisingly, OG, I've found that a lot of those private schools don't pay as well as you'd think, given the tuition they charge. The one you went for could well have been different, but I've been surprised to see them sometimes paying less than the public schools. But they still get plenty of demand cuz it's just a better job. More resources, nicer buildings, fewer problems. The students are all rich so you don't have to deal with delinquents or people who don't do the work, as they're all under immense pressure to get into good colleges. Also, no IEPs/SPED. Big perk.
Being a public school teacher is a coveted job, especially for married women, so many come from families with much more resources than the salary they make, reflects.
DeleteHowever, public school teachers should be paid a fair salary that reflects their status in society, and that would be enough, at least after a few years, to afford housing in a decent place to live.
USC as a degree mill. The law school scam expands to the MSW.
ReplyDeleteOver the past decade, the University of Southern California has used a for-profit company to help enroll thousands of students in its online social-work master’s program.
The nonprofit school used its status-symbol image to attract students across the country, including low-income minority students it targeted for recruitment, often with aggressive tactics. Most students piled on debt to afford the tuition, which last year reached $115,000 for the two-year degree. The majority never set foot on the posh Los Angeles campus but paid the same rate for online classes as in-person students.
Recent USC social-work graduates who took out federal loans borrowed a median $112,000. Half of them were earning $52,000 or less annually two years later, a Wall Street Journal analysis of newly released U.S. Education Department data found. Compared with other master’s-degree programs at top-tier U.S. universities, the USC social-work degree had one of the worst combinations of debt and earnings.
A master's in social work is a requirement for many counseling jobs. There are less expensive ways to get one. More than a dozen public universities in California produced graduates with less debt and higher incomes, the data covering 2015 and 2016 graduates show. At California State University, Long Beach in Los Angeles County, graduates borrowed less than a third of USC students and earned a median $59,000 two years later—about 14% more than USC students.
What is so prestigious about USC? In much of the Southeast, "USC" is taken to mean the University of South Carolina. I've never seen USC as a status symbol. Then again, I'm not into status symbols.
DeleteSocial work has long been known as an unremunerative calling. Who the hell would be ass enough to pay $115k for an on-line degree? Why on earth should the cost be so high? Conducting the program entirely on line should greatly reduce the cost.
It seems to Old Guy that inexpensive exams or evaluations could replace a lot of what passes for higher education these days. Rather than requiring people to undertake four years of expensive full-time coursework, why not allow them to get a degree or other certificate by examination? Old Guy has learnt a great deal from books alone, without ever genuflecting at the altar of a hackademic institution. He once paid about $150 for an examination in a certain language that resulted in a diploma (with top honors, incidentally) that permanently exempts him from further examinations for purposes such as employment, study (even at the PhD level), and immigration in the country that issued the diploma. Why not do the same for academic degrees? Want a bachelor's degree in math? Learn the subject on your own and pass some exams. Law? Same thing, except that maybe you also have to submit some legal research, and perhaps a few of the exams may take place in a practical setting rather than on paper. There are many resources nowadays for learning things on one's own; years at the leafy campus of some overpriced university should not be necessary.
The weird thing about social work is that it can be clinical or nonclinical. It's very hard (and takes years) to get the huge number of post-grad hours to get a clinical license, but if you manage it you have essentially the same scope of practice as a psychologist. Meaning you can diagnose mental illnesses, treat them with psychotherapy, and bill people's insurance/Medicare/Medicaid.
DeleteAs a result, the demand for LICENSED social workers is huge. They're in short supply and they make money for their employers, or they can set up a private practice. But merely getting an MSW will not get you a license. The supply is artificially constrained because without formal residency programs or funding, it is very difficult to amass those thousands of hours and insurance won't pay for trainees. The vast majority of MSW graduates never manage to make it all the way to full, independent licensure, and these nonclinical social workers drag down the earnings averages.
It's never lucrative enough to justify what USC charges, because even with licensure it's not like they can prescribe meds which is where the real money is in mental health. But for those who do manage to make it all the way to full independent licensure, the job prospects are kinda comparable (albeit a little less well-paid) to a nurse, meaning you'll have little trouble finding 60-75k jobs pretty much anywhere you want to look geographically. A common refrain I've heard is "you'll never be rich, but you'll never be unemployed either." More than I can say for law.
So while the field does have some things that make it worth looking into, there are much cheaper places to get an MSW than USC. So I wouldn't necessarily discourage getting one but I would certainly discourage getting one from there, and I'd only recommend it if you've got a plan for how you're going to get the thousands and thousands of hours of post-graduate pre-licensure experience needed for independent licensure.
Unbelievable-had you seen this OG?
ReplyDeletehttps://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/paid-fine-dining-got-mcdonald-014145853.html
No, I hadn't seen it; thanks for posting it.
DeleteI'm not surprised. Something similar happened at the law school of the U of Illinois about ten years ago: it turned out that the toilet had an entire written plan in place to scheme its way up the "rankings" put out by You Ass News, and that the implementation of that plan included both corrupt manipulation and outright lying. A notorious scheme of corrupt manipulation was the admission of "little bastards" with high GPAs through a program that exempted them from taking the LSAT so that the U of Illinois could drive its average GPA up without running the significant risk of lowering its average LSAT score. Outright lying included the reporting of inflated figures for GPA, LSAT, and expenditures. The U of Illinois tried to pin the whole thing on a little bastard named Paul Pless, then dean of admissions. But it was obvious that the rot ran much deeper than a single crooked employee. Here's one old piece on the subject:
https://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2013/08/update-re-paul-pless-and-illinois-law.html
Of course, the U of Illinois is not the only one that has been caught manipulating the "rankings": just about every law school, if not every last one, does the same. Indeed, law-school scamsters have been known to justify that sort of conduct on the grounds that other law schools all do it and that they can't afford the path of honesty, which would send their law schools plummeting in the "rankings". Of course, law-school scamsters are also quick to condemn the "rankings" of You Ass News—but why don't they simply refuse to take part?
Well, there's always the Cooley approach of publishing one's own "rankings". In the twelfth edition (2010) of its universally derided publication "Judging the Law Schools", Cooley arranged to rank itself second, graciously conceding top billing to Harvard (vile Yale was distinctly inferior to the Cooley franchise).
I've always wondered what'd happen if a school just made the numbers up. I'm rather surprised, though, that federal prosecutors deemed it worth charging as a crime. I mean, they lied to a magazine, not under oath or to the government or the accreditors recognized by the government.
DeleteIt'd have been easy enough for them to just say it's a civil matter that the students can sue the school on their own for, and for USNWR to simply bar the place from their rankings or impose whatever other remedial measures it has at its disposal.
Glad they took it up, the argument for criminal fraud is clear, but prosecutorial discretion being what it is (essentially absolute) I'm kinda surprised they deemed this worthy of prosecution. It's a good sign of people recognizing how much weight students really give to this magazine, so lying to it is by extension lying to them.
Oh, why not just make the numbers up? There's proverbially no honor among thieves, and apparently none among law-school scamsters. Several schools have just made numbers up, and gotten away with it for a few years. Eyebrows might be raised if Cooley announced a median LSAT score of 177, but less obvious lies would escape scrutiny even though the LSAC has all of the data by school and could easily publish them.
DeleteYou Ass News doesn't exclude schools from its bullshit rankings; it just reranks them when the true data come to light.
The last time I checked, "reputation" among lawyers made up 40% of the score used by You Ass News, and "reputation" among law-school scamsters made up 25%. So 65% has to do with nothing but subjective perceptions by a couple of hundred people almost none of whom can claim meaningful knowledge of the 200-odd law schools in question. I'd bet that many a "reputation" has to do with the popularity of a football team, not with anything specific to the law school.
All online MBA programs are scams. It's too easy to cheat in online courses, and 99.9999 percent of the "value" of an MBA is in networking.
DeleteAgreed, OG, and in fact it's been studied that a school with a powerhouse football team will tend to get a reputation bump simply because people have heard of it, just like how if you ask people to rate Princeton Law they'll often score it highly even though Princeton Law doesn't exist. Reputation is code for prestige, and prestige is largely based on whether the place is "famous" in general as opposed to any specific program.
DeleteHowever, the thing about these You Ass rankings, as you so aptly call them, is that they also have the effect of creating what they purport to measure. If a school jumps 20 spots in the rankings, the school starts marketing this fact like crazy, its reputation goes up, and students and employers start to hear about it and respond accordingly. When that falls apart due to literal fraud, the students are victims and kudos to the prosecutor for seeing that.
When Old Guy was preparing to go to law school, he was urged to apply to Princeton Law. That would have been difficult: Princeton Law closed down in the nineteenth century. And Old Guy isn't that old.
DeleteYes, indeed, "reputation" is nothing but prestige, and You Ass News feeds upon that. But prestige doesn't change much. That's why people speak of the "top 14" law schools: traditionally they were always the same (though in recent years Georgetown has reportedly fallen out of this group). Really, the latest issue of those dumb "rankings" probably looks very much like one from twenty years ago.
lol yeah it closed down in like 1850 and even then only operated for a couple years and graduated less than a dozen people in total during the course of that time. Of course, back then law school was totally optional anyway and most people got trained purely by apprenticeship, which still technically exists in a few states but very few people manage it.
DeleteYou are right that prestige is unalterable at the highest ends. Harvard will always be Harvard for example. And the top 14 is so-named because of its stability like you said. But below the top 14, schools do regularly move into and out of the top 20 or 25 or 50 or whatever arbitrary cutoff you want to use. And whenever a school moves up and cracks the top X, it always plasters it all over its website and marketing materials so rightly or wrongly, applicants and students do care about such things. Regardless of whether it should or shouldn't be, it is material to their decision to enroll.
Thanks for posting that link; I, too, was going to post it. I know people who taught in that program. They said the whole environment there was terribly toxic. I feel so bad for the students and the faculty and the Commonwealth and its taxpayers.
ReplyDeleteI ended up ending my studies at Charleston School of Law. It is not a good education at all from my perspective. Most everyone has the same complaint, the professors are terrible. The school made a $25 million profit last year, but they sure don't invest it in improving the quality of education that we receive. For example, the class are too big. The professors try to bulldoze through the material. They are not clear about when it is and is not okay to ask questions. They grade overly harsh. The reason that I say that is that they admitted students supposedly based primarily on our LSAT score and undergraduate grade point average. The LSAT has a writing section. They know each student's ability. Yet, they and this is not a new thing at Charleston I was told by 2 and 3L's apparently this has been a problem there for sometime, they grade overly harsh on essays. You can know the concepts and write them out, but if they do not like the way you worded it, then they grade you as though you did not know them. The point is this, we cannot read their minds and know exactly how they want the essay, because there is no feedback, and they do not teach how to write the essay. LRAW professors, and I can only speak from the one that I had, is contradictory. Everyone has the same complaint with this professor, his 2 and 3L students that have him for Moot Court say that he tears them to shreds and they leave him more confused than when they started with the professor. He will not clarify himself or if he does, then he still has a problem with what someone wrote. Grading is supposed to be anonymous even to the professor's. They are the student's identity of the paper, assessment, or exam that they are grading, but they do. The administration insist that professor's are not biased, because the administration insist that they do not know the identity of the student that they are grading, but the number on the student's work is their student i.d. When you see them to see your work, they know your student i.d. Clearly, grading is not anonymous as we students by the administration. For 1Ls orientation is the most contradictory, exhausting ill time spent week of all. Here students are presented with the 'proper way' to study, however the administration gives a bunch of conflicting information, and often students are given introductory instruction by professors, the only problem is your section may not be given this orientation by the professors you will be taking classes with. These professors all contradict one another at orientation and they are never on the same page. They want all students to go to 18 hours worth of different professional events, yet often times, these events conflict with class schedules. There also seems disagreement among the Deans and Professors about who is in charge. The Dean may say one thing, but what the professors do is entirely different. For example, they are not supposed to count someone absent unless they are more than ten minutes late, but one time I was two, and was still marked absent. I had a valid reason. I had a professor rightfully say multiple teams, that "you all are charged an outrageous sum of money for the education quality that you receive." This is truest statement I have ever heard. They try to cut cost, by charging students more money in anyway that they can find. For example, there is software out there that have templates for memo's, complaints, and other legal documents, but we spend over half our time in LRAW and then other classes just trying to get Microsoft Word to format it, because the professor will get made if in their mind someting is 1/1000th of centimeter one way or the other that they think that it should not be. Also, there are not enough copies of legal books in the library.
ReplyDelete*They did not make $25 million, but everything else I wrote above from personal experience is true. I attended a couple of years ago.
ReplyDelete