Southern University Law Center, which gives Cooley stiff competition for the rank of lousiest accredited law school in the US, is going to open a branch in Shreveport in January 2022.
We here at Outside the Law School Scam discouraged this particular piece of folly. Law School Truth Center wrote a feasibility study on the creation of another über-toilet in the Pelican State. But of course the scamsters were undeterred by such inconvenient party-poopers as rationality.
Were there a need for a law school in Shreveport (and there isn't a need for a new law school anywhere in the US), Southern University Law Center would be very ill placed to run it. At least a quarter of the incoming students last year scored no better than 143 on the LSAT (the highest score at that level in more than a decade). A "school" that bad should clean its own shit up before branching out.
Who are the students in the first cohort? Eight students at Southern University Law Center who decided to complete their last semester by moving from the main toilet in Baton Rouge to the outhouse in Shreveport. After a single semester, this ridiculous "law school" is going to close until it can find a few students next winter to pull the same stunt. Optimists might suppose that the new über-toilet is being built prudently from modest beginnings. Old Guy is more inclined to deal with reality: for the reasons carefully explained in Law School Truth Center's feasibility study, the Shreveport area just cannot support a law school, and that fact would become perfectly clear if this laughable branch of one of the very worst two or three law schools in the US threw open its doors and tried to operate as a full-blown Indiana Tech (with or without the four specializations in Global Leadership™ and such).
Indeed, the students are all from the area, although they completed most of their studies in Baton Rouge: "The inaugural class will be eight Southern University Law students who have roots in Northern Louisiana and felt an early move back to the region could help secure post-graduation employment." The only people who wanted to go to that branch in Shreveport were people who were from that part of Louisiana. And they are still looking for work as their time in law school draws to a close. They're desperately hoping that the declining Shreveport area will want graduates like themselves (assuming for the moment that they'll ever pass a bar exam), even though their ridiculous eight-student campus cannot offer meaningful support for finding local employment.
A propagandist for this bullshit Southern University Law Center said "I meet people all the time who say I want to go but all of the law schools are in southern Louisiana". Old Guy is unsympathetic. If you live in a small or bleak place like Shreveport, you cannot reasonably expect to have the facilities of New York City at your doorstep. Grow the hell up and move a couple of hours away if you're interested in law. Old Guy had to move far from his home town of Bumblefuck (much smaller than Shreveport) in order to go to university. People who have to wait for a law school to be brought to them don't deserve access to federally guaranteed student loans.
The scam is dead; long live the scam.
ReplyDeleteThis is proof absolute that there's just too much money to be made for the law school scam to ever end. As many have pointed out, unless and until the federal loan $$$ spigot is shut off(and there's zero indication that will ever happen regardless of democrat or GOP control of the WH/Congress); the scam will live on.
Although the persistence of the law-school scam is certainly disheartening, I don't see this particular piece of über-toiletry as proof absolute of an everlasting scam. Quite the opposite, actually. If the law-school scam were that powerful, we should have expected a full-blown Indiana Tech in Shreveport. Instead, what we see is a shitty-ass eight-student branch that operates for one semester out of the year. It's not so much a law school as a semester abroad without the glamour (and without leaving the state). Really, the whole thing is risible.
DeleteOld Guy predicts the closure of at least one more law school by the end of 2022.
I think you're right about at least one more school closing, but 10:11 is correct about how this seemingly small expansion is going to grow and become permanent...and a permanent funnel for loan $$$ at taxpayer expense. And once it gets a physical plant up and running, it won't even pay for itself with the loan dollars, so the LA taxpayers will be on the hook for the rest. And since it's a public HCBU, the chances of ever closing it are virtually non-existent.
DeleteSo a new whirlpool to vacuum up taxpayer money, for a school which is absolutely unneeded. What a great idea.
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic, but I'm not convinced that this shitty little branch in Shreveport will develop into a permanent, autonomous law school. There just aren't many people who want to attend law school in Shreveport. Already Southern University Law Center has the lowest LSAT score at the 25th percentile of all ABA-accredited law schools (Cooley abandoned that position by shrinking enrollment by 43% in a single year in a quest for students with higher, though still dreadful, LSAT scores). An autonomous branch in Shreveport would draw in even worse students than the one in Baton Rouge. So there are at least two difficulties (leaving aside questions of funding and the like): finding enough students and finding students of a quality that wouldn't make Cooley blanch.
DeleteUltimately the ABA would get to decide whether to accredit an über-toilet in Shreveport. Certainly the ABA is quick to deploy its rubber stamp of approval, but it would first need to see a few years of operations, and even the ABA just might hesitate to accredit an upstart branch of what may well have become the worst law school in the US.
Interestingly, this is a public school and the state board of regents previously rejected the plan, saying while the state may have a "distribution problem" it does not have a "capacity problem."
ReplyDeleteI wonder if this is incrementalism at work. By just opening a branch that a small number of existing students move to, it literally is redistribution instead of capacity. But like the adage about slowly boiling a toad, once the building is up and running it's going to be harder for the BOR to maintain its stance against increasing law school capacity. Especially since the school involved happens to also be an HBCU.
Distribution problems are not unusual. The law schools in Massachusetts are overwhelmingly in the far eastern part of the state, precisely because that's where Boston is. Ditto North Dakota (Grand Forks). The one law school in West Virginia is in Morgantown, hardly a central location.
DeleteAnyway, Louisiana is not an island. If you really have to go to law school and you live in Shreveport, either move to the southern part of the state or go to some dipshit toilet in Arkansas, Mississippi, or Texas.
The one thing that can be said against that is that Louisiana actually is a sort of island: much of its legal system uses civil law, which isn't widely taught in the rest of the US (unless one counts the neocolony of Puerto Rico).
I don't think there's a distribution problem in North Dakota. North Dakota doesn't need a law school at all, and the western portion of North Dakota is even more sparsely populated than the eastern part. Just my two cents.
DeleteIndeed, there's no need for a law school in North Dakota at all. I've said before that two law schools could adequately cover Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska.
DeleteWhat I meant is that sometimes it happens that facilities such as law schools are unevenly distributed geographically. In Louisiana, the great majority of the population lives in the southern parishes, so it is hardly surprising that the northern ones (which are arguably more extensions of Arkansas or Texas than parts of Louisiana) don't have a law school among them.
Yup. Lots of states will have their law schools in the major metros. So what? If you're a legal employer in a more far-flung region of the state you can pick up the phone and call the CSO office of that law school a couple hundred miles away.
DeleteOffer a wage someone could actually live on and experience that'd actually be meaningful and the CSO will be absolutely delighted to inundate you with resumes in short order. The fact that this isn't happening isn't evidence of the need for a new law school; it's evidence that the jobs do not exist and that the few that do exist are concentrated in those major metros.
Why is the Federal govt still providing unlimited loans for law students? It's not like we got a shortage of lawyers in the US.
ReplyDeletePoliticians are stupid, lazy, and incompetent, and they are playing with other peoples' money.
DeletePoliticians from the Left to the Right have more in common with each other, than with normal people of any political persuasion. Remember that for the rest of your life....
They do that because law is a graduate program, and ALL graduate programs qualify for unlimited lending under GradPLUS, unlike undergrad where it's just Stafford so lending is capped unless your parents pledge their futures to ParentPLUS.
DeleteThey created GradPLUS for basically two reasons. First, many congress people still have the outdated notion that college is a ticket to the middle and upper-middle class and figure that if that's true, then grad school would be even better prospects and a lucrative program for the gov't as lender. And second, because prior to gradPLUS (which started in 2006) kids who maxed out their Staffords had to turn to private lenders with worse terms. They figured hey, most people will pay these back with interest and for the few that can't, we can offer better safety nets like income based repayment. This was also attractive because BAPCPA had passed in 2005 so those private loans were getting more predatory since they got the same bankruptcy-proofing as federal loans at that point.
Of course, it hasn't worked out that way at all. For those who can figure it out, income based plans are increasingly the default for people who go to grad school. Meanwhile, the schools have figured out that with all the regulatory attention focused on undergrad, they've basically got a blank check to create useless masters programs. WSJ picked up this story for that very reason recently, also noting that prestigious schools are using it as a way to cash in on their brand without hurting the reputation of their much more selective undergrad programs. Heck, many of them are even putting these degrees online where physical space no longer limits seats you can offer.
I think it was well-intentioned, but based on severely outdated information and without consideration of the moral hazard it created. The weirdest part is that it may surprise younger folks to know how recent this change really was. Graduate federal lending WAS capped, by the Stafford caps, until as recently as 2006. And until 2005, the private loans that served as the means of going above the caps were subject to ordinary bankruptcy discharges.
Earlier this year, Old Guy told the story of "education" in the US over the past century, from the scarcity of elementary schools to the overabundance of graduate degrees:
Deletehttps://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2021/02/
As for jobs, let's just say that we aren't living in 1970. Old Guy has begun to think that those who see a bachelor's degree, or even an advanced degree, as a ticket to a great career are deliberately deceiving themselves.
In that old article, you rightly talked about how different the baby boomer college experience was: A negligible cost for a valuable credential that really set you apart from most people, but most people could just get sweet unionized factory jobs with defined benefit pensions anyways.
DeleteWell, according to Pew Research, some 80% of the senate and 60% of the house are either baby boomers or even older, the so-called "silent generation" born 1928-1945. No wonder they're blind to how little a college degree is worth today, much less a graduate degree, and only vaguely aware of how much it costs. No wonder they've assumed programs like GradPLUS would be lucrative and that things like income-based repayments would be rarely-used safety nets.
Members of the Senate and the House also tend to come from wealth and may therefore find it hard to appreciate the plight of the great unwashed.
DeleteB-School Dean Guilty:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/b-school-dean-found-guilty-222956827.html
Which raises the question...why did all the law school deans skate, as there was as much documented lying(for the same goal: USNWR rankings)?
"People who have to wait for a law school to be brought to them don't deserve access to federally guaranteed student loans."
ReplyDeleteThe kind of third-tier cannon fodder that are still at Thomas Jefferson SoL have to have the "school" within a local bus route or driving distance, so the diploma mill has to come to them.
Not sure what to make of this one, other than St Thomas' stellar #126 ranking by USNWR; it doesn't even look like Crump had to kick in any money:
ReplyDeletehttps://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/florida-law-school-creates-ben-crump-social-justice-81515523
My worthless trashcan of a law school added a Social Justice certificate program last year. It's struggling with bar exam passage as well. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.....
DeleteJust a distraction, like the four specialties (including "Global Leadership") that Indiana Tech offered. Ask the scamsters at your trash can of a law school what exactly you could do with their certificate in "Social Justice".
Deletehttps://www.cnn.com/2021/12/13/entertainment/kim-kardashian-law-exam-scli-intl/index.html
ReplyDeleteDon't look now, but Kim K is halfway to being an honest to goddness CA lawyer!
Wow, 4 tries to pass the baby bar. Well to be fair, this is someone who really does just want a license. Doesn't need to compete with anyone for a job so doesn't matter how long it takes her or that she gets licensed by the apprenticeship route.
DeleteWho knows, it could be a shrewd investment strategy as well as the publicity stunt it already is. You have to have a law license to hold an ownership interest in a law firm, but you don't have to actually practice. She could start up her own firm and hire good lawyers to do the actual work, or with license in-hand she could approach an existing firm and offer to buy a partnership stake.
I sincerely doubt she'd ever make an actual, personal court appearance. And if she ever did it'd really just be for the photo ops and supported by a phalanx of other lawyers who really know what they're doing. But can you imagine the volume of business that'd get driven to a law firm that can list her as a partner and have her appear in commercials and whatnot? Not for corporate work obviously, but in an area like criminal defense the phone would be ringing off the hook and having a license would enable her to get a piece of the firm's profits as a equity distribution.