The first was the announcement, reported in the previous article, that privately owned Jacksonville University plans to open a law school and has even obtained the required funding from the municipal government.
Soon after that, privately owned High Point University in High Point, North Carolina, announced that it too is going to open a law school, possibly within two years. As if that weren't foolish enough, the university also plans to open a school of optometry, a school of nursing, and a school of entrepreneurship (whatever that means), while spending $400M—about $70k per student—on construction. How it's going to pay for all of that I don't know, but I certainly am not offering to underwrite the loans. But the law school cannot possibly be needed. North Carolina already has six law schools (seven before the Charlotte School of Law went tits up), only one of them possibly worth attending in Old Guy's assessment. All of them are in the north-central part of the state, from Durham to Winston-Salem. One could drive to all six of those law schools in two hours or so. High Point University is only about twenty minutes' drive from two other law schools: Wake Forest, in Winston-Salem, and Elon, in Greensboro. Why the hell should another goddamn law school be built in that area? If it sees the light of day, it will certainly be another über-toilet, with not even accreditation to offer to new students. Like Indiana Tech, it will fold soon enough.
The third setback is the absorption of Law School Transparency into the Law School Admission Council. As the article states, "Law School Transparency was a thorn in the side of law schools when it
launched in 2009, criticizing what it said was misleading graduate
employment data and calling for changes in how schools report student
outcomes". LST did good anti-scam work. Now the LSAC, which coordinates applications to law schools, produces the LSAT, and thus greatly promotes the law-school scam, has taken LST over. In exchange for surrending LST, Kyle McEntee, its director and founder, has been hired as "senior director"—perhaps one should say scamster-in-chief—of the LSAC. Et tu, Brute?
And recently the LSAC has announced plans to introduce its "Legal Education Program" as an alternative to taking the LSAT. Until the past few years, law schools in the US and Canada (other than some non-English-speaking localities), and even a few in other parts of the world, required the LSAT of all applicants. A few schools introduced the GRE as an alternative, and many others followed suit even though it had not been approved by the American Bar Association (the scam-leading organization in charge of accreditation of law schools in the US). Now the LSAC will let applicants take a couple of years of courses in lieu of writing the LSAT. Billed as "equally valid", this new approach will serve mainly to confuse the data so that it will become impossible to assess student bodies objectively. Whatever its flaws (and Old Guy thinks that they are greatly overstated, mainly by scamsters and people who score poorly on the test), the LSAT provides a consistent measurement of applicants' ability to think logically and to understand English text. A few cotton-candy courses on "the skills necessary for success in law school", "the legal profession and law school experience", and "strong support networks" will not.
The two proposed über-toilets aren't of great concern: they can be expected to shut down as quickly as they open. But the LSAC's little coups revitalize the law-school scam. Let's hope that they encourage the federal government to curtail access to student loans, without which the scam could not endure.
