Jacksonville University in Jacksonville, Florida, has announced its intention to open another goddamn law school. Florida Coastal, also located in Jacksonville, survives only to give its last few students another year to finish their studies and collect a Mickey Mouse law degree from the last über-toilet of defunct scam-chain InfiLaw.
As usual, the stated justification is geographic. The mayor of Jacksonville reported that his is the largest city in the US that does not have a law school. (He said nothing about the one that is shutting its doors after having enrollment of almost 4000 students not many years ago. Might it be that Jacksonville just doesn't need a law school?) Of course, he also alluded to the supposedly vast numbers of local people who can't possibly get off their asses and go to any of the twelve law schools that already exist in Florida—such as the U of Florida, only about an hour and twenty minutes away—or for that matter to any of almost two hundred more distant law schools, practically all of which have more to offer than an upstart.
This would-be über-toilet is to be housed "in a downtown office building", rather like Thomas Jefferson School of Law and other whopping failures. Already the city of Jacksonville has pledged $5 million, curiously enough the very amount that the university expects to spend on opening its vanity project. Initially there will be only four professors, not exactly enough to offer Law 'n' Hip-Hop or a range of certificates in Global Leadership—nor even to inspire confidence in the university's commitment to sustaining the dump long enough for the first class to graduate.
Targeted enrollment for the initial class is 20 to 30 students. Within two years the university wants 150 students—whether per class or for the entire school is not clear. Nor is anything said about the important question of costs. Still, Old Guy has seen quite enough to advise resolutely against signing up for three years at an ill-considered über-toilet that may not last that long. Even a horrible shithole like Cooley is marginally better than this big if. Expect another Indiana Tech or worse.
I do not understand how the market speaks that clearly that it's a bad market for a 4T law school, and some buffoon turns around almost immediately and wants to try again.
ReplyDeleteOh, perhaps the buffoon thinks himself superior to the buffoons whose law school failed. In other words, the new buffoon supposes his own involvement to be the crucial element for success.
DeleteAh, the good old days when the GOP claimed to be more fiscally responsible than those spendthrift democrats. This mayor, a republican, is spending $5 million in taxpayer money-basically, it's a gift to a private university for an utterly unnecessary law school. The state is awash in lawyers, and the newer ones are very unhappy about the choice they made:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.abajournal.com/news/article/30-of-young-lawyers-in-this-state-wouldnt-go-to-law-school-in-a-do-over
Just like in the 20th century when every hack politician wanted a new post office, the new law school has become the hack politician move of the 21st century. And while it won't be named for the good mayor, guarantee he'll be prominently listed in the school's (hopefully brief) history.
You're right: it's a private university. Then why the hell should it get public funds?
DeleteWhy do football stadiums for privately-owned teams get public funds? Why do local jurisdictions allow themselves to get drawn into a "race to the bottom" against other jurisdictions on tax breaks for Intel or Amazon's next plant to locate there? Because it's believed (often without real evidence) to help the local economy.
DeleteSure, you later find out that Amazon's new massive facility is just a server farm for AWS that creates hardly any real jobs, or that law school has trouble filling its seats and doesn't draw down as much federal loan dollars as you expected. Or the neighborhood around that football stadium is a ghost town anytime there's not actually a game going on. But that's OK. What you need as a politician is to stand at a ribbon cutting for something tangible and new. If it works out you'll have a track record of achievement to campaign on, and if it doesn't everyone will forget about it and move on by the time you have to stand for election again.
Hell, the federal government shoots money as private colleges like it's coming out of a fire hose, and cities and states give subsidies to businesses through things like tax breaks to promote economic development. The issue here is the belief that a TTTT will be anything more than a dust speck of development in a city the size of Jacksonville.
DeleteYes, but the student loan firehose is a different phenomenon. That's driven by congressional boomers' failure to realize that the degree value they experienced when young was, like currency itself, driven by relative scarcity more than anything intrinsic to the education itself. They cannot acknowledge this, though, because to do so would undercut the myth of meritocracy. But look at NFTs. Why do people pay a fortune for some video clip they can watch for free on Youtube? Because they found a way to make it scarce. Nothing more or less. Such appears to be human nature: People (and institutions i.e. employers) want things that are hard to get and that few people have, simple as that.
DeleteMaking it so everyone can go to college by giving them (forgivable/IBR-able) loans to pay for it simultaneously devalues the credential by reducing its scarcity, and raises its price because like any rational economic actor, the schools will charge whatever people are willing and able to pay. But too many degrees chasing too few jobs devalues the degrees just like too much money chasing too few goods and services = inflation. There is simply no way for anything to be valuable without what economists call "relative scarcity," which seems to be the basic facet of human nature from which the law of supply and demand emerges.
But at the local level, it's all about drawing those federal dollars in. If we invest $X to build a school, people will borrow $Y to attend and Y is far greater than X over time. We will get our piece of $Y directly if we're a public school, and otherwise indirectly into the community when those students need to rent apartments (driving up property values and taxes in turn) and go out to eat and whatnot.
I recently moved to Florida (along with everyone else). My neighbor has a nice place to live, several cars, a wife and a grown kid, is (apparently) debt free, and goes to the beach on his days off. A rare successful lawyer from a prestigious family?
ReplyDeleteNo. Far from it. He's the doorman/head valet at the local fancy hotel. Oh and was he advantaged by being born on third base? Hardly. He's an immigrant who speaks with a thick accent.
If you are in Florida, don't be the debt-burdened, miserable, economically poor lawyer, the kind who has to also drive for Uber to barely survive. Be a hard-working, dedicated and debt-free employee in a regular job and go the beach every weekend.
Universities need to seriously consider how risky it is to open a law school. Concordia University in PDX opened a law school in Boise, Idaho. Not only did the law school fail, but the parent institution went under as well. Was it because of the failed law school? I don't know, but it certainly couldn't have helped. I live in Portland, and that Concordia campus has just been sitting there for a while. (I guess the U of O has recently acquired the property.) I digress, but if Jacksonville University has any good sense, they will re-think their law school pipe dream...
ReplyDeleteApplications are down 10 percent from last year.... D-bag politicians can flush all the money they want down the law school toilet, it won't work.
ReplyDelete