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.
Ouch.
ReplyDeleteOG, I will forever salute the fine work of OTLSS...but as this posts highlights, the scam will never die. The death of LST is particularly telling, as it was a voice of truth in the matrix of employment lies spun by the schools.
ReplyDeleteIt's clear why so many other blogs have given up; there's just too much money to be made in the scam, so self-funded skeptics of the scam stand no chance.
It's been said over and over, but it bears repeating: as long as the federal government funds the scam through graduate school loans, it will never die.
I too am ready to give up.
DeleteThe data is out there, and has been out there for 14+ years. At some point the lemmings will jump over the cliff and three years later, there will be another huge crop of bitter ex-lawyers. I have shared my sad and common tale of woe but I don't really think I dissuaded any lemmings. I think this site should stay active though.
DeletePlease don't. The cause is just too important.
DeleteSadly, that is exactly correct. The government funds the scam, and more and more young college grads who don't want to live at home with their parents and work for minimum wage with their BA in "philosophy" "film" "Political Science" or whatever choose to go to law school. That way they get three more years of a paid vacation, courtesy of the government. Some will then go on to even more graduate education, avoiding real life for as long as possible. Having been a full time law student and a full time adult, with a job, young kids, mortgage etc. I can tell you it's a lot easier to be a student reliant on loans than ben a worker reliant on your own, post-tax, income, generally speaking. The other problems are that movies/TV/novels make law look lucrative, sexy, and glamorous, and a mass of students will say they "can't do math" and see a JD as a way to avoid their fear of math and science and secure a good job. All of this hurts the lawyers who are already struggling, as another mass of unneeded, and unwanted, JD's enters the job market every May.
DeleteI know it's hard but don't give up! I have read OTLSS since it started and you are doing great work. I did go to law school after reading the blog, but I did it the right way, enrolling at a good school on a full ride. You are needed.
Deleteyou dissuaded me, old guy :)
DeleteEt tu Brute indeed. A "charitable asset assignment" means it's not an acquisition in the traditional sense. Since there are no stockholders and the acquirer is another nonprofit, there is no purchase price. No owners would mean no one to make the check out to anyway unless there's some foundation or something set up to receive the purchase price and carry on the acquired entity's legacy in some other way.
ReplyDeleteMakes sense to force assets to stay in charitable use, but in these nonprofit-to-nonprofit transactions it can have effects just like this: They basically get all of LST's technology (and silence it or put it to pro-law school uses) for no money; the "price" is just a job for certain key people of the target.
Oh well. Can't blame the guy for wanting a steady job over trying to subsist on donations, we all have to put food on the table. Maybe naive to say this, but maybe he can be a force for good on the inside.
The "payment" was a well-paid job for life at a monopolistic organisation that does very little but charges a lot. Kyle can now look forward to a sweet 9-5, a six figure salary (basically paid for by students about to be scammed), long lunches, etc.
ReplyDeleteWhat stings a little more is that had blogs like this not unified the scam movement and given him and his work a platform, he wouldn't be in the fortunate position he is today.
Unless he's playing a very long game and doing his part to foment change from within. But I doubt it.
Yes, Mr. McEntee springs from running his Web site to "senior director" of Scam Central. One would have to be blind not to see what has happened. Will he just be kept on payroll, with no work to do? Or shall we soon be regaled with reports under his byline about the new certificate in Rescuing Dolphins or Hip-Hop & the Open Road at this or that über-toilet?
DeleteIf Old Guy ever sells out to the law-school scam, consider this message your permission to kill him.
Old Guy - After doing this for over 10 years there were a few baby steps by the legal world for transparency with law school results. And a few of the supreme toilettes de la toilettes closed, but now the with the first opportunity, the legal profession, law skule industry and their regulators, grab the first opportunity to roll everything back to the way it was. So after a decade we are back to where we started from. And an new group of first year lemmings are ready to jump on board.
DeleteI can see why you are ready to hang it up. And frankly if someone offered you a million to close the blog, I couldn't blame you for taking it.
Thank you, 11:39. The blog won't be closed down; at least Old Guy isn't going to close it. But it may become less active.
DeleteI don't agree that all of our progress has gone to waste. More than a dozen law schools have closed their doors in 5½ years. Before that, it had been a long time since even one school had shut down. Indeed, Infilaw itself has ceased to exist. A number of other law schools, including some faux-prestigious ones, are short of lemmings, money, or both and probably don't have much life left in them.
So sad about LST. Looks like OTLSS is the last remaining of a very long line of anti-scam activists.
ReplyDeleteWell, I am not going away. I have commented on the scam for 14 years and have tried to dissuade anyone who asks from going to law school. I watched as at least 30% of my former classmates tried to get into patent law.
ReplyDeleteSome became patent examiners, some went back to their old careers, some tried to open up their own shop (and failed miserably), and some just charted a new course like me. But all of them would have been better off NOT attending the Toilet known as Chicago-Kent.
Chicago-Kent should change the vowel in "Kent". On that subject, see my old piece about the U of North Texas.
DeleteThank you for carrying the struggle on. I have been at it for more than ten years, starting when I was a law student myself. The name "Old Guy" was assigned to me by some sarcastic anonymous poster at Paul Campos's old site because I had had the effrontery to recount my own experience as a jurist manqué spurned everywhere—very nearly by the law school itself—for being past my twenties (and even my thirties, but starting law school at any age after 27 is a big mistake). Now I'm Older Guy, the quixotic one still scribbling about the law-school scam long after his comrades-in-arms have surrendered. Time for me too to move on to better things. "For the sword outwears its sheath, / And the soul wears out the breast…"
Just admit to yourselves, please, as I did decades ago, that there's no intelligence in the US. Occasionally an intelligent individual can be found, of course—one capable of a thought that doesn't come handily packaged from the ultra-right-wing (m)ass media, one capable of discourse that won't fit on a bumper sticker. But the society itself, to the extent that it can decently be called a society, is profoundly anti-intellectual. The best hope for it is to go down the toilet. And that is exactly what is happening, only too goddamn slowly for everyone's good.
When I was younger, I used to think that the big problem in this country was that most people aren't very smart. Now I have a more nuanced view. People are stupid, but they are also very gullible, and tend to be quite lazy. When I attended college, it was common for professors to only award A's to 10 percent of the class, just as they do in most law schools. The professors gave lots of B's and C's, and handed out plenty of D's and F's too. Underperforming college students were routinely placed on Academic Probation, and some were failed out. Nowadays higher education has turned into a gigantic racket. Grade inflation is endemic. The college professors are told NOT to give poor grades, and the school won't put weak students on academic probation or fail them out--if the kid is paying $60k in tuition (funded by student loans that will never be repaid) it would be suicide to fail them out of your college. You just pat them on the head and dole out top grades for awful performance and collect those fat tuition checks for 4 or more years. Frankly, many of today's college graduates are less academically proficien than high school graduates were a generation agao. Some of these lazy, deluded fools go on to bomb the LSAT, go to a toilet law school, and fail the bar exam repeatedly. From my perspective, their passing or failing the bar exam is irrelevant, as thre are no jobs for them in the law anyway.
DeleteYes, the problem that you describe stems from disposition, not from inherent ability. What do you expect in a society that glorifies cretinous entertainment and elevates football games to a position of supreme importance? One with a heritage of anti-intellectualism running back more than 400 years?
DeleteA quarter of the US's adult population didn't read a single book last year, in whole or in part, even if listening to an audio recording is counted as "reading". Lawyers are supposedly an "educated" bunch, yet many of them cannot write a decent paragraph (to say nothing of a brief), and allusions to the likes of Iago, Micawber, and Babbitt go right over most lawyers' heads. The so-called universities are rapidly turning into day-care centers, if not amusement parks.
Grade inflation is indeed quite rampant, except at law schools where market forces have kept it in check because the good gigs (basically big law firms and federal clerkships) want a way to distinguish between the top middle and bottom of the class at all but the most elite law schools. Thus, everyone takes the same classes in 1L and they're blind-graded and rigidly curved. It's a tournament-based hiring model, and if a school didn't follow it then the good jobs wouldn't interview there.
DeleteA similar phenomenon happens in undergrad science courses that are generally regarded as "premed." Medical school applicants have two GPAs calculated: The science GPA and the overall GPA, with the former far more important than the latter.
Sure enough, in the liberal arts type courses you're pretty much guaranteed an A as long as you turn in your work on time and don't plagiarize. But stuff like organic chem, commonly regarded as a "weed out" for medical school, you'll see rigid curves and few As. Because there's a market that actually cares about GPA and expects it to be a meaningful way to compare one applicant against another.
So grade inflation is just a response to market forces, because in most industries employers don't much care about GPA, so that leaves the only customer as the student so why NOT give them an A if you can possibly justify it?
Old Guy may be showing his age, but he doesn't recall that liberal-arts courses gave out A's to everyone. That may well be the case nowadays, but it wasn't a few decades ago.
DeleteThe Humanities departments were turned into garbage-can shlock classes that are impossible to fail around about the year 2000, Old Guy. The pirate administrators needed a way to retain unqualified students.
DeleteThat's why I can get fixed up on blind dates with women who hold Master's degrees, but have never heard of Marcus Tullius Cicero, and can't recognize "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes" as Shakespeare.
Within living memory, even a high-school diploma meant something. Now, as I've said for decades, a university diploma is nothing but a receipt for fees paid.
DeleteAt the turn of the last century, anyone with a degree in law would have read much of Cicero's work in the original language. Few lawyers back then even went to university, and fewer still to law school, but those who did were taught Latin. Now, as you said, many "educated" people haven't even heard of Cicero. O tempora! O mores!
Well, it can be a receipt. But if it's from an elite school than it's also proof you got in in the first place.
DeleteOne idea I've had in the past is that employers that hire on prestige should, if a license isn't required, just hire based on the admit letter.
If the student gets in to a school that rejects 95% of its applicants, then you already know they can learn whatever the employer needs to teach them. So why make them spend 4 years and incur gobs of debt studying stuff that is going to be mostly irrelevant to the employer anyway? You know all you need to know about them by the summer after high school which is when you know where they did or didn't get in.
That'd certainly lay bare an inconvenient truth: A college degree doesn't really have much a priori value. If it's an elite school the value is getting in, and if not, then you wait til graduation the value of which was once well summed up by Elon Musk, who said that the degree basically just proves you can "do your chores."
"That's why I can get fixed up on blind dates with women who hold Master's degrees, but have never heard of Marcus Tullius Cicero, and can't recognize "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes" as Shakespeare."
DeleteDo you give your dates some kind of literature exam during the course of the evening? Sounds like loads of fun.
Yes its true that nowadays college-educated people almost exclusively marry other college-educated people. But I don't think it's so they can sit around quoting Shakespeare to each other (there may be some who do this). I think it's more about mutual life experiences, values, outlook on parenting, and shared financial goals.
Since my last date occurred while Bill Clinton was smoking flavored cigars in the White House, I cannot speak to the modern dating scene. Best of luck to you.
People who differ greatly in education may not have enough in common to build a meaningful relationship. Although no particular line of Shakespeare would serve as a touchstone for me, I would expect a relationship between an uncultured person and myself not to work out well: neither of us would have much to discuss with the other.
DeleteYears ago we reported here that the newsletter of now-defunct über-toilet Indiana Tech Law School had run an interview with a member of the faculty who stated that she read no books, just magazines about the private lives of celebrities. Do you really think that that person and Old Guy could form a viable relationship? What on earth would we discuss?
Not so very long ago, high-school graduates would all have had some exposure to literature. Now plenty of people with PhD's do not.
@Tyler, good point. Anthropologists have studied this and they call it "assortative mating." Interestingly, they have a concern about it because historically, "marrying up" was a massive source of social mobility. No matter how much it might feel like "gold digging," the reality is it's been lifting entire families out of poverty for eons and the benefit of it extends down to successive generations.
DeleteBut no, they don't do it to quote Shakespeare to one another. They do it because of the relatively modern ideal of marrying exclusively for love. Marrying an "equal" reduces the odds of ulterior motives. You can feel more confident that they're not just marrying you for money if they have their own money. Besides, similar earnings capacity reduces the odds of a brutal alimony battle if things don't work out.
Cicero coined the phrase "the Humanities" (studia humanitatis) and outlined it as a field of study. If you get fixed up with an MA in Education, who doesn't even recognize his name, that is interesting evidence of the frivolity of modern education.
DeleteInterestingly, the "design partners" of this LSAT alternative are Cornell, Northeastern, and Univ. of Maryland. Of those, only one (Cornell) has a law school worth attending (it's just barely within the top 14). They also say it's "complementary to" and not necessarily "in lieu of."
ReplyDeleteSo it'll be interesting to see what schools actually end up accepting this in lieu of the LSAT. I suspect that with Cornell's notable exception, it's all gonna be toilets. And I'll bet with Cornell it'll be "complementary to" and not "in lieu of."
Now in fairness, there is a role for something like this. The LSAT certainly does predict bar passage, but once you get to mid-high 150s to low 160s or so pretty much everyone passes. So, should 165 vs 170 be the difference between a trap school and the top 14? Given the massive difference this makes in career prospects, perhaps those 5 points shouldn't make such a world of difference. Perhaps adcomms should disregard the LSAT one it gets above the point where passing the bar is a virtual certainty, and look instead to programs like this to draw finer distinctions. But that, of course, is unlikely to be how this gets used.
Well, none of this makes any sense; this site has over 3.2 million pageviews, and yet the scam seems healthy-and is even growing, with the creation of totally unnecessary law schools. Applications in 2021 surged 13%...and as of March, for 2022 applications are down over 10%.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/law-school-stampede-may-be-over-with-applications-down-10-2022-03-03/#:~:text=Applications%20to%20American%20Bar%20Association,have%20applied%20for%20fall%202022.
There's nothing consistent about the law school scam.
Yeah but 3.2m pageviews doesn't necessarily indicate 3.2m unique people, nor do you know how many of them are 0Ls who could still decide not to go as opposed to people who already have JDs for whom it's just a sunk cost.
DeleteI don't think anyone should the antiscam movement based on lack of big huge world-changing difference though. If you persuade even one person not to make the life-destroying choice of attending a non-elite law school without massive scholarships and/or job-guaranteed connections, it's all worth it.
We can't win the war, but we've won some important battles. I think that counts for something.
ReplyDeleteEven Paul Campos proved to be a self-aggrandizing hackademic in the end.
ReplyDeleteHe has a sinecure in the law-school scam. Are you surprised?
DeleteHe was just another spoiled Champagne Socialist Bobo with a fat paycheck and a fake job.
DeleteAnd not just a fat paycheck; before latching onto the scam as an insider/savant, he spent years decrying the medical profession's bias against, er, overweight people, with allegedly scholarly writing which was thoroughly debunked and which everyone, including Campos, has done their best to forget.
DeleteIt was my impression that when Campos contracted Trump Derangement Syndrome in November 2016, the law school scam took a real back seat for him. Campos seemed to focus most of his energy on transcribing every misdeed by the bad orange man.
DeleteIn one of the older posts on here, I asked OG what he would do if he were somehow offered a tenured prof job at a law school that is crappy in terms of student prospects, but safe from an accreditation and financial solvency standpoint. He admitted that he "could be bought" and would probably not be able to bring himself to turn down the gig.
DeleteI think it'd be the same for someone like Campos. If the job is available to you, you'd be crazy not to take it. Good salary/benefits, virtually impossible to be let go if you have tenure, and all you have to do is teach a couple classes (for which there is only one test to grade) and write papers on whatever interests you (which are not peer reviewed and for which the only barrier to publication is a student-controlled editorial group that mostly just makes your job easier by checking your cites and stuff).
You really can't fault the profs for taking such a sweet gig. You can only fault the system that allows it to exist despite such bad career outcomes. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Meh...hypocrisy, especially rank hypocrisy, ought never to be accepted. Just because the job pays well doesn't excuse being a cog in the giant gear called the scam.
DeletePeople gotta do what's best for their livelihoods and families. If someone offers you a job that's better than any of your other options and doesn't involve doing anything illegal, you can't really fault them for taking it.
DeleteAnd c'mon. Lawyers? We take loathsome clients all the time. How many factually innocent people does the average public defender get? Should they lose sleep if a person they know murdered someone goes free because they got some motion to exclude evidence granted? How about the tax lawyer who takes on a client to help them make use of a perfectly legal and legitimate but politically unpopular tax loophole? Faulting a prof for taking this awesome job (that you know if you're honest you'd take too if it were on offer) and then turning around and heading off to take the next time-wasting depo for your klutz of a client in some slip and fall case seems like a case of pot meet kettle. We work in the system we work in, and as long as we don't do anything illegal or that violates the ethical codes we need lose no sleep.
So your job is to teach people stuff they're paying too much for and that they may never be able to use at a school that probably shouldn't exist. So what? The blame for this is the absurd federal policy of unlimited lending that funds it, and the administrators who mislead people about their prospects to entice them to attend. I don't see any reason to blame some prof whose job is to teach these poor kids centuries-old caselaw about torts or whatever. By the time they're sitting in your class, they've already enrolled. It's not like you recruited them.
Deriving a living from the scam and being responsible for it are different things.
No, they aren't; the scam only exists because people are willing to do whatever in order to make money. Law professors, egads, could actually practice law rather than fleece their marks, er, law students.
DeleteIf you are part of the scam, you're a scammer. To put it simply, the scam wouldn't exist if it didn't have the worker bees-professors, deans, administrators-to create the facade which makes the scam possible.
To argue otherwise-"it's the government's fault"-means that no one is responsible for their actions in any instance, ever.
Again, the scam only exists because there are those who are willing to be part of it.
I don't remember what exactly I said, but I may have said that I'd take a teaching position at a law school if one were offered to me. Fat chance of that: I've never even attempted to get one, and there's no way that I'd be considered, being well into my fifties and not having been born into high socio-economic status (you won't find Choate or field trips to Spain on Old Guy's résumé). As 3:33 pointed out, we do have to make a living, and many of us don't have abundant options. When I answered the academic question about becoming a scam-professor, I was probably out of work, with few prospects of making a penny even as a lawyer. I do make a living now, mainly doing shitwork. But at the time I probably didn't. Today I wouldn't take a hackademic job. But when one is driven almost suicidal from despair, even the law-school scam looks attractive.
DeleteAnd, yes, the practice of law is another scam. Which litigator hasn't been handed a horrible decision by a judge who was fucking wrong if not outright biased? I frequently precede the word court with the word kangaroo, and I won't apologize for that. Litigation too is a scam, just one with special characteristics (notably the inability to avoid it if you are named as a defendant).
Campos is old enough to wrangle early retirement if he wants it, and yet there he is, cashing his paycheck and vomiting social justice gibberish all over the place..... Just another Hackademic.... another shark in the murky water....
DeleteIt was always an impossible task. Moneyed powerful interests working together versus honest individuals merely seeking to expose the truth. I find it foolish when people claim the truth rings louder, I think we've been shown time and time again that lies are more powerful, and the truth has to be repeated as loudly as possibly by many individuals before it would ever even begin to silence the self interested lucrative lies.
ReplyDeleteI had hoped there would be new scambloggers but it never came about. Yes progress has been reset, not just 10 years, probably closer to 14 years now, the early parts of the scamblog where there were few if any voices around and there was heated opposition even to that. Those early scamblogs all got wiped too. A pattern that did continue. Meanwhile on the lawschool side, they get more applicants and have even more exposure. The NYT article and Campos are in the rearview mirror, as is LST. They won, a complete, total victory.
We are back to people mostly being ashamed to even mention they got scammed. Maybe we were always there, outside of a brief blip. Most people move on by necessity, people are resilient and eventually either something hits for them and they prefer to forget, or they try to disappear into shame and depression. Either way, the victims tend to be cleared out.
I'd forgotten about the anti-scam movement entirely because of other things until I just recently saw something that reminded me of it. And so I figured I'd stop by again on here. I am glad OTLSS is still here and I believe Old Guy has done an incredible service that he has not been praised enough for and I'm sure never will be. This is my own last personal link to the scam. I have already "retired" from the bar and moved out of law. I'll not be a success by any means but I have other issues to worry about and don't have the energy to deal with the scammers and warning others. They never wanted to listen anyway and now I'm too old to care.
Best wishes to Old Guy and I do hope you continue to have the energy to at least save some souls and call these scammers out. You are a stronger man than I.
Now that the government has decided no one needs to repay their student loans, vastly more people will take an all-expenses-paid 4Y vacation to "college" and many will follow on to keep the party going for three more years of "law school". I personally know a guy who did this, he took a 3Y vacation in warm sunny Florida, because he likes beaches and girls in bikinis. He called it "law school" but didn't even sit for the Bar Exam afterwards, just moved back home with his parents and started stocking shelves. He had a great time in college and law school, a lot of fun, without having to work for a living. He came from a family of modest means, so 7Y of vacation was amazing, probably the best 7Y of his life. . .
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
DeleteWe've reported a number of cases here of people who, bold as brass, told the media or the courts that they had no intention of repaying their student loans, nor any plans to do anything with their degrees. If the public wants to pay for vastly overpriced degrees, often coupled with not a little lavish spending on beer and travel, to the advantage of generally unpromising and unworthy students, it should do so openly, with clearly expressed public approval. Instead, most of the public imagines from years of propaganda that student loans constitute an "investment" in "education" rather than a monstrous boondoggle.
DeleteThere have been a few news stories about kids using student loan money for alcohol and drugs on Spring Break, but that's about it. None of this should surprise people. Every single time the government starts throwing around money people take advantage of it. In this case the primary offenders are the schools, who charge outrageous tuition, often don't really teach anything, and benefit from the "student loans" which are really just a transfer of money from the government to the schools themselves. The schools don't see their students as students at all, but rather as "student-loan-conduits". The secondary offenders are the students who take out the loans, and party and live large with money they will never pay back for 4 years, 7 years, or even longer.
DeleteYes, 3:50, the schools treat the students as student-loan conduits, just possibly human bearers of three $50k checks. This nine-year-old article of ours nicely illustrates what the law-school scam is all about:
Deletehttps://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2013/08/dean-peter-alexander-just-doesnt-care.html
The dean of newly opened Indiana Tech Law School, with only 33 students in all, didn't know a thing about them except that one of them came from Ghana ("in Africa", the dolt of a dean added, lest anyone suppose that he had in mind some suburb of Fort Wayne). One person who applied late was accepted without any review of the application. But each student brought in money, and that was all that mattered. The author of the article aptly points out that the students "sound like more of an inconvenience" than the inaugural class that would make or (in this case) break the über-toilet of a law school.
If dogs were eligible for student loans, law schools would erect kennels.
Student loans are definitely investments more than loans. If they graduate and make enough money, then they get paid back with interest. If not, then they fill out IBR paperwork and pay what they can afford which can be nothing.
DeleteThis is much more like an investor who only gets paid if the company is profitable. The problem is that investors make decisions about what investments are good or bad, they don't just invest in any company they are legally allowed to invest in, which is the current rule of basically limitless lending (at least at the graduate school level) as long as the school is accredited and the school certifies the amount borrowed as consistent with the student budget.
In a sane world, the government would make real investment decisions, at least regarding graduate degrees which are where the massive balances are almost exclusively found. They would lend or not lend or set different limits based on supply and demand about which they already have lots of data from the BLS. But no, the left would hate that as perpetuating privilege and the right would hate it just as much for different reasons i.e. a socialistic central authority deciding what people should or shouldn't study, and both would be lobbied hard by the education industry itself and the large amount of money it could target towards getting anyone with such ideas out of office.
@April8@3:33 asserts:
ReplyDelete"Deriving a living from the scam and being responsible for it are different things."
I was in medical school in Houston during the height of the cocaine abuse epidemic. Cardiac ICU beds were frequently full of young African-American men with cocaine-induced heart attacks. During that time, members of the medical school faculty and other affluent residents of Houston would attend "investment parties" that worked something like this: There would be a number of such gatherings around town in which participants would bring fairly large sums of cash to "lend" to a local "entrepreneur" who would make the rounds, picking up bundles of cash. The party-goers would eat cheese and sip on fine wine, listening to light jazz for several hours. Then, the "entrepreneur" would show back up with their cash, plus a ridiculous amount of "interest."
There's nothing illegal about lending money to a stranger. But we all knew damn well what was happening: The "entrepreneur" was gathering the capital to purchase an incoming shipment of cocaine, then re-selling it at a huge markup to middle-men or street level dealers down the food chain. As far as I'm concerned, these elites who were supplying the cash were more culpable for the cocaine crisis than the street-level dealers, most of whom endured low incomes and daily mortal danger out of desperation.
OG, your blog is as much relevant today as it was a decade ago, but not for the reason you started it, which was to dissuade people from going to law school. But unfortunately, for each lemming you have waved off of the disaster, there are who-knows how many dumber candidates who will blindly borrow six-figures and waste 3 years of their lives.
No, we need to continue to promote the mindset that the Higher Education Cartel is fleecing the American taxpayers in the form of student loans that will never be repaid. We can only hope that with enough pressure from constituents, policy makers will eventually start looking at ways to put an end to the gravy train.
Keep the faith, OG.
If there us any loan forgiveness by the feds, it should be accompanied by laws ending the loan system or at least highly regulating it with clawback provisions that hold the schools responsible for students' failure to repay their loans.
ReplyDeletelaw school is for losers!!!
ReplyDeleteThere have been comments about how all higher ed is a scam-here's an interesting article about corportations jettisoning the requirement for a four year degree in favor of a skills-based hiring process:
ReplyDeletehttps://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-many-employers-have-ditched-4-year-degree-requirements-135219348.html
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-many-employers-have-ditched-4-year-degree-requirements-135219348.html
ReplyDeleteIf you're hiring for something that requires a government license you need the right degree. If you rely on prestige as a proxy for intelligence then fine, but you could just as easily hire based on the fact that they got into Harvard or whatever without needing them to actually go at all.
DeleteAbsent those two circumstances, then I think Elon Musk said it best: A degree mostly just "proves you can do your chores." It will teach you little of relevance to an actual job and what is relevant is likely stale and could've been picked up much cheaper and more quickly on the job or in an apprenticeship.
I guess it does prove that you can jump through (often modest) hoops and successfully achieve a long-term objective that takes several years to do, but it is an awfully expensive way to prove such a thing.
Infilaw loans wiped out..https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/23/business/student-loan-debt-fraud-settlement.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur
ReplyDelete