Just over five months ago, we at OTLSS reported that notorious über-toilet Golden Gate was struggling to stay in business. Now we have found out that Golden Gate is going to close its JD program in May 2024, while still offering degrees in law other than the JD (presumably LLMs).
We at OTLSS are delighted to see yet another über-toilet bite the dust. Predatory failed law schools such as Golden Gate do not deserve to exist, nor should they be permitted to fatten themselves through federally guaranteed student loans. The sorts of people who go to über-toilets, in the main, have no business attending law school and should not be allowed to do so.
Golden Gate has thus become the sixteenth ABA-accredited law school to shut down since 2016:
Cooley (one campus)
Hamline (merged with Mitchell)
Indiana Tech
Whittier
Charlotte
Savannah
Valpo
Arizona Summit
Cooley (a second campus)
Thomas Jefferson (relinquished ABA accreditation in favor of state accreditation)
La Verne (relinquished ABA accreditation in favor of state accreditation)
Concordia
Cooley (a third campus)
Florida Coastal
Penn State Law (probably)
Golden Gate
Which law school will be next?
Sad to see it go like Valpo. Unlike most of these garbage closed law schools, they weren't 70s cash grabs but school that were once respectable run into the ground by greedy deans.
ReplyDeleteWho will be next? Well if we mean who will be FORCED to close under threat of losing accreditation, I continue to believe that'll be either Charleston or Westcliff - they're the last 2 for-profit ABA law schools remaining in the country, and the for-profits are definitely the low-hanging fruit for regulators to sacrifice.
ReplyDeleteCharleston is the most likely candidate; it already tried to get itself acquired by infilaw and when that fell thru, they are following the usual playbook of trying to go nonprofit. Problem with that is, as we saw with Florida Coastal, the for--profit owners usually strip mine the place of every last scrap of cash they can before "donating" the assets they don't want to the nonprofit board that takes over, and the regulators tend to think this leaves them too high and dry from a solvency standpoint so, without a parent company guaranteeing their obligations, they close. So "going nonprofit" is easier said than done and I think Charleston is the prime next candidate for FORCED closure.
Of course, other schools may beat it by simply deciding, GGU, that they just don't WANT to do it anymore. That's too difficult to predict.
At the risk of repeating myself, there are 10 ABA-accredited law schools in the state of Pennsylvania. TEN law schools in one state. There are 6 ABA accredited law schools in the tiny District of Columbia, 8 in Virginia--8 law schools, in one state, that borders a District with half-a dozen more. So, saying a couple of toilet schools closed down when literally thousands of law students, nationwide, are attending schools where they will have a very, very slim chance of finding work afterwards due to gross oversaturation appears to be a very small drop in a very large bucket. Can you even imagine competing with 10 entire classes of law school grads in one state upon matriculation? A state that had been cranking out 10 entire classes of new lawyers, a conservative estimate would be 1,500 lawyers every May for years on end? More than 100 new JD's per month fighting for jobs in one state? I am starting to feel like the whole country is being scammed by our system of so-called "higher education" that educates thousands of people for jobs that don't exist, while refusing to educate people for fields that are desperate for new workers.
ReplyDeleteWell said. I think people look at markets like DC and think, omg so many lawyers I can intern there and get my foot in the door!
DeleteIn reality, sure there are lots of places that'll take a free intern. But when it comes to actually hiring they're gonna chase the Harvard grads like everyone else. At least biglaw doesn't bother with the charade and hires summer associates with the same prestige focus (and pay) as it will use to extend permanent offers. But government will string you along as long as it can and then require you to apply like everyone else at which point you find that the summer internships conferred no recruiting advantage whatsoever.
This is especially the experience of going to a DC area school: You get internships at these really cool federal agencies and it gives you a sense of false hope, only to graduate and have your resume disappear into the black hole known as USAJobs.
Sadly, the lemmings are still lining up. An electrician who is doing work on my house told me of his dream to be a criminal defense lawyer. He is 38, has a 156 LSAT and a criminal past. I can’t dissuade him and I know in 4 years he will be cursing at the world.
ReplyDeleteNO!
DeleteHis age alone will damn him, as mine damned me (and I wasn't very much older). His criminal past will raise issues of character and fitness, especially if it's recent or grave. Unless he improves that LSAT score considerably, he will not be able to attend a law school worth attending (there are only 13 or so).
I know. He thinks that uber-toilets are his path to success. He could make more as an electrician. I wish I was making this up but I'm not. I'm going to take another crack at him.
DeleteI also know a 22 YO who is barely getting by at her regional undergrad school (think, slightly better than community college) who wants to become a "commercial real estate lawyer." This little lady doesn't even have the Chutzpah to ask her boss for more than $10/hour! Toileteers are the golden goose for law schools.
If he becomes a lawyer, he will earn much less than a competent electrician does. Mine bills around $160 per hour, and hew works for himself.
DeleteWhen a plumber presented his bill, the client spluttered: "That much for twenty minutes' work? I'm a lawyer, and I charge much less!"
Delete"Why do you think I got out of law?"
As for the failing undergraduate, I'd like to know when exactly law came to be "for everyone", as scam-dean Harry Wu notoriously wrote in You Ass News many years ago. Not all that many decades ago, it was widely accepted that lawyers had to be erudite. Today every knuckle-dragging moron is ushered into law school.
DeleteWell, OG, look at what law school offers. Mainly and most importantly, no prerequisites. Medical/dental/pharmacy/etc you THEORETICALLY can major in whatever you want, but there's so many prereqs to even be able to apply that for all intents and purposes you might as well just major in biology and almost all of them do. Then the med/dental/pharm/PA schools bust your GPA up into overall GPA and "science GPA" and pretty much disregard the former because they know how easy liberal arts is.
DeleteMBA might be less particular on undergrad coursework, but it's a lot like law in that all but the elite schools are scams, and it's shorter by a year and so that's one year less of "pretend independence" with student loans paying your rent. Plus most MBA programs want at least some preexisting professional work experience.
That, in a nutshell, is how law became "for everyone." Because it's like a liberal arts MA in that anyone can get into it, but unlike the liberal arts MA in terms of appearance of practicality. So law school's pitch is basically "Got a useless undergrad degree and don't want to have to move back in with mom and dad? No problem. Come here. We'll get your rent paid AND shut your parents up for three years."
Yes, the absence of prerequisites opens law up widely. But there was a time, not so very long ago, when underperforming students didn't consider law or, if they did, were quickly set straight ("um, dear, with your D+ average, perhaps these lines of work would be more suitable"). When did this change?
DeleteThat is the problem. I have a worthless political science degree and law school seems like the only option. I don't know what else to do?
DeleteThe 38-year-old electrician needs to be happy he has a good job that pays the rent, and leave the legal career to pipe dreams. He can go read my story in the comments under the last post, especially the part where I earned LESS after law school, working in the legal field, than I did before law school, when I had a skilled job that had good benefits as well. A situation that lasted well over a year for me.
DeleteI am currently 24 years old and debating whether I should apply for law school at the next cycle or should do a career change into nursing. I am thinking about applying for law school at the next cycle because I believe my LSAT is too low and I want to see if I can get a higher LSAT. I will be 25 if I start Law School. Do you think that is too old and should I just look into nursing instead?
ReplyDeleteNursing will have better career prospects. You sound a little unfocused. Maybe you could start with a Nursing associate's program and transfer to a 4 year program if it works out.
DeleteIt depends on the type of nurse but I know nurse practitioners and ICU and ED nurses that make bank. $200K+ per year. The more highly trained ones get at least $150K here in the south. why even think about law school?
DeleteIf you want to swiftly land a high-paying, very secure job, go into Nursing. If you would prefer to go massively in debt and be unemployed, then go Law. It's not a hard call. I am a practicing lawyer, with a busy solo practice. I run into unemployed and severely underemployed lawyers all the freaking time. I don't think I have ever met an unemployed nurse in my life. Nurses can, and do, absolutely make six figure plus salaries after a few years on the job, something that will never happen for most of today's new JD's (or most of the current ones). A big part of the reason why I opened my own law practice is because the job market was so bad--and this was 13Y ago--and the salaries I was being offered were so low, despite me being a former prosecutor with many years of experience.
DeleteUnless you get a 170+ on your LSATs and get into an EXTREMELY prestigious law school (and even then, it's a tough call) go into nursing. There is a dire shortage of nurses and a dire surplus of lawyers and it is that simple.
DeleteNow, getting into nursing as a career-switcher is often a bigger hassle than going to law school, which is part of law school's siren song. I think the nursing profession deliberately makes it harder if you didn't pick nursing right from the get-go out of high school precisely because protecting the shortage protects the high pay.
The hoops are that first of all, nursing requires a bunch of prerequisites which can be hard to get put together (and for which there may be no financial aid) if you are not already in an undergraduate degree granting program and either don't already have them from your first trip through undergrad, or if the courses were taken too long ago for the nursing school to be willing to count them. Someone who knows they want nursing right out of high school just enrolls in college traditionally, picks up the prereqs along the way, and then applies to the nursing major from within the school. Much easier than a career switcher who often has to enroll class-by-class at the local community college or whatever, and because they are a nondegree student just taking a class, they have to pay out of pocket and get last priority for registration in these courses which are quite popular and often fill up fast. Between class availability and the need to work in order to pay out of pocket, it took my friend who switched to nursing 2 years just to get the prereqs done. But she was still very glad she did.
And once in, it can also be harder to pay for because it is an undergraduate program which (unlike law school which can access GradPLUS loans) is subject to the annual and lifetime Stafford loan limits. Law school is a graduate program so you can borrow unlimited, so it pays your rent as well as your tuition, which is also part of how the scam attracts its victims.
But, if you can get the prerequisites together and whatnot, choosing nursing instead is absolutely worth the extra effort. As a standard RN you'd have hospitals begging to hire you at 70-80k, and into the six figs easily if you aren't tied to a geography and can sign up for one of those travel nurse companies. And then as you advance and gain experience it'll go up quick from there, and you can make even bigger bucks with special certifications like CRNA, or get the right graduate degree to become an NP if you want to leave hospitals entirely and work nice regular clinic business hours and (in many states) have essentially the same scope of practice as a primary care physician. There are also lots of nurses that eventually move entirely away from the bedside and into various hospital administration roles, including the c-suite.
In short, going back to undergrad to pursue nursing is going to be significantly harder than law school. But it will also be significantly more worth it than law school, in all likelihood. But it's only going to get harder as you age, because as we get older we all tend to get more and more entanglements that make it harder to go back to school. You're only 24, but that is still six years older than the traditional start to this track. I would go nursing, and I would get on it now while you still can.
I am thinking about serving in the military first and then perhaps using the GI Bill to pay for perquisites and nursing school.
DeleteIf you are 24 years old and have not started taking the necessary pre-requisites to go into nursing, you have no time to lose. If your goal is to become a nurse, I recommend that you start now. Sometimes, when you are young, it can feel like you have all the time in the world, but as you get older you will see people who were firmly on their path to a particular career when they were 20 years old, and succeeded, and people who were saying "I don't know what I want to do with my life" in their 30's, and failed.
DeleteThat can be a good idea...but remember you'll be in the military. When I was in, a small but vocal number of my fellow recruits couldn't adjust; they were shocked, just shocked that they needed to wear uniforms, salute superiors, etc etc. Needless to say it was a very unpleasant experience for them.
DeleteSo the benefits can be good, but you'll need to serve first.
Or, dilbert113, in their fucking forties, like Old Guy…
Delete@8:35 so the question is which is the best path to pursue nursing at 24 without any background in it? 1) Join military. Presumably pick and MOS as corpsman or medic. Then at completion use GI benefits for school 2) Pursue school now, perhaps starting with community college then if one turns out to be crackerjack nurse, apply to military as officer and seek to get loan forgiveness, if necessary. Or just pursue hospital nursing and hope salary can cover loans, if necessary.
DeleteGGU closing means that lemmings like the electrician will go to the other Uber toilets that accepts low hanging fruit and paradoxically the fewer Uber toilets still on the market are going to benefit from this. Actually will have a "Uber Toilets" monopoly when the other Uber toilets close.
ReplyDeleteI was at Indiana Tech for four years. Part of the problem is grade-inflating undergraduate institutions that tell students that anyone can go to law school, the ABA, which accredits anything under the sun, and parent institutions that have idiots as leaders and see law schools as cash cows rather than places to produce high-quality lawyers. It's a fucking disgrace.
ReplyDeleteAnyone CAN go to law school. They just won't get a job after, lol.
DeleteAnd the school leaders aren't idiots. On the contrary, they're extremely smart. Just evil. Law schools ARE cash cows. The school gets paid up front and in full thanks to student loans, and because gradPLUS borrowing is unlimited they can charge whatever they want, unlike undergrad where the Stafford limits function as quasi price caps. And it's low overhead; it's not like you need sophisticated lab equipment or whatever for a law school, just professors and seats for their students to sit in.
From a business perspective, running a law school is a no brainer for an administrator, as long as you can keep the accreditation happy and the seats full. It is the demand for those seats that matters; demand for graduates is irrelevant to the school because they get paid up front. We all see the list of law schools that have closed. Make no mistake. That is because they couldn't keep the seats full of kids willing to borrow 200k to go there. It is not because of how the graduates fair except insofar as the prospective students got wise to the plight of those that came before and stopped enrolling.
Here's the reality: the scam will never die; at best information about the scam can be made available(this blog, for example) but that's about it. Remember all those articles 5 or so years ago in the media about the scam? And not a single one since, as the media has lost interest? So no general public pressure regarding the wasted taxpayer money on loans never to be repaid.
ReplyDeleteThe independent websites/blogs-again, except this-have given up, too.
And it's just too easy for the scam to continue. If law school goes all virtual-see article above-you'll have scam schools popping up like mushrooms, each getting "provisional" accreditation before the scammers take their cash and move on.
The brutal truth is that law school was, is, and will remain an option for many. Why? Well, everybody knows all lawyers are rich, so there's that.
And it's the last resort-and will remain the last resort- for the person with the worthless BA. What's another three years of loans when you've never paid a dime on your college loans? It's all make believe at the point, and who wants to work for minimum wage and have to explain yourself to everyone(You went to college and still work at Starbucks?).
And it's the "opportunity" for others who see the grass is greener-see the tale of the electrician, above. Again, everybody knows lawyers are rich, so I'm going to law school even though I have a job that pays the bills. My law school class was filled with teachers, social workers, nurses(this was back in the day when nurse-attorneys were going to rule the profession. That didn't happen, you say? I'm shocked, just shocked). All of them quit regular jobs with good benefits because....1. they felt underappreciated and 2. everybody knows all lawyers are rich.
OG has established 13 or so law schools worth attending; I'd suggest another 15-20 regional schools(state flagship, etc) which may be worth it if you are going to stay local.
So that would be less than 35 law schools worth attending...but the lemmings still apply to Cooley and every other godforsaken law school. And it's never going to end; at best some will read this blog and think twice.
Agree with all of that, 11:20, except the notion that some non-top 14 flagships might be worth attending if staying local.
DeleteI think the message is simple. Top 14 or bust. I say 14 because that's been the widely-recognized cutoff for eliteness for many years and prospective students will easily understand it if they google the term.
Those "good but not great" schools you mentioned are a trap. Basically, your odds of success there are (at best) like 1 in 3 instead of 1 in 100 (or worse) at a bad school. That is much better odds, sure. But it's still more likely than not that you will end up just as screwed as the toilet grad, because it's all about that first job out which pretty much has to be biglaw or a federal clerkship else the lack of either is a disadvantage that follows you for life.
Now granted, even within the top 14, nothing is guaranteed. Maybe you're too old or too awkward or whatever. But those are the only schools where more students than not will do well.
@ 3:02......speaking of cut-offs. Career services at law schools have an implied cutoff for their career services if you aren't employed 10 months after graduation when the law school already submitted their ABA required employment statistics despite their claim they work hard to help alumni.b You are dead to them. Your employment status won't matter anymore and you are a waste of their resources. The career services will refuse to assist you and simply tell you network then hangup. They are too busy working on the next graduating class. So their website where they advertise their career services for both current students and alumni is mere puffery. Not a warranty.
Delete"Career services" won't help you even when you're enrolled, if you fall outside the favored group. They knew damn well, for instance, that Old Guy was unwanted on account of his age, so they didn't even try to help me. Of course, they had plenty of time for the rich little darlings who got sheaves of offers.
DeleteIt was clear at my law school-not a top school by any means-that the fanciful-named "career services" was to be used only-and I mean only-by the top 10% of the class. The associate dean made that clear to me during a very unpleasant conversation, when I was told not to submit for any posted jobs.
DeleteAnd 10:26p is also correct; once you've graduated you are of no use to the school. At best they'll refer you to their website, which may or may not have actual jobs listed. More often than not it will contain mindless advice("network" "contact relatives who are attorneys").
Adding insult to injury will be the calls you get from the "development" people wanting donations from alumni. I was so desperate that during one of these calls I told the caller I was unemployed and asked if they could help me find a job. A long silence followed; caller then explained she was a 3L at the school and took the job to pay her bills.
Yeah, USNWR used to have an "employed 9 months after graduation" standard that mattered for their rankings, and nowadays the ABA has a ten month standard. So yes, that is the cutoff when your outcome completely ceases to matter to the school.
DeleteBack when it was just USNWR, some schools used to create jobs for new grads that "just so happened" to have a duration of exactly 9 months. The ABA eventually got wise to that (I think because of reporting by LST) and made a standard that measured "full time, permanent, bar passage required, not solo practice" or something like that.
So, the school-funded positions have largely gone the way of the dodo because they no longer work to game the disclosure, but frankly I don't think most of 'em care about how bad that number looks anymore anyway. It's not like the employment rate is a standard that can cost them accreditation; it's just a disclosure and one best managed by not trying too hard to get responses from grads i.e. better to mark "unknown" than "unemployed."
So, if you are a "trap school" your numbers already look good enough to entice since around a third of your class is gonna have great outcomes. And if you are a "Crap school" the focus seems to have shifted away from misleading people and towards just finding the ones who don't do their due diligence. Either way, what you tend to experience is as OG said: At all but the elite schools, career services at both trap schools and crap schools are there for appearances and to arrange OCI interviews for the top of the class. They don't care one whit about anyone else, not even when they're still students much less ten months out.
Any "development" person who had the gall to hit me up for a donation to the school that never gave a damn about me would get a nice development of profanity in the ear. It hasn't happened yet—probably because those mother-fuckers know better than to lock horns with Old Guy.
DeleteOld Guy, my toilet had the gall to call me up and beg for money. This was in 2009 and I had been an unemployed toileteer for 12 month by that time. I briefly relayed my employment situation then screamed at them to fuck off forever. I will never forget what law school did to my career.
DeleteThe schools are wise to that too though, OG. For one thing, I noticed that all the active alums in my class are people who got biglaw. School seems to know who is or isn't worth reaching out to.
DeleteAnd even those they do call, they don't do it themselves. They make a student do it as a condition of their scholarship or summer public interest stipend or whatever. I know because I had to work a certain number of these "cold call shifts" as a condition of some of my own aid.
Harder to yell at 'em when the person on the other end of the line is a fellow likely scam victim themselves.
IMHO the driving force behind the charade of Hamline Law School "merging" into William Mitchell, which amounted to just changing the name of the latter to Mitchell Hamline, was the folks at William Mitchell wanting to get hold of Hamline's alumni list to solicit the listees for contributions in the belief that their alma mater still exists.
DeleteI disagree with both of you, 11:20 and 3:02. I don't think that there are a dozen or more other law schools worth attending, but I also wouldn't limit it to the T14. In particular, there are two or three law schools outside of that limit that will pay through the nose for certain applicants to attend, and if you meet that metric, you should go though.
DeleteIs it better to pay $75,000 a year to go to NW/GULC/NYU or to pay $0 in tuition and receive a stipend on top of that to go to one of these schools that still put 50% or more into BL? I think there's a legitimate argument to be made for this.
Law is for morons.
ReplyDeleteI can tell immediately that the electrician is yet another "grass is greener on the other side" retard. He probably has no drive but should be able to work and easily make high 5-figures in that field.
ReplyDeleteYou have someone on this topic alone who flat-out states that they were a prosecutor for many years and had to open their own shop. Or in other words, couldn't make the jump to a county PD which can pay well after some years. That's because every other lawyer wants to be on the public dime as well, with I'm sure hundreds of applicants for an open position.
It's almost impossible to get in unless you know someone.
Anyone who thinks that the grass is greener on the lawyers' side of the fence should talk with a few lawyers. Staying in law for five years is a real accomplishment. Even many people like Old Guy who are relatively "successful" are trying to get out.
DeleteHow about career services uses only the top 10% of the class for OCI and if there are hardly any minorities in the top 10% of the class then those minorities become jobless for life student loan that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. But the law school can say they are committed to diversity for taking their money at enrollment.
DeleteIt's just a little more complicated than that, 4:23, but you basically have it right.
DeleteThe additional complication is that the most desirable of the minorities—those with the best LSAT scores, for instance—are snapped up by the élite and near-élite schools. Mediocre U doesn't get them. A Black person in the range of, say, the U of Minnesota will end up instead at Cornell or Michigan, at least. After all, those schools, too, need to be seen as welcoming minorities (even if not so many decades ago they prided themselves on their whiteness)—and they have the means to get the students that they want.
Minnesota, however, does not. It can bribe a few impecunious Black students of high calibre, but for the most part it has to plunder the ranks of the lesser schools in order to maintain whatever image it has for "diversity". So quality starts to suffer, and many Black students wonder why they aren't getting anywhere with their "prestigious" degree from Minnesota.
The plundering continues all the way down to the real shit pits, which will take a goddamn platypus if it is clever enough to mark an X on the check for the student loan. But of course the shit pits are among the most vocal about their glorious "diversity". Oh, yes, there are plenty of Black graduates on the unemployment line.