We at OTLSS have been following the decline of über-toilet Appalachian Law School for years. Now the discordant notes of its swan song resound far from Grundy, Virginia.
A week and a half ago, the supervisors of Buchanan County voted 5–2 to give Appalachian Law School $3.4 million out of the public coffers. This handout still requires approval from the county's Industrial Development Authority, although it appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with industrial development. Half of the money will be disbursed in early March if the IDA agrees and Appalachian tenders financial records that it has previously refused.
Leading this campaign, apparently, within the county government was Supervisor Trey Adkins, who ever so coincidentally "was recently appointed to the law school’s board of trustees". Can you say conflict of interests? Might this little appointment have been a little quid pro quo? How happy will the public be to know that their board of supervisors just voted to hand dying Appalachian 6% of the county's $59M annual budget?
Not very, according to Supervisor Roger Rife—himself a former trustee of Appalachian. Reluctantly voting to give Appalachian "one more chance", he lamented: "What we’re creating is going to come back to bite us." Specifically, he expects the county to raise taxes just for this piece of lagniappe.
Yes, even some of the board members who voted in favor of this pork-barrel graft are anything but sanguine about Appalachian's prospects. Supervisor Craig Stiltner observed that no bank would lend money to an institution perenially swimming in red ink. Appalachian never repaid a $6M loan extended by the Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority in 2016.
Adkins promoted this rip-off of the public coffers as an endeavor vital to the survival of Grundy, which happens to be the county seat. Forty-one jobs at the über-toilet depend on it—22 of them held by natives of Buchanan County. In the vulgar expression of Adkins, the IDA would "tear their arm off" to save 22 jobs at the trifling price of $3.4M.
Well, before so dramatic a performance of self-mutilation, the IDA might like to do a bit of arithmetic, if anyone there is up to the task. That sum is more than $150k per job—for the next two or three months. That vastly exceeds the value of those 22 jobs to the county.
Over the past ten years, Buchanan County has lost almost half of its population. As one might guess from the name Appalachian, the county is situate in an area historically devoted to coal mining. In a remote, mountainous county with no economic prospects, whose very geography militates against anything industrial and whose population lacks the education for learned professions (even if demand were present), a law school stands out like a sore thumb, its gleaming brick building and manicured lawn clashing with the scarred, black hillsides and piles of slag that typify the landscape. It does not serve the largely impoverished population that will soon see its taxes go up to pay for a predatory über-toilet that gives Cooley stiff competition for the title of lousiest law skule in the US.
Appalachian can do nothing to help. It turns out to be in dire financial straits: without $2.5M in a big hurry, it will not see the end of the semester. Long-term survival, according to the dean, will require an infusion of some $10M.
Now, if you have just read that paragraph and are still thinking of enrolling at Appalachian, please stop and read the paragraph again. This so-called school had to go begging just to survive for the next two months. It was prepared to shut up shop in the middle of the semester. And if it does get this money for the second half of the current semester, where will it get enough money for the next semester and the one after that? Do you really want to take the evidently high risk of having your über-toilet law school bolt its doors on you in the middle of the term, leaving you to hold an empty bag?
Enrollment, at 184 students, is far below the level of 300 that, in the words of dean David Western, would be needed to sustain Appalachian. Indeed, OTLSS estimated some years ago that a law school cannot survive over the long run with fewer than 75 students per class—and right now Appalachian has only 61.
I admit that Appalachian, evidently because of millions of dollars in welfare payments, has survived longer than I had expected during the wave of shutterings of toilet law schools that started ten years ago. I predict, however, that Appalachian will soon be the seventeenth institution in law-school-scam history to close its doors for good. And when it does, good riddance.
There are already 8 law schools in Virigina, a state with a population of under 9 million people. That is literally almost one entire law school for each one million people in the state. The job market absolutely, positively cannot support 8 entire graduating classes of JD's each year. Frankly, one, perhaps two law schools with moderate sized classes would be all that Virginia needs. The supervisors of Buchanan County are basically throwing tax dollars into a landfill by funding this wholly unnecessary school.
ReplyDeleteDuring the Great Depression, the federal government built post offices everywhere. As in literally, every podunk town in the middle of East Nowhere had a post office. It was good for local politicians-steady well-paid jobs (if only for the select few) they took credit for. And it was no big deal, cost wise, since the federal government prints the money-so what's a few million here and there?
ReplyDeleteIn this case, local politicians are spending millions to support well-paid jobs(if only for a select few). The problem: Buchanan County doesn't print the money, so this sort of profound nonsense will lead-very soon-to disaster. Don't be surprised to read, in a few short months, that Appalachian has failed to pay back any money(no need to use a harsh word like "defaulted") and that county services will get cut dramatically as a consequence.
In Buchanan County, most of the money probably comes from property taxes and other charges on the public. That's why a supervisor said that taxes would have to be raised soon enough. Twenty thousand largely impoverished people are seeing their taxes go up for the sake of an über-toilet headed for its last flush.
DeleteAs I understand, Appalachian will not have to pay anything back: it is getting this money as a grant (I'd say as graft). Without any source of fresh income, it would not be able to repay a loan anyway.
In light of this apparent gift, it would certainly be appropriate-at a minimum-for their to be a forensic accounting of the budget of this county. That's a tremendous amount of money to be given to a single employer by a government that is not swimming in funds.
DeleteSmall towns in particular can often be taken over by private interests. Here we see that some people on the board of supervisors are or have been on the board of Appalachian. Adkins, recently installed on Appalachian's governing board, seems to have acted not only as voting supervisor but also as chief advocate of this pork-barrel scheme.
DeleteReally weird. Normally, an industrial development authority is basically a government agency that says "yes, we deem this organization worthy" which in turn enables certain private organizations (like nonprofit hospitals) to borrow money as if it were a municipal bond. This is attractive to lenders cuz lenders don't pay income taxes on the interest they earn from repayment of a muni bond. This in turn enables them to pass some savings along in the form of lower rates than you'd get with a regular corporate bond, but the bond is still only secured by the assets of the borrower and not by taxpayer funds. So it isn't a true muni bond in that sense, but it gets tax breaks similar to the breaks you get for investing in true muni bonds.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, an IDA is usually a conduit for special financing of the sort a community wants to promote. I've not known them to straight up make giant grants of taxpayer money to private organizations. But hey, maybe its different in Appalachia I have no idea.
I'd rather go to a toilet law school in Florida or San Diego than Appalachian. At least you get to see sexy girls on weekends at sunny beaches for your wasted tuition dollars than see hillbillies named Betty Lou with less teeth than a Halloween pumpkin 🎃
ReplyDeleteI'm sure its not THAT bad of a town, but you have a point about law schools in touristy destinations. Every class comes in flush with loan money that they will spend at local bars and on renting local apartments. It's very much like tourism revenue, except these tourists stay for three years and a fresh crop of them comes in each year to replace the ones exiting. And for all that time, all they do is spend money in the community. If the class is kept full, it's not just a cash cow for the school. Those kids spread that loan money around.
DeleteIt'll be interesting to see what OBBA's elimination of GradPLUS loans might do to that equation. But heretofore, it has indeed worked a lot like tourism for local governments. So you do have to market the location and community as a place someone would want to vacation. Because let's face it, these three years ARE a pseudo vacation for a lot of these kids.
Grundy, Virginia, is indeed pretty bad. Its population, now below 800, has been declining for 70 years. What is the nearest city? Even medium to small cities are far away:
DeleteCharleston, WV: 3.4 hours
Roanoke, VA: 3.5 hours
Asheville, NC: 3.5 hours
Knoxville, TN: 3.6 hours
Lexington, KY: 3.7 hours
Much farther:
Cincinnati, OH: 5.3 hours
Richmond, VA: 6.6 hours
Atlanta, GA: 7.2 hours
Washington, DC: 7.5 hours
The nearest place with a thousand people—and just barely—appears to be Elkhorn City, Kentucky, 0.6 hours away on winding roads.
Grundy looks like a miserable place!
DeleteThis is an all-too common example of the corruption and ineptitude of many local governments in the U.S. It's one thing for a politician at the state or federal level to broker a little federal or state pork into their territory. Yet another for a county or municipal government to squander precious resources that could have gone to streets and law enforcement and such. Local-yokels love to pass out corporate welfare in the form of tax abatements and sometimes all-out handouts to their cronies and others with the promise of "job creation" and "economic development" that rarely pans out in the long run. It is no surprise that the law school scamsters would be quite adept at this game.
ReplyDeleteLaugh all you want, but a quick Google search reveals that the campus is right next to a "Super Dollar Food Center", which conveniently sounds like it provides both food and the students' only actual chance of employment after graduation. There's also a Walmart quite close to it, though rumor has it that WallyWorld requires Law Review.
ReplyDeleteAlso, per Appalachian's own website, they charge 43 THOUSAND GODDAMN DOLLARS PER YEAR. That is insane. There are any number of trade programs that charge a miniscule fraction of that and offer much better employment prospects. Hell, Appalachian estimates the total annual cost of attendance at over 80 thousand dollars. For almost a quarter million dollars in debt you could get a CDL, your own truck, and operating authority. At least if that goes south you can sell the truck and pay back part of the loan. Good luck selling back your Appalachian J.D.
Years ago, we reported that the switchboard operator and the janitor at a courthouse in Massachusetts were paid more than some lawyers working there. Yet the operator and the janitor did not have to have and maintain a professional license at great expense, nor did they have to complete a course of training costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their jobs.
DeleteBy the way, Vermont Law School is not near any grocery store: the nearest one is half an hour away, in New Hampshire.
DeleteWell, maybe you can count that gas station/convenience store just across the river from the law school--the one with the sign outside advertising maple syrup buckets for sale (at least it was there the last time I looked on Google Maps, lol). It looked like a pretty drive, but not tempting enough to actually go to law school there.
DeleteLololol imagine if some state or the feds created a "degree sellback" system, 10:05.
DeleteIt'd be awesome. Some kind of ALJ type system that has to hear evidence about whether a person tried hard enough for long enough to find good living wage work in their field. Work out all the fine details in the regulations, but basically if the grad wins, the school has to pay off their loans. But the degree is revoked so the person can never use it to do anything that requires the school to send a transcript ever again.
Wonder how many would take that deal, and how many lawyers would ironically find jobs arguing on both sides of the system that adjudicates such claims.
I wrote years ago about that gas station with the handwritten cardboard sign in the window that advertised maple-tapping buckets. Yes, I actually did have a look round Vermont Law School's campus, without going into the building. I haven't been to Appalachian Law School's campus, but I have travelled all over Virginia, and I remember the desolate little places like Grundy. At a gas station in that area, I fell on some sloping pavement and ended up with bursitis in my knee that didn't resolve itself for three or four months.
DeleteVermont doesn't need a law school at all, but the best place for one is Burlington, not the unincorporated crossroads of South Royalton.
But this blog was created by Professor Paul Campos? I'm confused.
ReplyDeleteCampos created Inside the Law School Scam, which hasn't been updated for ten years. Outside the Law School Scam was created and is run by various people who, unlike Campos, are not inside law schools (he is a professor of law).
DeleteUnfortunately the taxpayers in this jurisdiction are being raped in order to keep the music going a couple months longer. There is no way any other deep pocket is going to hand ALS $10 million to bail them out. They need to turn out at the polls and throw out the idiots who are raising their taxes for this fools errand. Regrettably it will probably not stop this allocation but it may stop the next one. The lack of fiduciary responsibility amazes me.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe that $10 million is all that Appalachian needs. A quarter of that would be consumed just this semester. The dean admits that enrollment would have to increase by 60% just for the über-toilet to be sustainable. How likely is that? Appalachian is an unwanted joke of a law school in a desolate place. Money flushed down this toilet will simply disappear, with no benefits for the town.
DeleteAppalachian was even founded on a handout. The county gave it its grounds and buildings (which used to be used for public schools) and even paid for renovations to the buildings. More than thirty years later, über-toilet Appalachian still has its hand out.
ReplyDeleteAnybody remember the site Above the Law? They got big reporting on the layoffs and everybody getting Lathamed back in the day, and last I heard they'd caught Trump Derangement Syndrome and suddenly the law schools were brave resistance fighters....
ReplyDelete