Savannah Law School, a branch of John Marshall Law School in Atlanta, will close at the end of the semester.
The students, if I may so flatter them, of this über-toilet were informed two days ago. Already the building had been sold—apparently with possession to take place before the end of the semester, as the students will "be relocated to an unannounced location". I'm sure that the students appreciate this very late notice, scant weeks before their exams.
Savannah Law School now has to produce a "teach-out" plan to enable its current students to finish their Mickey Mouse JDs. Funny, I don't recall seeing any such plan from Indiana Tech or Whittier or Charlotte. Certainly none of those venerable institutions stayed open for two more years for the sake of the currently enrolled students. And Savannah Law School apparently has no such intentions either, since it has already sold its building. The "plan" may well be to have everyone transfer to the main campus in Atlanta, hours away.
In the meantime, Valparaiso is not admitting students, Cooley is in hot water with the ABA, and the two remaining InfiLaw toilets (Arizona Summit and Florida Coastal) have shrunk to a small fraction of their size at the heyday of the law-school scam. Expect more closures this year.
To say Atlanta is “hours away” from Savannah (I presume the school is located in that city) is a vast understatement. It’s like closing a school in NYC and advising students not to worry, they have entree to a campus located somewhere in Maryland between Baltimore and D.C. In other words, the students at Savannah are screwed.
ReplyDeleteFrom the Web site of Appalachian School of Law: "Several cities, including Asheville, N.C., Knoxville, T.N. [sic], and Lexington, K.Y. [sic] are close by for weekend trips."
DeleteThose cities are four hours' drive from Grundy, Virginia, and much of the driving is through mountainous terrain (thus probably slower for much of the school year). Without a car, none of them is realistically accessible, particularly for a period as short as a weekend. Beyond that, none of those cities is particularly inviting.
I guess selling off all the buildings before telling the students and faculty about the closure avoids those pesky student protests which invariably follow. Now Marshall will just issue an invitation for all to travel the mere 250 miles to finish at the main campus.
ReplyDeleteAnd even with this closure, this shows the resilience of the scam: according to one of the articles, Marshall did the same thing back in the 80s-in the late 70s it opened a campus in Savannah, which it then closed in the 80s. Thirty years pass, people forget, but there's money to be made fleecing the law school wannabe sheep, so open it again...
Ellipses troll here......This is terrible news. I know a TTTTT grad......hauling in billion dollar verdicts on a weekly basis......I’m not an actual lawyer. I can’t attend law school after getting arrested for.....in a Walmart bathroom. But I hired a TTTTT grad to represent me. They did a fantastic job. Bottom line......borrow $250k to attend a toilet law school.
ReplyDelete^^^^^^^^^^ Needed to be said. ^^^^^^^^^^
DeleteBtw, another Dreamer:
http://jdunderground.com/all/thread.php?threadId=153422
"georgiapeach (Mar 2, 2018 - 8:39 am)
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Jeff. As I said earlier in this thread I am not determined to go to Savannah and I may wind up taking a year off to improve my LSAT and get into a better school. I've heard the conventional wisdom about attending third tier schools before and it's quite rational.
I guess I was hoping to hear from someone who has first hand experience with this school or could provide specific insight into practicing in Savannah. Also, I know it's not a guaranteed thing but with my stats I'm confident I can be at the top of my class at the school so you would think someone would hire the top student from a local LS.
I know the obvious counterpoint is not to bank my career on being first in my class, but it's a risk I'm considering."
----------------------------------------------------
Yuh-Huh!!
Top of the class (does not know about / understand forced 1L curve unlike undergrad.)
Disregards researching what a shitty career law is. Can always go to another school, etc. (Doesn't understand about The Class Hierarchy in law or "Top 10 or Bust")
In fact, doesn't understand a lot of things.
This is exactly why I don't bother anymore. It's not worth it..
Also btw, I once got busy in a BK bathroom.
Wow...read through that thread. But for the school closing, OP was doing everything he could to rationalize attending that soon-to-be-closed TTTT. Numerous posters gave advice based on experience, based on statistics, based on actual facts...and he didn't want to hear it. I admired Nando's efforts, and I admire the folks here at OTLSS but it seems almost impossible to get through to these folks who are hellbent on attending law school, any law school. It's almost as if the scam is genetically imprinted in some people.
DeleteI can kind of see where Georgia peach is coming from. I grew up in a lower middle class family. Nobody in my family went to college. They had good union jobs with great benefits and a pension. But they all thought they had it bad and said, “go to college, get a better job.” We had no idea what the Ivy League was or what was a good school. Our state school is highly ranked. But we fell for the liberal arts college propaganda. I was encouraged to go to the nearby, more expensive, low ranked liberal arts college because of the benefits of small classes and a “well-rounded” education. My family also would not let me attend school far from home. But if we had more info available at the time, like the College Scorecard website, we would have avoided the liberal arts toilet. According to College Scorecard, the state school is cheaper, has a much higher graduation rate, and has a substantially higher average salary after graduation by almost $20k! Only about half of grads of the liberal arts school even earn salaries higher than a high school grad. Recently, I spoke with a member of the faculty. They said the school had pretty much adopted open admissions to collect Federal grant money and student loans. They said the school doesn’t care what happens to graduates.
DeleteI didn’t know about the higher education scam. During my senior year, I kept my options open and applied to corporate jobs. Very few employers came to interview students. I was rejected by the handful of employers that did interview on campus. But I naively thought, no sweat. I didn’t get a corporate job but I’ll just go to law school! I believed the stats. $100k+ private practice salaries and 99% employment rates. There were no scam blogs or NYT articles to warn me about the perils of law school. Again, rather than trying to go to a higher ranked law school, I went to the toilet close to home. What difference did the rankings really make I thought! All law schools had pretty much the same job stats. The dean said everyone got a job, even the bottom of the class. The dean of career services said we could easily repay our $150k student loan debt by taking private practice jobs that paid $100k. By my second year, after failing to get a job through OCI, it became clear the school was lying. I eventually graduated and passed the bar. But nobody wants to hire grads from toilet law schools. Had I known the truth, I would never have gone to law school.
Many of my friends took non-legal jobs. Some went solo. I know a few people who got MBAs and took corporate jobs. I did a post bac and went to med school. In med school, many of the students were from wealthy families and went to the Ivy Leagues, or schools like Stanford and Chicago. One of them was an Ivy Leaguer whose last name was on the med school building. They were actually all very kind, smart people. I had a lot of conversations about education and class with them. They were surprised that when I initially applied to colleges, I had no idea which schools were elite. They were surprised my family would suggest a low ranked liberal arts college. Their families emphasized education and pushed them to attend the top schools.
That is why I can see where Georgia Peach is coming from. But times have changed. Maybe that person came from a family without connections or knowledge about how the country works. But there is so much info available now. This person should know better. Even the elite schools are cashing in on the higher education scam now. I heard an ad on NPR a couple weeks ago. Dartmouth now offers some type of online masters in health care management to doctors and health care administrators. Of course the price tag was not mentioned in the commercial. But a quick Google search revealed Dartmouth charges $100k+ for this 18 month online course. The elite schools are selective when it comes to undergrad, MBAs, and MDs. But they are more than happy to sell you a worthless masters to collect tuition dollars.
I went to a very elite Ivy League undergrad institution and came from a very highly ranked public school in a wealthy area. This was years ago, and almost everybody in my college class was from a prep school or a highly ranked public school. We had then just recently come from the era when little of the class was from public schools.
DeleteEven the few minorities were from elite schools.
Fast forward 30 years, and the school has more minorities, but they are mostly elite minorities. The school will not generally look at public school students in New York City who are not from one of the tested honor schools like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science. The school has admissions representatives dedicated to expensive private schools and prep schools.
My family had not attended this school, so I simply hit the admissions jackpot. However, few people from middle class, lower middle class and poor backgrounds attend this college, even today. Many of the scholarship students have highly educated parents who just may not have much money. It is a continuing admissions scam at the top of the Ivy League because all applications are not created equal. It is not just the preferences for legacies. It is the preference for a specific type of background.
My tenure was a long time ago when law was not so overcrowded. Nonetheless, my college did a S__T job of advising students of the pros and cons of their career choice and gave no help as to what to look in a career.
Maybe the attention you got at your small liberal arts college actually helped you make your way to and through medical school. In the state school, you would have had little individual attention. Maybe the economics of the liberal arts school worked out well for you family. Anyway, you ended up with a great career choice, notwithstanding the burden of the extra debt from law school. With any luck you could get public service loan forgiveness on all you school-related debt, so the law school debt will soon be history.
DeleteOnly 41 new students enrolled at Savannah Law School in 2017. The median LSAT score was 147, which is at the 33d percentile; in other words, most of the class was in the bottom third on the LSAT.
ReplyDeleteWhere did the professors study law?
https://www.savannahlawschool.org/facultystaff/
Mostly at undistinguished, which is to say toilet, law schools. Not a single Harvard or Yale on the list. A couple of professors went to Virginia, one to Pennsylvania, one to NYU, one to Chicago. Things must be bad when even the professors have to be drawn from toilet schools.
Get a load of this unsigned editorial:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.savannahnow.com/opinion/20180324/editorial-law-school-close-robs-savannah-of-valuable-asset
Particularly amusing, amidst the general stupidity, is the characterization as "callous" of the school's justification for closing: it could not "attract the quality of students needed to be sustainable". It must have been similarly callous of the LSAC to report scores in the bottom third to most of this year's matriculants. Why couldn't the LSAC have given out a couple of dozen 180s instead? That would have preserved the tender feelings of the dolts that enrolled at this soon-to-be-shuttered über-toilet.
And there it was, as it is in every one of these nonsense pieces about a TTTT: the school "caters to non-traditional students." The editorial ignores debt, lack of job prospects-although it does mention the sterling 54.5% bar passage rate.
DeleteSo if people flunk the bar in huge numbers-in this case,nearly half the test takers did; and if nobody can find a job, well that's no big deal because the school caters to non-trad students, who presumably don't care if they pass the bar or are employed.
And of course the usual reference to the lack of other law schools in the vicinity. As if smaller cities and even rural areas all had to have law schools. Moving in order to pursue a degree is out of the question; bring it all right to my doorstep, mach' schnell!
DeleteOne student who was a year from graduating (apparently she was studying part time for four years) has sued Savannah Law School, John Marshall Law School, John Marshall University, and a couple of officials of these celebrated establishments for fraud and breach of trust:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.savannahnow.com/news/20180323/savannah-law-school-student-sues-for-fraud-breaching-trust-in-planned-closing
The plaintiff alleges that the officials were just trying to soak up federal funds and flip the real estate for a profit. Also, they supposedly misrepresented her chances of getting a JD there.
She claims to be unable to obtain a degree now, as she and her fiancé both live in Savannah, which is far from any other law school. Well, cry me a river. If she's serious about becoming a lawyer (she has a job as a lawyer lined up already), she should think seriously about finishing her degree elsewhere. Eight months' absence from home and fiancé would not be the end of the world.
In other news, the students of Savannah Law School have been offered a $2k "scholarship" at the parent institution, John Marshall Law School in Atlanta. That's not even 5% off the super-low scam price of $42,628.
These closures are way far away from what is needed to even start bringing the supply/demand situation for lawyers anywhere closer to equilibrium.
ReplyDeleteThere are 18,000 lawyer jobs, including solos, for each law school class assuming the jobs are distributed evenly by classes. In fact, there are 23,000 to 26,000 first lawyer year jobs. If you do the math, this leaves about 8,000 lawyer jobs for each older law school class. So for the older law school classes, which numbered over 40,000 people for years, only 20% of the class can have a full-time permanent lawyer job.
We need many more law school closures and many law schools to drop their class sizes considerably for most law school graduates to have a prayer of a career working as lawyers.
Maths. That was a good analysis and should (in quotes) be sobering to any Lemming who researches the current legal field.
DeleteThis is what's out there, btw, for 5 years of specific plaintiff experience in NYC. The poster had it wrong: The ad wants 5 years plaintiff experience. Not just being admitted for 5 years.
$20.hr. in NYC and you pay your own overhead.
This is an independent contractor position, not a paid Associate. You will be responsible for your own expenses PLUS SEP taxes (~ 15%) and all taxes at the end. No benes. No nothing.
http://jdunderground.com/all/thread.php?threadId=155468
https://tinyurl.com/y8spgqoo
The $30 doc review project is in another ad a few clicks down:
https://www.indeed.com/m/viewjob?jk=a3fb8380c34380d3
Savannah is/was a night program. It's TTTTT (5T). No one is looking for grads from this school. If you didn't have a job when you attended, you were likely to not get one coming out.
When you went, you didn't quit your day job, hopefully.
But the scammers gladly took the money. $21K is still 21K and at the end of 4 years (part-time, remember?) that adds up to $85k per sucker, er.. I mean .. student.
Go on a search of open lawyer jobs on the internet or on Law Crossing. The shocker is that a huge percentage of advertised jobs in law firms and in house have experience limits of about 6 years or less. Some just use code words like midlevel or junior level. Some open lawyer jobs have unadvertised experience limits.
DeleteThe problem of a separate and very much unequal job market for experienced lawyers is really there. Most older lawyers end up in eat what you kill arrangements or solo practice where they are seriously underemployed and often unemployed seeking work. The supply demand numbers for lawyers dictate that result.
It is unclear why lawyers are such cowardly lemmings that they do not mass protest the very unjust lawyer oversupply so as to remove the ABA as accreditor in favor of an organization that fairly represents all law graduates, including the hundreds of thousands of law graduates who are unable to work as lawyers full-time or at all.
every time i cruise over here another one goes down! sweet! i hope it gets much much worse for the cartel! die, bitches.
ReplyDeleteGreat stuff. Music to our ears. Of course, we need really 150 law schools to close to bring the market anywhere near balance. The thieving law professors and administrators are still laughing at the lives they've destroyed.
ReplyDeleteOh, and I forgot. Check this thread out:
ReplyDeletehttp://jdunderground.com/all/thread.php?threadId=155512
$20k base and 1/3rd of what they bring in.
Try paying back $250,000+ (more like 350k after undergrad) on that.
Or, for that matter, living in anything but a box under a bridge..
Everyone yelling at the OP. Here's what I say: He'll get people. Absolutely. That's the real world of law. That and doc review and that contractor job for $20/hr. in NYC - if you can get it.
You know, if you are a successful lawyer and you are willing to pay only 20K plus 1/3 of what they bring in to a young assoicate...you have to be a total ahole. Why anybody would think they could learn anything from such a person or would give that person the time of day is beyond me...especially if they are asking for full time work....heck, I don't know of any legal assistants who would agree to work for so little. And 30% of what you bring in...how generous of the lawyer to pay him what he would have to pay in a referral fee anyway to a lawyer not working for him. That is the biggest problem with this profession. Scumbags.
DeleteAfter failing out of law school, getting readmitted, and passed the bar on the first time, I believe this is just the beginning.
ReplyDeleteIF the Prosper Act passes, I hope these law professors are ready to go back to "Sullivan and Cromwell" LOL.
New article from Bloomberg looking at student loan debt:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-27/financial-crisis-is-over-for-housing-but-not-for-student-loans
That's an opinion piece, it's really not "from Bloomberg" and there is no point in taking it seriously.
DeleteFor all the real problems there are, a poorly written and researched editorial really isn't shedding much if any light on it.
I honestly do not think there is any real issue with student loan debt, especially outside of law and maybe from shoddy MBAs (a very similar scam to law school really). While college attendance is high, the debt is still limited and most of the population does not continue its education after college, if it even finishes college.
It is an opinion piece, but was published by Bloomberg, and it cites numerous stats to support its suggestions. Not sure why you declare it to be "poorly written and researched."
DeleteNow a class-action lawsuit against Savannah's soon-to-be-former toilet law school:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.abajournal.com/news/article/suit_claims_closing_of_savannah_law_school_is_intended_to_benefit_parent
Funny how these high-minded, mission-focused deans and educators turn tail and run once the easy money stops flowing. "Non-profits" indeed...
ReplyDeleteNow they are trying to keep the school alive with the help of a local public university.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.law.com/dailyreportonline/2018/03/28/law-students-and-alums-seek-to-save-savannah-from-closing/
Yep. Law Students and Alumni seek to save the school...
Delete