Thursday, February 20, 2020

Concordia Law School survives, for now; plans for law school in Shreveport, Louisiana, rejected

Old Guy has good news and bad news for the anti-scam movement today.

First the bad news: Boise-based über-toilet Concordia Law School is going to survive after all, for now. Just last week, the parent institution in Portland, Oregon, announced that it would close down at the end of the semester. We had hoped that the closure would also kill off the law school. Alas! no. The law school has been acquired by Concordia University in St. Paul, Minnesota. How long the über-toilet will last under the auspices of yet another member of the sprawling Concordia family remains to be seen. I hold out little hope for a bottom-of-the-barrel law school in Idaho—a state that does not need one law school, never mind two—whose most recent graduating class featured an unemployment rate of 40%.

Now the good news: the vaunted "feasibility study" for a proposed law school in Shreveport, Louisiana, came back strongly negative. Almost a year ago we criticized the proposal as hopelessly inappropriate. We expected the feasibility study for Shreveport to be of the odious Indiana Tech variety. But saner heads existed in Louisiana, apparently, just as they did in Tennessee when über-toilet Valpo tried to dump itself onto Middle Tennessee State University.

The feasibility study for Shreveport sensibly observes that "[t]here is little compelling evidence that a new law school is warranted in the Shreveport/Bossier region". It recommended that "[n]o new law school be established in the Shreveport/Bossier region". Apparently unimpressed by such sensible conclusions, however, the Louisiana Board of Regents "requested further reports and feedback".

If the Louisiana Board of Regents stupidly approves another über-toilet in the Shreveport area, it will have itself to blame for the ensuing fiasco. Why do I say "another über-toilet"? Because just about any new law school today is bound to be an über-toilet. It will start life with no accreditation, no reputation, no particular reason other than location for anyone to attend. And location—really, Shreveport, for god's sake!—isn't going to attract applicants of even mediocre, never mind high calibre. Indiana Tech boasted that it would start out as third out of Indiana's five law schools by LSAT score, but absolutely no evidence was given of its ability to o'erleap two established and accredited (if awful) law schools. Predictably, it started at the bottom, and soon enough died. Such is the fate of just about any new law school. The exception of UC Irvine is hardly relevant: Irvine started with the prestige of the UC system and an enormous infusion of cash that enabled it to bribe entire entering classes. Even Irvine has hardly been a smashing success: first-year enrollment last year fell by a third, and more than 20% of graduates were unemployed or in jobs funded by the school itself (these being notorious as devices for distorting the picture of [un]employment).

23 comments:

  1. Rankings, for what they are worth, of current LA law schools:


    And ABA-required employment numbers:
    Tulane #52 per USNWR-graduating class 186; 132 bar passage required jobs
    LSU #100-164 graduates, 133 bar required
    Loyola New Orleans #138; 135 graduates, 85 bar required
    Southern University unranked(146-192); 155 graduates, 76 bar passage required

    So it appears that there are quite a few unemployed law school graduates from LA schools...no need for a new one.

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  2. I find it hilarious that Indy Tech would purport to attract better students than McKinney, which is in a major city (Indianapolis) that also happens to be a state capital. That founding dean was such a piece of garbage, as was the feasibility study.

    As for Concordia, yes that's bad news, but I can thank God that few students got sucked in. I do hope that Idaho Mormons, who tend to be decent, stable, and unassuming people, don't start receiving "personal revelations" that Concordia Law School, despite all the available evidnce, is a good idea after all. Gonzaga has tended to be the backup school for Intermountain Mormons, and they should start doubting that school's effectiveness as well.

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    1. It was perfectly ridiculous for Indiana Tech to claim that it, upon opening, would leapfrog over two of the other four law schools in Indiana on the basis of LSAT scores. Why the hell would anyone with an LSAT score even at McKinney's level want to go to a new, and therefore unaccredited, law school in Fort Wayne? The most likely matriculants with LSAT scores outside the appalling range would be people living in or near Fort Wayne.

      It is hard to conceive of any explanation for that claim other than arrogance, narcissism, or fraud. And of course the claim proved to be false.

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    2. The explanation was: The federal government is shoveling out loan money and once we're up and accredited we can get our share of it. That's the explanation for any start-up law school.

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    3. In other words, Old Ruster, you're putting it down to fraud. I'm inclined to agree.

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  3. My favorite quote from the feasibility study: "On a per capita basis Louisiana has a lot of law schools and a lot of law school graduates. The state does not have a capacity problem; it has a distribution problem."

    In other words: You have plenty of lawyers. They just don't want to live in Shreveport. Well, building a new law school there isn't going to help. That works for medicine, not law, because even in the poorest areas, there's an army of people toting Medicaid cards. Not so with law.

    A lot of lawyers are desperate. They'll move anywhere if there's decent work for them there. They'd even learn Louisiana's wacky civil law system and come from far and wide if there was a lawyer hiring bonanza in Shreveport. But unless there's some kind of "civil Gideon" type system created, the demand is not going to exist.

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  4. The folks in Louisiana have picked up on what the folks in Tennessee figured out but Indiana Tech and Concordia of St. Paul have missed. Although you might think otherwise after seeing the admissions standards of these toilets this ISN'T FREAKING COMMUNITY COLLEGE. You don't need to have one commuter-accessible to every significant population center in your state. Anyone who wants to go to law school except those tied down by a job or other commitment that puts them too far to be a commuter anywhere is already in law school. You will not pick up enough local yokels in Fort Wayne or Shreveport to make a go of it. And contrary to Indiana Tech's pipe dreams people from those places who have enrolled elsewhere will not deface their own resumes by coming home to be the first turds in your newly opened local toilet.

    The market is saturated, and when markets get saturated the rules start to change. Southeast Connecticut has two huge tribal casinos. Massachusetts legalized gambling and an MGM casino was opened in Springfield which is closer to at least 80% of the Hartford/New Haven market than the tribal operations. The tribes were running scared because the golden rule of casino marketing was always that no gambler would drive past one casino to get to another one. They started planning a joint venture right off I-91 between Hartford and Springfield to cut off the traffic headed to MGM. But a funny thing happened. The common wisdom was turned on its head. The hit on the CT casinos wasn't that bad and within months MGM was laying people off. Plans for that "cutoff" casino are being scaled way back. In a totally saturated market market forces changed. Anything anyone ever learned about opening a law school from past experience is a high-risk wager at this point.

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    1. A dozen or so law schools can claim to attract people from the whole US, though even they tend to show a regional concentration. The rest draw students primarily from their own region. The presence of a couple of students from distant places does not make a law school "national" in scope.

      In the case of Indiana Tech, demand was restricted to places within perhaps 45 minutes of Fort Wayne. A handful people did move there from distant places: someone in the first class had gone all the way from Ghana. But mainly the students came from Fort Wayne. And Fort Wayne produces only so many potential students—most of whom will opt for a vastly better law school.

      The analogy to community colleges is apt. Law school these days is little more than a vo-tech.

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    2. Third World applicants don't count. An acceptance letter from Cooley will get you the same visa as an acceptance letter from Harvard. For other risks involved, call Appalachian Law School for details.

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    3. You've raised an interesting issue. LLMs are notorious vehicles for soaking foreign students. Yes, they yield a visa—but only a temporary visa. Will many people want to pay stiff fees for a three-year JD program in order to get temporary residence? Foreign students generally are not eligible for guaranteed student loans. On the other hand, an über-toilet like Indiana Tech might extend a "scholarship" to a student with a sufficiently high LSAT score.

      The reference to Appalachian Law School pertains to an incident in 2002 in which a student who had just withdrawn in lieu of failing out opened fire at the school, killing three people and injuring three others. He was originally from Nigeria, but he was a US citizen, so it seems that Appalachian had not helped him to get a visa.

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    4. "Will many people want to pay stiff fees for a three-year JD program in order to get temporary residence?"

      Yes, because a person with a student visa is eligible for adjustment of status. They can become a lawful permanent resident if they can land a job or spouse who can sponsor them.

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  5. There needs to be a federal law that if a feasibility study (which must be conducted by impartial third parties and commissioned by the DOE directly and report to the DOE) comes back negative, that no new proposals can be made for a school for 10 years outside of compelling changed circumstances, with a presumption against said new circumstances.

    Any attempts to influence the process or put them aside should be considered criminal and lead to jail time.

    These types of laws are necessary to prevent corruption and graft. I guarantee you none will be enacted. Interestingly enough, similar rules ARE in place for other industries especially concerning government contracts. Even Wall St. is more tightly regulated than academia is.

    Eventually academia WILL get regulated, but it will take the collective demand of a doomed generation to do it. The elites will then scurry away and very likely lie in hiding until they can find a new industry to sell to the commoners and exploit them in. But at least it will force them to get creative and even use some elbow grease, which these parasites are utterly allergic to, so it would require a bit of time (generally for some actually productive people to create new said industry and stabilize it, such that the elites can then muscle their way in and displace them again). This is a cycle that has occurred all through American history and probably world history, so I do not expect it to stop. But I would like to see academia and especially law schools get cleaned up a tiny bit in my lifetime.

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    1. Academia (law schools) is being regulated- by the academics. When you make government big, the regulated become the regulators.

      Look at the constituency of the ABA committee responsible for the accreditation of law schools, hint- it’s not regulated by many practicing of any stripe, it’s under the firm control of academics that benefit from federal money.

      Stomp your feet on the ground, and beg for government help all day long, but all you are going to get is misery.

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    2. Plenty of jurisdictions with "bigger" government don't have this sort of problem. People in France and Germany, for instance, don't borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars on the state's guarantee to attend an über-toilet, because the cost is substantially covered by the state and there are no über-toilets.

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    3. You want the feds to approve whether a private business can open or not? Well comrade, that sounds like communism to me!

      I'm j/k of course, the reality is that student loans will in many cases never be paid back, particularly in law school where IBR is fast becoming almost the default repayment plan selection. So the real question is whether taxpayer funding should be made available differently depending on what the economy actually needs.

      Or we can continue pretending that these things really are loans and that the schools operate in a market that government can't tamper with except for quality/accreditation type reasons.

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    4. As with health care, so with universities, the US manages to fuck everything up.

      Numerous countries in Europe and elsewhere run a public system of universities funded almost exclusively from the public coffers. Quality is high, standards of admission are high, costs are low, and there is no such thing as an über-toilet.

      By contrast, the US has a system of actually or effectively private universities that are nonetheless funded largely, if indirectly, by Uncle Sugar. Über-toilets abound, quality varies dramatically, costs are enormous, and anyone who can fog a mirror is admitted.

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  6. TTTTs on the edge-but the deans of the school seem pretty happy. They are clearly anticipating a slap on the wrist, if that, for failing to meet bar passage standards:

    https://www.postandcourier.com/news/charleston-law-school-falls-short-of-new-accreditation-standards/article_31a44b9c-5281-11ea-bc6d-8765aabf9c02.html

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  7. Law should be an undergraduate degree.

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    1. In much of the world, it is. But that bachelor's degree doesn't usually lead so directly to the bar.

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    2. Right. The "normal" route in most common law countries is that your degree is an LLB, and then you have to apprentice for a couple of years with a solicitor firm (or, in much smaller numbers, a barrister firm) before you can get a license.

      Of course, an apprenticeship-based system means current practitioners control how many new entrants there can be. The system can therefore operate in an openly protectionist manner, much like a medieval guild.

      So there is a downside, but our current system of letting in anyone who can sign a promissory note is worse. Not just for the profession but for clients and the judicial system as well. Hordes of un and under-employed lawyers scrabbling just to survive have a strong incentive to act unethically and to compete on price until the price being charged leaves no choice but to cut corners or to take on more volume than you can possibly handle ethically. No one wins a race to the bottom.

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  8. Old Guy, Thomas Jefferson Skool of "Law" is still staggering on, nothing heard in the San Diego press since November 2019. Why can't this obviously doomed organization quit? They can't teach Federal law, they have a tiny number of students, the Google "People also ask" box has "What happens when you law school loses accreditation?" as it's fourth question. It is a RUMP LAW SCHOOL - no chance for getting back into the good graces of the ABA, working out of rented rooms in a downwardly-mobile building, no prestige. And yet it lives! Why?

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    1. Good questions, Strelnikov. Only 49 first-year students enrolled last autumn, more than half of the graduates are unemployed ten months out, tuition is $53k per year, not even a quarter of those taking the bar exam pass… And now, as you said, it has lost its ABA accreditation (it is accredited by California, which seems to accept just about any school that doesn't misspell "law" by more than two letters).

      Why is it still alive? Possibly because it gets to keep that ABA accreditation for two more years so that the current students all have a chance to graduate. I don't think that it can survive for long, though. Nobody is going to pay $53k per year for some dipshit California-accredited dump.

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  9. I did not even know that Loyola NOLA had a law school. And I thought I knew them all.

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