Tuesday, November 17, 2020

Cooley dumped by Western Michigan University

In an apparent bid to lift itself out of the bottom of the shitter, Cooley affiliated itself with Western Michigan University in 2014. Recently Western Michigan decided to dissolve this ill-advised marriage in November 2023.

Western Michigan was gracious enough to utter a few pieties about returning to its core mission (Cooley was specifically identified as "a distraction"), and it conveniently blamed COVID-19 for the downfall of its bonds to that laughing-stock of law schools. Astute observers of the law-school scam, however, will perceive a different motive behind the propaganda. However much the partnership may have improved Cooley's reputation, it only tarnished Western Michigan's. Cooley indeed has been closing campuses, and it also is at risk of losing its accreditation. How could Western Michigan have gained from that deal? 

Recent months have seen little news here at OTLSS. Stay tuned, however, for a report on the celebrated OTLSS question of whether law school is worth attending at all.

19 comments:

  1. Good! Kill the monstrosity, let the world be free of the concept of a law school named after Wes Cooley.

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  2. While I do not disagree with your analysis, OG, I wonder whether there might have been some internal struggle on WMU's board and whether Cooley announcing closure of its Grand Rapids campus might have given the "Lose These Clowns" faction the upper hand.

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    1. Probably. Some of the people who made the dumb decision to join forces with Cooley may have been involved in the decision to cut Cooley loose, and they may have been reluctant to admit that what they advocated just a few years ago had not panned out.

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  3. Yup. Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. The irony is that this affiliation was clearly designed to be little more than a license for Cooley to use the name, precisely because it was an experiment that was designed to be easily unwound.

    What we're seeing these days is "never let a good crisis go to waste." COVID is providing the perfect cover for people to abandon failed initiatives without the shame of admitting such failure.

    We shouldn't need those excuses, though. Even academia has this issue. What happens if your research project ends up proving the null hypothesis? It doesn't get published. This attitude towards failure of an experiment as a failure of the people conducting it leaves us holding on to a lot of dogs with a lot of fleas and deprives society of a lot of guidance about what works and what doesn't.

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  4. This is good news for Cooley. They can go back to ranking themselves as the Number two law school in the universe!!!

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    1. Well, they certainly are one kind of "number two"! lol.

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  5. If this article is correct-that applicants/applications are up 35% and 56% respectively, it's clear that the scamblogs are sorely needed, although it also appears that nobody is listening. But let's be direct: OTLSS is the final scamblog standing.

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/law-school-applications-rise-means-150112132.html

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    1. Yeah, it's sad that so many scamblogs (and message boards) have fallen. Many times that's cuz of problems with trolls and stuff. But it's also because of this sentiment that "everything that needs to be said has been said." There's truth to that. The bleak employment prospects are out there and will probably be found by pretty much everyone who takes a minute to google it. And the cold hard numbers are right there on LST as well.

      So, the real question for scamblog hosts IMHO is: Do people who spend 200k on a TTT anyway, despite all this info out there, deserve exactly what they get? I would say no. The mission does not stop once the reality is out there and easy to find. The schools are preying on ever less intelligent people. As they dumb down admissions standards to keep classes full, less and less can be expected of prospective students in terms of due diligence. We still need people actively talking about how life-ruining this decision is.

      No fraud victim deserves their fate. Stupidity may explain their victimhood but it doesn't negate it. So scambloggers are fighting the good fight and should keep it up as long as they have the ability and willingness. Most 0Ls won't listen, but some will. And every one is a life saved. It's also nice for people who already have fallen victim to the scam to know they aren't alone, to be able to commiserate and laugh at some of the ridiculous heights the schools will go to to keep the loan $$ flowing, and so forth. It's cathartic.

      So yeah, OTLSS is one of the last. Mad props to OG for keeping it up.

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    2. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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  6. Of course, of course.

    And 2:25 PM nailed it. He nailed the issue: Nobody is listening.

    F. them. That's been my philosophy for years now. When they come out with $300k in debt and no hope, ever, if paying it off well, then, that's their problem now isn't it?

    People never learn and there's nothing new under the sun.

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  7. This statement speaks volumes about how the law school scam is promoted nowadays:

    https://www.yahoo.com/news/law-school-applications-rise-means-150112132.html

    "Reginald McGahee, associate dean of admissions and student affairs at the Howard University School of Law in the District of Columbia, explains that people who have been contemplating law school for a long time had more time for soul-searching during quarantine. With that time and space for introspection, some individuals realized that they wanted to become lawyers, McGahee suggests.

    'The pandemic has forced a number of people to really take stock of the fragility of life and the importance of doing things that are fulfilling and nurture you and advance the goals that you set for yourself,' he says. He adds that because people had to "slow down" during the pandemic, they couldn't distract themselves from big questions about what a good life is.

    'We've been able to focus on those things that are really important to us, and I think that a lot of people are reconnecting with the idea that, if I'm going to work, let me add something to society that I didn't really think that I was adding before,' McGahee says."

    How do you like that? Spinning the uptick in law school applications as young people answering a divine calling, not just desperate college kids with worthless majors wondering what the hell they are going to do after graduation. Making the modern legal profession look like it's not just soul-crushing drudgery of endlessly pushing paper around.

    Brilliant, as usual.

    You know, I'm concerned that the scamblog movement is almost dead. This is apparently the last one left. Of course it makes sense: After all Americans communicate ideas almost entirely through memes passed around on Facebook and tweets. The exchange of complex ideas through discourse in America is dead also.

    It's obvious that you'll never talk these dumbasses out of going to law school. The change will have to occur at the policy level, e.g. cutting off the flow of guaranteed student loan money for those pursuing worse-than-useless undergraduate and graduate degrees.

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    1. Yes a JD degree from Howard or a similar cesspool will allow one to "add something to society". These schools, like sports gambling websites and state lotteries are merely "selling the dream".

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  8. The lunacy of student loans: owing over $500,000 in student loan debt...yep, a cool half-million.
    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/student-loans-unemployed-debt-payments-due/

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  9. The people choosing to go to law school now are mostly recent college graduates, young people who don't want to work--and who can blame them? Yes, 1L is awful, but it is really only about 8 months long. After that, the rest of law school is far easier and less stressful than working a full time job, having to support yourself, budget your money, pay your bills etc. Second and third year law students have roughly 12 hours a week of boring lectures, they are only tested twice a year, literally, and they can borrow all they want. People go to casinos with their student loan money, quite literally. And let's face it, these kids know they aren't going to pay the loans back, anyway, and the government may even forgive them. So, get a tough job with a demanding boss for a low salary and struggle, or cap of 4 years of carefree college with three more years of law school, which will also be carefree once the second semester of your first year ends. . .why not? And the law schools will take anyone who applies, so it's a relatively easy way to put the real world on hold for another 3 years.

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    1. All very true, but I don't think it's cuz they don't want to work. There's just no other options for a liberal artist. Law school is the only "practical" graduate degree with no prerequisites.

      So they have to either do law, do an even more useless masters degree in the humanities, or go back and essentially redo undergrad. And redoing undergrad is tougher because Stafford loans are capped. So even if you could pay the tuition, you likely couldn't pay your rent without parental help.

      Only GradPLUS allows borrowing up to the full cost of living, and the problem with that is right in the name: It has to be a graduate program. The system is very hostile to people attempting a "do over."

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    2. 9:36, you are correct. There really are few options for liberal artists and it is very difficult to just redo undergrad. I redid undergrad. I went to a non-elite liberal arts college in the late 90s. I didn’t know any better. Having nobody in my family that went to college, we fell for the non-elite liberal arts college promising small classes and a “nationally ranked” private school education. I tried to select a practical major. I even thought I could hedge my bets. I could try and get a job related to my major, and if that didn’t work out, I could go to law school. I mailed out resumes and attended the few on campus interviews that were available at a small non-elite college. I didn’t have the information at that time that is available now on the Department of Education College Scorecard. Here is a summary of the average salaries of grads from my undergrad by major: Biology $22k, English Language and Lit $20k, Natural Resources Conservation $21k, Psychology $21k, International Relations $20k, Political Science $23k. Most likely these grads are working retail or at Starbucks.

      When I couldn’t land a real job, I thought no worries, I’ll go to law school. I didn’t have the information that is available now. I believed the stats from non-elite law schools that 99% of grads are employed making $100k+. I was a member of my non-elite law school’s law review. None of that mattered. I was rejected by Big Law, Big Fed, s—t law, State’s Attorney offices, PD offices, city legal departments, and judicial clerkships. I failed to land a single legal job. When I graduated law school unemployed in the mid 2000s during a strong economy, my law school published the usual 99% employed making $100k stat.

      I left law school after 9/11 and during the height of the disastrous Iraq war. I was hoping to get a legal job and join the Army Reserves. In no way did I support the disastrous Iraq war. The military was desperate for people. With no offers after law school, I abandoned law altogether. I enlisted, volunteered for Airborne, and went to Iraq. The Army wiped away my $150k student loan debt through student loan repayment, a bonus, and through a tax free Iraq deployment in which I had no place to spend my money.

      I also earned the 9/11 GI Bill. Redoing undergrad would have been difficult trying to take out more student loans. The GI Bill gave me a do over. I used the GI Bill to attend a state school and take the undergrad science prereqs for med school. I then went to med school and I’m a physician now. By no means am I a war junkie or hawk. But knowing a lot of people who are still in the Army, and even now knowing retired service members with children in the Army, I felt obligated to join the Army Reserves as a physician.

      Going to a non-elite liberal arts college and law school is a disastrous path. Just look at the Department of Education College Scorecard data. And frankly, these schools don’t give a damn about you. They just want your tuition money. I imagine a lot of these people going to non-elite liberal arts schools and toilet law schools are people similar to me when I was in my teens and early 20s. They just don’t know any better. When I went to med school, my classmates mostly came from the elite. None of them were bad people at all. They were very kind and committed to serving others. But they were nothing like the people I grew up with. The majority of my classmates went to an Ivy League undergrad or other elite school like Stanford, UChicago, WashU, etc. I was talking with a classmate one time. He came from an elite family. He was still bummed that he went to ND and not the Ivy League for undergrad. At this point I understood my undergrad was not good and many grads had poor job prospects. I told him what a mistake it was to go to a non-elite school. He said, in no way that was condescending or disrespectful, something on the order of, that is a school that people from elite backgrounds know not to attend.

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    3. The blatant dishonesty of the law schools knowingly and intentionally posting job numbers that have no connection to reality is disturbing. . .but on the other hand, the vast pool of gullible rubes who believe the nonsense and happily go off to get a worthless degree, for 200K or so in debt, is also disturbing. I have to work very hard for my money, as a successful lawyer, and I am very frustrated that 21 year old college grads who are delivering pizza are given ("loaned") hundreds of thousands of dollars and told you don't have to work a job for the next year, and we know you will never repay the loan anyway. . .

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    4. Wow, 8:04. Long road to get there, but I bet you're living the dream now? A JD/MD is a rare bird indeed, and with military background to boot.

      Tell us, what was it like after residency? I mean, you experienced that "shut out of everywhere" thing we all know after law school, but then after residency I'll bet you were getting recruited almost like a star athlete, with more offers than you could probably even count. Must've been an amazing feeling after how crushing all that rejection can be.

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  10. Anyone who has an aptitude for the sciences should pursue that ab initio, rather than dabbling in the humanities.

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