Monday, November 22, 2021

The newest über-toilet is coming—to Shreveport

Southern University Law Center, which gives Cooley stiff competition for the rank of lousiest accredited law school in the US, is going to open a branch in Shreveport in January 2022.

We here at Outside the Law School Scam discouraged this particular piece of folly. Law School Truth Center wrote a feasibility study on the creation of another über-toilet in the Pelican State. But of course the scamsters were undeterred by such inconvenient party-poopers as rationality.

Were there a need for a law school in Shreveport (and there isn't a need for a new law school anywhere in the US), Southern University Law Center would be very ill placed to run it. At least a quarter of the incoming students last year scored no better than 143 on the LSAT (the highest score at that level in more than a decade). A "school" that bad should clean its own shit up before branching out.

Who are the students in the first cohort? Eight students at Southern University Law Center who decided to complete their last semester by moving from the main toilet in Baton Rouge to the outhouse in Shreveport. After a single semester, this ridiculous "law school" is going to close until it can find a few students next winter to pull the same stunt. Optimists might suppose that the new über-toilet is being built prudently from modest beginnings. Old Guy is more inclined to deal with reality: for the reasons carefully explained in Law School Truth Center's feasibility study, the Shreveport area just cannot support a law school, and that fact would become perfectly clear if this laughable branch of one of the very worst two or three law schools in the US threw open its doors and tried to operate as a full-blown Indiana Tech (with or without the four specializations in Global Leadership™ and such).

Indeed, the students are all from the area, although they completed most of their studies in Baton Rouge: "The inaugural class will be eight Southern University Law students who have roots in Northern Louisiana and felt an early move back to the region could help secure post-graduation employment." The only people who wanted to go to that branch in Shreveport were people who were from that part of Louisiana. And they are still looking for work as their time in law school draws to a close. They're desperately hoping that the declining Shreveport area will want graduates like themselves (assuming for the moment that they'll ever pass a bar exam), even though their ridiculous eight-student campus cannot offer meaningful support for finding local employment.

A propagandist for this bullshit Southern University Law Center said "I meet people all the time who say I want to go but all of the law schools are in southern Louisiana". Old Guy is unsympathetic. If you live in a small or bleak place like Shreveport, you cannot reasonably expect to have the facilities of New York City at your doorstep. Grow the hell up and move a couple of hours away if you're interested in law. Old Guy had to move far from his home town of Bumblefuck (much smaller than Shreveport) in order to go to university. People who have to wait for a law school to be brought to them don't deserve access to federally guaranteed student loans.