Toilet law schools University of Akron and Cleveland-Marshall College of Law (Cleveland State University) contemplated a merger, but now those plans are off. It seems that each of the toilets wanted to maintain its campus.
Old Guy never saw anything to be gained from pretending that Cleveland and Akron, a good 45 minutes apart, offered fertile ground for this endeavor. He remains of the view that both law schools should close down—as indeed should all nine law schools in Ohio. The best of the lot is Ohio State University, which ridiculously insists on styling itself "The Ohio State University"—a mediocrity where more than a quarter of the class ends up not working in law after graduation. Far better law schools than this can be found nearby in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ontario. Down in the depths of über-toiletry lies dreadful Ohio Northern University, which, with only 59 students in the latest entering class, is likely to dry up and blow away. More than two-thirds of the class gets discounts ranging from 50% to 100+% (that's right, outright bribery occurs at the top), while 40% of the graduates find themselves not working in law (and usually not working at all) ten months after graduation.
Despite its undeniable charms, the Buckeye State just does not need a law school at all, let alone a reformed or reconstituted Akron–Cleveland hybrid. The entire region spills over with law schools from Tier 2 to Tier 6. How exactly a large state like Ohio has managed to assemble an assortment of law schools ranging from humdrum to shitty is a good question for historians of the law-school scam, but in practice all nine should go. Never mind that it is a big state; never mind that under more propitious circumstances it might have pulled off a respectable law school: it has not done so, and now is certainly not the time to try.
If you live in Ohio or Indiana, your nearest choices of decent law schools are Michigan, Chicago, Northwestern, Penn, and probably a couple of schools north of the Great Lakes. Do not go to any Buckeye or Hoosier law school.
University of Akron has lost half of it's students over the last decade (the University, not the law school). A college degree is a Worthless Participation Trophy; the "accomplishment" is to get the Right degree, from the Right school. Enrollment at the third tier universities are facing collapsing enrollment.
ReplyDeleteSay it ain't so, OG! After all:
ReplyDelete"the integrated law schools would have been owned and operated by both universities and would have been the only law school to be part of two urban public research universities, according to a news release at the time."
I don't think I've ever heard of a less plausible reason for a school merger ever, unless there's a mob out their demanding a law school(fun fact: no law school does any real research) attached to not one, but two "urban public research universities".
I'd love to know the real reason the merger collapsed; probably had something to do with many of the faculty being made redundant and out of jobs or something similarly prosaic. Maybe it was just a battle of the mascots; what law school student wouldn't embrace being a "Zippy the Kangaroo" over being a "Viking"?
The alleged status of the parent institutions as public research universities is indeed a silly reason for a merger. As you pointed out, law schools don't do anything that can be fairly characterized as research, whether or not some jumped-up nincompoop born at the top of the socio-economic hierarchy wants to use the term "research" for stupid scribblings about open roads or the intersectionality of law 'n' hip-hop.
DeleteProbably this was an attempt to save a couple of smallish law schools by turning them into a bigger one. Problems would indeed have arisen when one institution or the other had to relinquish its campus. That institution would also have suffered the bulk of the firings, of course, and neither side was volunteering. So the ridiculous deal fell through.
That's not a merger. A merger leaves one combined entity remaining when the transaction is complete. If you have two equal owners like they apparently wanted, then what you really have is a joint venture. And if the venture doesn't have a majority owner and a minority one, then it's a 50/50 JV.
DeleteThe problem with 50/50 JVs, aside from the fact that neither side gets to consolidate financials which is usually a big deal itself, is gridlock. See https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/11/13/decision-making-in-5050-joint-ventures/
Simply put, a 50/50 venture can't generally make any decisions unless both partners agree, and it sounds like in this case, they hit that very gridlock on the campus decision before the arrangement was even created, so they abandoned it.
Reminds me of companies that try to do co-CEOs and stuff like that. Bad idea. The buck always needs to stop somewhere, and true 50/50 decision-making tends to lead to a gridlock that can only be resolved either by arbitration or by breaking up the partnership and having everyone take their cookies and go home. These guys couldn't agree on the most fundamental of big decisions so I guess it's good they figured that out early.
Yes, it was doomed to failure. First, apparently nobody was actually taking control and making the decisions, unlike the merger of Hamline and Mitchell (a true sell-out). You don't appoint two people as joint executors, and you don't expect two parties with opposite interests to achieve consensus. Second, each appears to have been trying to find a way to go on existing as before. That's antithetical to a merger.
DeleteI get the impression that each wanted to subsume the other. Unsurprisingly, that didn't work out.
This sort of thing could have succeeded if one side had been eager for buy-outs (retirement) and the other had wanted to expand operations. Instead, both sides wanted a merger without a merger.
I used to hear law school referred to as cash cows for universities. Was this ever really true? With the cost of maintaining a law library, a law school could only be a cash cow with a significantly large enrollment, if even possible then.
DeleteI would think that the business schools and liberal arts schools would be the true cash cows. No special expenses associated with those.
A law school can certainly be a cash cow for the parent institution. It's pretty cheap to operate. Yes, you need a library—but you need one for a medical school, too, realistically speaking. What you don't need are laboratories, equipment, affiliated hospitals, and other costly trappings of a medical school. After the outlay for a library and the bloated payroll for faculty and staff, the budget comes down to a few boxes of chalk and similar minor expenses. And a law school is easy and cheap to expand because the marginal cost of a student is small.
DeleteThat said, a law school too becomes unsustainable below a certain level of enrollment. Old Guy has estimated (look back a couple of years in the postings) that 75 first-year students is about the threshold of sustainability. And a lot of law schools are probably so extravagant as to require even higher enrollment. The law school at the U of Minnesota, for instance, has required big annual infusions of cash for many years now, to the point that people in the North Star State are seriously talking about shutting the damn thing down. Universities, after all, tend to expect their law schools to pay tribute, not to soak up resources.
Exactly OG. There really aren't any variable costs to a law school; the costs are pretty much fixed whether you have 10 students or 100. So once you get the thing up and running, there's a number of students that represents a "breakeven point" and if you can get above that it's pretty much gravy. Plus of course, a lot of that initial investment in the building and library and whatnot is capital. i.e. you're not really "spending" so much as investing in a revenue-generating asset. Much of that can be debt-financed which is a no-brainer if the return on investment exceeds the interest, which it will especially if you float muni bonds, and if the school fails those buildings can always be sold.
DeleteSure at some point you cross certain thresholds at which you have to hire more faculty and such, but graphing that looks more like a staircase than a line: Costs stay fixed until you cross a certain number of students and then they jump up a little, and so forth, and you can always stretch where those thresholds are crossed with higher teaching loads, larger class sizes, etc.
Point is that with few if any truly variable (i.e. per-student) costs, the only thing that matters is how many students you can convince to enroll and how much you can convince them to borrow to do so. The accountants can easily figure out how many students they need and the average price that needs to be charged to hit any particular desired level of profit with some pretty easy Excel formulas.
At the end of the day, all that matters is whether you can fill the seats without paying too much opportunity cost in bribes AKA "scholarships" AKA "merit aid." But it's a very simple equation to figure out what it'll take to make a school a cash cow, and you can bet the school's finance department has that spreadsheet front-and-center.
When the breakeven point isn't crossed, the school will eventually shut down or be sold off or ditch its accreditation and go state-only if that's an option. But psychology does come into play there. No one wants to preside over a failure so parent universities will bail it out for awhile. But if something can't go on forever, eventually, it won't.
I could see OSU standing. Every state should have a public option for law school, and whether it is deserved or not OSU has a very loyal alumni base thanks largely to its football program engendering massive school spirit.
ReplyDeleteBut nine? In Ohio? That's an abomination.
As to mergers, I'll say this. Look at Cooley's soon-to-dissolve affiliation with Western Michigan, which wasn't really a merger at all but really just a license for Cooley to use the WMU name and logo. Once it became apparent that this is all it'd ever be, and that it was just dragging down WMU's already less-than-stellar reputation, they pulled out.
Usually, that's what the weaker school wants: They just want to attach themselves to a bigger name and carry on otherwise as-normal. But there isn't much in that deal for the bigger school, especially if they already have a law school which just means they'd be competing with themselves. So, such deals tend to fall apart.
Some states have no public option for law school. Alaska, for instance, has no law school at all. Delaware, Rhode Island, and Vermont each have only a ridiculous private über-toilet. Massachusetts has one public dump among seven private law schools that in many cases are far superior.
DeleteIf a "football program" is what Ohio needs or wants, let the state cut the crap and stop pretending to operate a university. Really, the association of so-called universities with commercial male football or basketball teams is a particularly offensive Uhmerican custom.
Cooley was indeed just trying to improve its reputation by licensing the name of Western Michigan. I fully agree that Western Michigan's reputation suffered as a result.
Yeah I know some states don't have it, or like in your MA example the one they do have is a total terlet, as is to be expected as what happened there is that UMass acquired what had previously been an unaccredited school: Southern New England School of Law (SNESL).
ReplyDeleteUMass did get the thing up to ABA standards, and I guess it is cheaper (albeit still very expensive) for in-state students than any of the private toilets, but it is a hard market in which to be seen as anything other than a toilet with BC, BU and Harvard already in the state.
That said, I still do think a public option is usually a defensible option. I would shut down NESL, WNEU and Suffolk before I would shut down what is now UMass Law, where I'd rather see them just raise admit standards even if they have to buy a better class until their reputation gets better.
I'd also like to see them shut down that campus and find a way to move UMass Law to the flagship campus of the overall university in Amherst. That'd get it seen as more of a "real" part of UMass.
If we were starting from scratch, we would put a public law school at U Mass Amherst and would make sure that it was of high calibre. We cannot, however, start from scratch. That "total terlet" U Mass Dartmouth will remain a toilet because it cannot just raise standards of admission: it would lose applicants in a hurry, because pretty much the only people who want to go to that shithole are those who cannot do better elsewhere. If you can get into Boston University, let alone Harvard, you certainly don't go to You Ass Dartmouth.
DeleteOld Guy - Do you consider U Mass Amherst to be of 'high calibre'?
DeleteAgree, but BU isn't their competition. NESL and Suffolk and whatnot are. Why on earth are people still going to those places when they can go to UMass, especially if they qualify for in-state tuition? There's no rankings that matter once you get that low, so you pick the cheapest accredited option in the geographic region where you want to practice.
DeleteUMass will never touch BU or BC, but it should be able to mop the floor with NESL and Suffolk and WNEU and would probably do so handily if it recruited and discounted aggressively.
New England School of Law and Suffolk are in Boston; Western New England is in Springfield. These are more attractive places than little Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
DeleteAs for aggressive discounting, U Ass Dartmouth couldn't do much more. Already 95% of the students receive a discount, and the median discount is around half of in-state tuition. Admittedly Western New England gives discounts to 90% of its class, and the median discount exceeds half of tuition. New England Law | Idiotic Vertical Bar gives free tuition to 37% of the class. Suffolk gives large discounts to 80% of the class. So maybe there's some opportunity to poach people from these other über-toilets, but all four über-toilets are already desperately whoring after LSAT scores—and I mean shitty scores such as 150.
@ 9:36 who says that they can go to UMass Dartmouth, particularly New England Law | Boston students? UMass is already enrolling better qualified students than NESL, at least. And Suffolk still has some cachet, it is in downtown Boston and has fairly attractive facilities. As Old Guy points out, Dartmouth's remote location isn't exactly a plus. Amherst is remote too, but at least it is an established college town near a lot of cultural venues.
DeleteUMass also is keeping its enrollment down. It most certainly could accept more applicants and still have a better qualified class than NESL. Whether this is by design, politics or just physical plant limitations, I do not know.
You Ass Dartmouth has grown rapidly, from 66 first-year students in 2016 to 143 in 2020.
DeleteNew England | Look at Our Cutesy Vertical Bar actually has higher LSAT scores than You Ass Dartmouth, and it draws in almost 400 first-year students a year.
Nobody should be going to You Ass Dartmouth, New England School of Law, Suffolk, or any other über-toilet. Any cachet that these places may have is illusory.
RE location: Understand for Suffolk and NESL, but people need to not engage in such short-term thinking. Who cares if Beantown is a funner place to live for the three years you are in law school? It costs a lot more and the higher your rent the higher your debt.
DeleteSpringfield is the opposite thing. Yes, it is within fairly easy driving distance of awesome college towns like Amherst & Northampton. But Springfield itself is pretty ghetto. Lower COL at least, but I can't see it as being better than Dartmouth unless you're going to commute in from Amherst.
Yes, NESL and Suffolk are bribing their way along pretty hard, and also yes Suffolk's facilities are downright palatial. But the message needs to get out that neither of these things will translate to better career prospects, which will probably be about the same out of UMass, so the only thing that should really matter is whether UMass is cheaper, at least assuming that you are an in-state student. If it's not cheaper after the competitors' bribes, then it should be. And if it already is cheaper, then it needs to market this fact hard and might even consider coming right out and saying it: You're not getting biglaw out of any of the schools in this range, so as long as it's accredited price (both in terms of tuition and COL) should be your only criteria.
Ohio State law school will always exist. The political forces in the state make it that way. I have hired their graduates and they have not worked out that well. I can't figure out how the other schools survive, but predictions of wholesale demise, although rational, have fallen short. We are dealing with rent seekers of the highest order.
ReplyDeleteYes, Ohio State is not going away any time soon. Even a terrible failure such as the U of North Dakota, with 25% or more of the class scoring no higher than 145 on the LSAT, cannot be dislodged easily, because mindless hillbilly politicians will always be there to back it up with public funds.
DeleteWe have never predicted "wholesale demise" here. Around 2015, we predicted that ten or more schools would be gone by the end of the decade. That prediction came true.
How are the shittiest law schools surviving? I too would like to know. Indiana Tech burned up much of the parent university's $40M endowment before the university finally decided to stop throwing money down that rathole. Appalachian seems to be near the end of its funds, yet somehow it hangs on. Ohio Northern, also private, has shriveled to an entering class of 59, with almost two-thirds of the students receiving discounts in excess of 50% of tuition. Admittedly the parent institution has money, but how long will it go on shoring up a tiny-ass über-toilet?
OSU grads, if they graduate in the top third, do quite well in Ohio and regionally.
DeleteYes, and then there's the insignificant matter of the remaining 2/3 having to scramble for any chance of getting a job. But they carry the same debt as those doing "quite well".
DeleteIndeed, 9:52, that's precisely the problem with an institution like Ohio State. Years ago I put Ohio State in Tier 4 (the tiers being numbered from 0 to 6), which I described as follows: "Expect a disastrous outcome at these unless you get tuition waived, have local connections, and intend to build your career in the vicinity of the school (no farther away than, say, an adjacent state)."
Deletehttps://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-seven-tiers-of-law-schools.html
It's true that roughly the top third of the class at Ohio State can get jobs in Ohio and the surrounding area. That group probably closely matches the third of the class that gets free tuition or even an outright bribe (politely framed as a discount of "more than full tuition") for signing up at Ohio State:
https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/schools/osu/costs
I still would not say that these people "do quite well". The median salary in 2018, for those who reported this information AND who reported being employed (so those who were unemployed didn't drag the figures down with a zero salary), was $67k—good but not exactly great. That salary would not support payments on student loans in the vicinity of $200k.
https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/schools/osu/salaries
As for the rest of the class, 26% find themselves working outside the legal profession or even not working at all ten months after graduation. They are likely to be saddled with approximately $200k of non-dischargeable debt at high interest. And the rest of the class, for the most part, won't exactly inspire envy.
https://www.lawschooltransparency.com/schools/osu/jobs
This is exactly why one should steer clear of a law school such as Ohio State unless, perhaps, one gets free tuition, has connections that can line up a job, and is content to stay in or near the state. If you're likely to end up in the top third of the class at Ohio State, you'll know because your offer of admission will come with a full discount or even an outright bribe. Anything less should be a sign that your chances of being among those who get modestly attractive outcomes are poor in light of the certainty of non-dischargeable student loans.