Odious "Western Michigan University's" Thomas M. Cooley Law School, an erstwhile chain now shrunken to two outlets, has received a three-year "extension" of time to come into compliance. The standard requires that at least 75% of those who take a bar exam pass it within two years of graduation. Cooley's rates for 2020, 2021, and 2022, respectively, were 66.01%, 62.31%, and 59.51%.
As we pointed out in the article cited above, law schools and their administrative enablers have resorted to various stratagems for temporarily bolstering bar-passage rates without improving quality. One popular old ruse was to cajole or bribe inferior students out of taking the exam, so that their predicted failure would not affect the bar-passage rate. Schools have been known to pay quite a few thousand dollars just to keep one student away from the exams. Another trick is to pare enrollment down artificially just long enough to make the school more "selective", with better students more likely to pass the exams—only to return to open admission as soon as the school achieved compliance with the norm. Unabashed pursuit of compliance has turned a number of über-toilets into glorified test-prep courses. And of course there is boundless potential for special pleading, flim-flam excuses, and other bullshit reasons to get "extensions" that amount to indefinitely renewable licenses for shameful non-compliances.
The scam-enabling ABA reassures us that Cooley's extension comes with strings attached:
They include working with faculty to improve teaching and learning, reviewing the effects of more rigorous grading policies, and making a “significant financial investment” in a “reliable plan” to ensure that the law school has resources to operate in compliance with the standards.
Also, the law school must adhere to a revised admissions policy, so entering classes have stronger success predictors for graduating and passing a bar exam.
What exactly is meant by "working with faculty to improve teaching and learning"? How will that be measured? Not at all, Old Guy imagines. What good will "reviewing the effects of more rigorous grading policies" do, especially if those "effects" turn out to be nil or negligible (or even negative)? Just what will the "reliable plan", the "resources to operate in compliance with the standards", and the "revised admissions policy" entail?
Note too that the ABA gave Cooley a three-year extension to a period of compliance that by default lasts only two years. One does not ordinarily think of an "extension" as being longer than the original period. Furthermore, with a bar-passage rate that shows a rapidly declining trend, Cooley is hardly the ideal candidate for an "extension". If Cooley gets a three-year extension for such dreadful results, would any school be denied?
When will the ABA cut the crap and admit that it is not serious about standards for accreditation?
Agree 100%, OG. One thing I can add though is that I think we know what "more rigorous grading" means. It means they're going to flunk more people out so that they will still get the tuition revenue for the year(s) they attended, but as long as they don't actually confer the degree then that person will not even be allowed to sit the bar. Even better than bribing them not to take it is preventing them from even having the option of taking it at all! All they have to do to accomplish this is find a valid excuse not to let people graduate who they think will fail the bar. Doesn't mean they can't admit 'em, just means they need to fail out a chunk of the class in 1L, a chunk of it in 2L, and maybe even some in 1st semester 3L, until the people they actually give degrees to are a very different group than the one they admitted, and one much more likely to meet the passage rate standard.
ReplyDeleteOh, yes, how could I have neglected the trick of failing people out? It also gives the school an air of "standards", as if it were cutting out the deadwood rather than serving its own narrow intere$t$.
DeleteHarlotte flunked out about 40 percent of their 1L classes, but allowed them to re-apply after 1 year. That was nice of them!!!!!!
DeleteThe ABA exists solely to enable ABA-accredited law schools stay open. Simply put, a law school has to work very, very hard to get its accreditation revoked. Several years ago the Obama administration threatened to pull the ABA's authority to accredit law schools as it recognized the ABA was doing a terrible job. That effort collapsed long ago.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, if you make standards too tough to meet it can be seen as trying to be a barrier to entry to new schools or getting rid of surplus ones which is anti-competitive and thus an antitrust violation. If we go back farther (to the Clinton administration) we can see that in action. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/06/28/aba-settles-antitrust-case-over-certifying-law-schools/91496e17-3da3-4640-bf50-5b76db84e01d/.
DeleteGranted, some of the things they used to do (like setting minimum salary rules for profs) were clearly not for the benefit of students. Some of them, though, are things that nowadays likely would've been well-received by DOE, like banning for-profit law schools.
But anyway, the point remains: The ABA cannot decide not to accredit another school or yank the accreditation of an existing one just because there's too many law schools, nor can it set rules where the real intent is to do that. They're simply not in a position to solve the supply and demand problem even if they wanted to. For that, we have to attack the problem of unlimited lending (and thus unlimited price) for all graduate degrees, including but not limited to the JD.
The ABA can, however, yank or deny accreditation for shittiness. It chooses not to do so.
DeleteIt can, but how do you define crappy? Passing the bar doesn't mean you can get a job, and getting a job is a supply/demand equation and antitrust, if it means anything at all, would mean you can't just decide how much supply there should be and bar new entrants or kick out existing ones until you reach an optimal number of schools.
DeleteThis poisonous tree needs to be attacked at its root, and its root is student loans, not accreditation. Student loans are the ONLY thing that makes operating these dumps viable, so that's the problem that needs fixing.
If there is to be accreditation at all, there should be a meaningful standard. Instead, every dump both gets and keeps accreditation. There is no real standard at all, as this latest incident involving Cooley shows.
DeleteIn very recent years, the ABA has occasionally felt the need to pretend to target a moribund law school by way of suggesting that the ABA has a spine. We are not fooled.
I don't agree that accreditation is not a significant issue. I'm well aware that nobody is certain of getting a job as a lawyer after law school (or even after the bar exam), but that doesn't mean that law schools should be allowed to milk every knuckle-dragging moron for money. In practice, however, law schools are allowed to do just that, thanks to the lack of meaningful accreditation.
Yes, student loans are the main source of the problem, since they generate the money that law-school scamsters covet. But let's not oversimplify the issue.
Bar exam passage and licensing, in and of itself, doesn't mean much with a USNWR 4th Tier school.
DeleteWe should stop law school scam seriously!
ReplyDeleteHey Old Guy,
ReplyDeleteNot sure if you are aware of this story that broke 2 days ago on various news outlets. This is the url to the original press release.
https://mitchellhamline.edu/news/2022/06/13/first-student-to-attend-law-school-from-prison-will-attend-mitchell-hamline/
She is serving life without the possibility of parole for aiding and abetting 1st degree murder. Basically, she was a heroin dealer who assisted another member of her syndicate to kill a guy who they suspected would rat them out. Her defense was that she thought they were just going to threaten him, but the jury didn't buy it. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/mn-supreme-court/1735902.html (it would appear that MN has reformed the traditional felony murder rule under which such lack of intent wouldn't have mattered).
DeleteClearly, this person will never be admitted to the bar and certainly won't be getting any student loan $$ to pay for the JD. But they are drawing, in part, on scholarships available to all students, which we all know are mostly just discounts from the school itself. So I don't think this is profit motivated for the school, but it is a bit unfair that this will reduce aid that could've gone to students who actually had some possibility of being licensed.
For this student, it'll be purely for personal enrichment or to serve as one of those unlicensed "jailhouse lawyers." In most states it's technically UPL, but never enforced and in fact often tacitly encouraged inside prison walls as a matter of longstanding unwritten tradition.
One might expect that a person serving a life sentence would not fulfill the requirements for character and fitness.
DeleteMaybe this is yet another blaxploitation stunt. More likely, it's a desperate attempt to attract attention.
There is no reason to assume the felon cannot access student loans.
DeleteExactly OG. As I said, she'll never get admitted. My assumption is she'd function as a "jailhouse lawyer" handling her own case and probably also ghost-drafting habeas petitions and such for other prisoners.
DeleteThe latter is technically UPL, but the bar can't do squat about it because the person is already in prison, and any prison-imposed discipline for it would probably violate Johnson v. Avery, a 1969 SCOTUS case which basically said that since many prisoners are uneducated or illiterate, barring prisoners from helping each other write such things up effectively closes the courthouse door to them unconstitutionally unless the state provides lawyers way beyond the usual public defense obligation.
Over time there was a commenter that kept referring to student lending as a "conduit" with all it suggests or implies. I was thinking today about the whole scamblog effort and I might offer an interpretation of sorts if I may.
ReplyDeleteSafe to assume the entire legal profession and related industry was made aware of how what Nando used to refer to as a big problem. Still they were collectively just that:: the law and not politics so what could they do to remedy any problems? Campos, in his cat bird seat, pulled a Ross Perot and, perhaps inadvertently, put an end to the scamblog movement but then again politics within the law are not what really mattered then and still matters now. So Biden at least mentions student debt and some kind of half ass remedy, which is great since no President has even mentioned the issue before. I wrote to Senators Schumer and Warren expressing my gratitude for their efforts regarding the student debt problem and I got a nice nice reply from Schumer and what more can I ask for? There is astounding citizen and congressional opposition to the notion of allowing bankruptcy protections to be restored for student debt, be it from a law school or University/College. Time may erode the problem but my best guess is that millions of student loan debtors will indeed carry the debt to their graves over the coming decades. So that is that. Sweet sentiments from politicians or Campoesque cranks notwithstanding.
Old Guy admits some personal hostility to the suggestion that people who contracted loans that they knew to be non-dischargeable in bankruptcy should be able to get them discharged. Old Guy repaid his loans from university in full at a time when the interest was not even deductible. Call him selfish, but he wishes that once, just once, Generation X didn't get fucked over.
DeleteYou can ask him to actually submit and Shepard legislation through that shifts the debt burden to endowments and operating facilities of universities. He must be thrilled he can buy your support with a letter like a cheap date.
DeleteI read "what more can I ask for?" as a sarcastic comment, not a rhetorical question implying that a platitudinous letter from a senator's office was meaningful. The reference to "[s]weet sentiments from politicians" corroborates my interpretation.
DeleteLaw students and many college students are, in fact, "student-loan conduits". They also are not very smart, generally speaking. You could study Nursing for 4 semesters and get multiple well paying job offers, even cash signing bonuses immediately. . .or spend 4Y college 3Y law school 2 day Bar Exam, Character and Fitness, be in debt a quarter million or more, and have great difficulty finding any job at all. . .so the idiots go to Law School. I went in an era when the tuition was far lower and . . .I know this will sound unbelievable but. . . You Could Get A Job with your JD! If you went to the best law school in your state, as I did, and graduated anywhere in your class, passed the Bar Exam on the first try, you could absolutely find a job, with little difficulty. And while your first job might not be highly paid and/or "prestigious" your next job could be, or the job 5 years after that. . .it was all up to you, there were plenty of employers back in the mid 90's hiring JD's and recently barred attorneys. The people I went to law school with were very smart (the school rejected at least 70 percent of its applicants, back then). They would have walked out on the spot if asked to pay outrageous tuition for the chance to do "temporary document review projects" for $19 per hour upon graduation. They were nothing like the fools who pollute modern law schools.
DeletePolitics, much like law, requires the best people. But, there is scarcely anything in either to attract the best people. So, we get what we get.
DeleteYes, I did and do refer to most modern law students as "student loan conduits." I'm still here and still very critical of modern law schools flooding a job market that does not need, or equally importantly, does not want a bunch of new lawyers each year.
DeleteI struggled for years to find a real legal job, but finally threw it in and went to work in construction. I tell people I was disbarred for drunkenness - that actually makes you seem like less of a loser in most peoples' eyes somehow.
DeleteIndeed, as dilbert113 said, most law students—and, I hasten to add, most lawyers—just aren't very smart. Perhaps those of a former era were more reliably erudite and intelligent, but these days I am pleasantly surprised to deal with a lawyer who is even minimally competent. Rare is the lawyer whom I would consider an intellectual. Yet somehow law retains its undeserved air of brilliance and sophistication.
DeleteThe debt-financed cost nowadays exceeds $100k at every law school in the US and at many of them greatly exceeds $300k. Anyone who signs up for that in a context of high unemployment or underemployment for JDs cannot be called smart. And I don't buy the claims of deception that various people have brought against law schools. Take some responsibility, for pity's sake.
Yes, take some responsibility. I get that. When I was in law school I was fortunate enough to land a paying job with a prestigious government agency. Low pay, but still paying. One day my boss said that they were thinking about "phasing out the pay" due to the "prestige" of that particular agency, and the glut of students desperate to work there. I looked him square in the eye and said, "Fine, just let me know when, because as soon as you "phase out the pay" I will "phase out the work" and stop showing up here. Of course they kept the pay going. But, that was probably the last year they bothered paying law students, who now cheerfully compete, and fight hard, for the opportunity to work full-time, suit and tie, for 40 or more hours a week, for no compensation whatsoever. These folks are quite gullible and unintelligent, and, yes, it is hard to have sympathy for them.
DeleteSo what exactly did Campos do to help the general situation described by Nando? A fair question I think. Come on everyone!
ReplyDeleteCampos was, frankly, a dilettante; he had previously railed against what he perceived to be prejudice against the obese by the medical community(he wrote a whole book about it). So it's not surprising that nobody's heard a peep from him about the scam in a long time; he's lost interest.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteNando was a different person, with his own blog: Third-Tier Reality. His blog featured pictures of excrement, overflowing or otherwise foul toilets, and other uninviting scenes redolent of scam schools. As I recall, he was a graduate of toilet law school Drake. Unfortunately for the anti-scam movement, he deleted his blog three or four years ago. It can still be found, however, in archives on the Internet.
DeleteYes, Campos was not Nando. But Campos' most valuable contribution was the simple fact that he was a tenured professor lobbying criticism from the inside.
DeleteI would like to think that Campos dissuaded some lemmings off the cliff.
I used to love Campos and really miss him. Unfortunately he caught a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome and has yet to recover.
Paul Campos wrote this blog:
Deletehttp://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/
He has since moved on to other topics, but back in his blog's heyday, it was required reading for anyone following the law school scam.
Oh yes, that's right. Nando had the toilet gallery. I deleted my original comment and replaced it with a new comment!
ReplyDelete