Saturday, October 29, 2022

Wilmington University to open the seventh law school in greater Philadelphia

Wilmington University, in New Castle, Delaware, is preparing to open a law school in 2023. This new über-toilet will be seventh law school in the general Philadelphia area.

Whatever its charms (and Old Guy must admit that he likes a good cheesesteak), greater Filthadelphia does not need the law schools that it alraedy has, let alone another. So what are the gimmicks that supposedly set this future über-toilet at Wilmington University apart?

First, allegedly low tuition of $24k per year. According to dean Philip Closius, who has made his career at various über-toilets around the US, "it will cost [students], at most, a total of $72,000 to earn a law degree". The cost, however, involves more than multiplying the annual tuition by three years. (And is he guaranteeing that tuition won't be raised?) On top of that, what is the value of a law degree from an unknown, unaccredited upstart of an über-toilet? He doesn't discuss that inconvenient little question.

Second, it proposes to prey upon "traditional- and non-traditional-age students, professionals transitioning from other careers, and multicultural populations". In short, it will be Indiana Tech all over again: a few local people whose commitments keep them from going to a decent law school (if they could get into one), older people whom age-based discrimination within the legal profession will soon hit right in the face (Old Guy being the poster boy for that), and various exploitable ethnic or racial minorities who can be duped into signing up for law school whether they belong there or not. According to LaVerne Harmon, president of the university, "[o]ur law school instructors will genuinely care about their students and be committed to making a difference in their lives." Pardon me while I yawn. She continues: "One of their main functions will be to prepare students for the real world that awaits them as attorneys." Assumes facts not in evidence, Harmon. Already lots of law students never pass a bar exam—a fact admitted in Wilmington's puff piece of an announcement. There is no reason to suppose that Wilmington's students will become attorneys. Closius makes the same mistake: he says that his über-toilet will help those many students who "want to specialize in areas of law they find meaningful but can’t because they have to choose specialties that aren’t as rewarding — just to pay off their loans". Something tells Old Guy that Wilmingtonians in the main are not going to enjoy abundant options in the legal profession—and that many won't become lawyers at all. But of course scamsters cheerfully dangle fantasies before the glassy eyes of 0Ls.

Another of those fantasies is the possibility of working far from Delaware—in Arizona, for instance. Outside a few élite and slightly sub-élite law schools, students rarely enjoy in practice the portability that exists in theory. If you want to work as a lawyer in Arizona, go either to a Harvard or to a law school in or very near Arizona. Do not throw your lot in with a bullshit question mark in distant Delaware. For that matter, if you want to work in Delaware, still don't go to Wilmington: look around for a decent school, such as Penn.

Yet another fantasy is access to "externships". The über-toilet will offer students academic credit for a 21-week "externship" with a lawyer. The difficulty is that local lawyers are hardly likely to snatch up all of the students who would like to avail themselves of this option.

Sound familiar? That's because we've seen it time and time again: an über-toilet opens amidst a load of self-congratulatory propaganda about being "a different type of law school", its tiny entering class has a median LSAT score in the 140s, and soon enough the propaganda yields way to reality. Old Guy predicts that Wilmington will prove to be yet another bottom-trawler that tries to prettify its students' general shittiness under the signboard of "diversity". The fancy educational opportunities envisioned by Closius will turn into mandatory bar review, and soon enough the school will shut down.

As is by now well known at this site, Old Guy recommends staying away from law school—except maybe Harvard, Yale, and eleven other schools listed elsewhere, and even those should often be avoided. Don't even consider Wilmington.


12 comments:

  1. At this point, some entity other than the ABA needs to take control over the entire legal educational cartel. They, along with the idiots in Congress and the Department of Education, are funding a disaster along with at least one hundred other toilets that are overflowing the profession with people who can't pass the bar and will never find employment.

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    1. I think that entity could be state supreme courts. They could all get together and form one group whose rules are adopted by all the member supreme courts. Given state supreme courts' sole authority over who can apply for and be admitted to the bar, they could make huge reforms without congress, without the ABA, and without even state legislatures.

      My state supreme court flat out says that lawyers have "priced themselves out of the market" when it comes to serving "regular people" in non-contingent fee cases, so they've been licensing these limited license practitioners for certain types of cases like family law.

      Doesn't seem like a big leap from what they've already done to consider the fact that a big part of why lawyers can't charge less is because school is so expensive. They could just as easily (for example) let people just sit the bar after 1L (which is almost all the bar tests anyway) and soon enough the ABA would have no choice but to recognize it as a one-year masters. That'd save 2 years of tuition and borrowed living expenses right there, and for the kids who don't end up practicing they probably wouldn't be as "pigeonholed" and disregarded by nonlegal employers if it were just an MA.

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    2. I am curious, though, with all of the unemployed lawyers, why are fees so high? Most pedestrian law takes very little time to do.

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  2. C'mon, OG, getting an uncredited law school is a fitting accomplishment for this Temple of Learning. After all, our good friends at USNWR rank the undergrad school at 331-440(didn't know they had fluid rankings) with a fall 2021 acceptance rate of 99%, so a degree from a school like that has got to be an accomplishment.
    Watch out Harvard!

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    1. Gotta love that 45 percent graduation rate, too. Here's the punchline - that's a 8-year timeframe!

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  3. The only people excited about this announcement are the folks who run the local class-action law firm. Now they can recruit document review click-monkeys from right in their own backyard.

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  4. Another new law school? Who would have guessed?

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  5. On the demise of Florida Coastal:

    https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/2022/11/02/i-team-leaders-were-warned-in-2014-that-a-jacksonville-law-school-would-fail-7-years-later-it-closed/

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    1. The article spells out why the scam will never die-there's just too much money to be made. Still can't process the person who went to law school because 1. Perry Mason(which strongly suggests the person isn't young) and 2. "planned for her law career to help support her husband’s medical costs"....anyone thinking person would have calculated the cost of attendance and then looked at relative job prospects/salary before embarking on the law school journey, and then realized that it would take years, if ever, before law school would pay off. But she didn't, and "lost everything".
      The other person quoted graduated with $250,000-a cool quarter million-in debt. How does this happen?
      So at the risk of being uncharitable, it's not the scammers who are keeping the scam alive; it's the would-be Perry Masons who have a Pavlovian response to the two words "law school".

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    2. Gotta love that student loan scam! Elect progressive politicians who "care about people" by slamming them into college regardless of feasibility, or conservative politicians who let for-profit scam schools help themselves to public money because that's conservative....

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  6. From the 2019 990s
    Net assets Endowment
    Indiana Tech 240,735,773 137,039,068
    Wilmington 242,302,412 119,991,912

    Two numbers do not make for a financial analysis, and perhaps there other resources not reportable on the 990 or other 990s. But those numbers are not encouraging.


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  7. I guess this makes Cooley #1:
    https://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/top-ranked-yale-law-school-shun-flawed-us-news-rankings-2022-11-16/

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