This law school was ordered to close its doors in June of last year, but it continues to accept new students. Enrolling there is quite unsafe: the LEB has reminded the public that it does not recognize the law school, so presumably a graduate might not be eligible for admission to the bar.
Unlike the pusillanimous, scam-enabling ABA, the LEB seems willing to take on what must be a prominent university. It is well known that numerous law schools in the US exhibit all of the defects listed above and more (something tells me that the U of Manila doesn't offer courses on law & hip-hop or publish self-indulgent crapola about The Open Road), yet hardly ever does the ABA do anything about them.
The ABA needs to lose the ability to accredit law schools. Law is a joke of a profession. I'm a "lawyer" who with 173k in student loans a worthless law license. There are probably a hundred thousand of us produced in the past decade with no career and a mountain of debt.
ReplyDeleteThe federal government some years ago did threaten to strip the ABA of its accrediting power. Typically, however, it backed down. So the scam is still with us…
DeleteIt is very common for a person with a good career to walk away from it and go to a low-ranked law school because "it's always been my dream" or "I will make loads of cash as a corporate lawyer" or some other foolish reason. . .only to end up crawling back to their old job after graduating from law school, passing the Bar Exam, and being completely unable to find a job. Again, at the risk of repeating myself, I have a hard time understanding why so many people are so gullible and fall for this scam. I went to the best law school in my state, in a state with only two law schools and a population of over six million people in the early 90's before the bottom dropped out of the legal job market. Literally every single person I knew who graduated, passed the Bar Exam, and was serious found a job before or shortly after being sworn in, with little difficulty. You could graduate dead last in the class, and if you passed the Bar Exam and applied widely, you would absolutely get a job practicing law. The people I attended law school with were very smart--the school had around a 20% acceptance rate the year I applied--and they were very serious. They tracked the job outcomes of my law school's graduates long before filling out an application to apply there. If any of us had, at any point during our three years of law school, learned that graduates couldn't find jobs, we would have dropped out on the spot and pursued something more practical. If people would just do some basic research about the real-world outcomes for newly-licensed attorneys in the US in 2025, they would save themselves a lot of grief.
DeleteWell yeah OG but if you look it up, you'll see that when that was threatened (in 1998) is was actually from an antitrust perspective, i.e. that the ABA was keeping new law school entrants OUT, not being to generous with letting them IN.
DeleteSo umm..yeah. DOJ was coming after ABA for NOT allowing enough new toilets to pop up! See https://www.chronicle.com/article/education-department-threatens-to-revoke-bar-associations-accreditation-authority-5623/
Maybe this was all geographic, but my experience in the late 80s is very different from 2:45. I also attended a law school where there were only two law schools in the state and would guess it had an acceptance rate much higher than 20%. My class was filled with teachers, social workers, even some engineers(that profession was going through one of its cyclic downturns at the time).
DeleteAnd everybody knew that a. all law graduates get jobs and b. all lawyers make a lot of money. And it was the age of "you can do anything with your law degree"; a popular book was something about a golden parachute, about a (Harvard) law graduate who went on to be a Hollywood producer(of course it wasn't emphasized that the person was a ton of Hollywood connections).
Then came 3rd year; fully half of my class was scrambling for jobs and not finding them. Almost all passed the bar and still limited luck, some getting jobs with very small PI or ID mills which paid peanuts.
But in fairness-there were no statistics anywhere accessible which reflected the terrible state of legal employment. The law schools didn't even bother to publish the fake stats that became common a decade later. There was no way for the Average Schlub to find out how bad things were-and the schools weren't telling.
So yes those career-changer students were probably sorry they attended(on our first day, the dean spoke glowingly of the fact the average age of the first year student was 33), but this was back in the day before any objective data of any sort was available.
It does seem as if law school scamming is international; have seen many a Canadian lawyer lament things there, too.
ReplyDeleteIn Britain, there is a market for used barristerial wigs: people who can't make it as barristers sell theirs, and new aspirants are happy to save much of the cost of buying new ones (several thousand dollars).
DeletePlus aren't there a lot fewer British courts where barristers even still wear the wigs?
DeleteThis reminds me of all the silly things I did after I got licensed. Hanging the diploma on the wall. Getting business cards made up. Joining the conveyancing association. I am cleaning out my house and finding some of these old reminders and feel a slight sense of embarrassment when I do and before the paper legacies go into the shredder. (The diploma went into a document cylinder, but it was a close call).
My diplomas are on the floor of a closet, not on any wall.
DeleteMy law school diploma is actually on the floor of a closet too.
DeleteMine (in its frame) is on the closet floor, leaning against the wall.
DeleteNow that we're on the subject of international practices, it is worth mentioning that law is one of the least portable lines of work, precisely because the law varies greatly from place to place. Some countries—China comes to mind—allow only citizens to join the bar; practically all require exams based on local law and sometimes an apprenticeship. A surgeon of my acquaintance has been invited to work in Saudi Arabia, despite not speaking Arabic; a lawyer would not get that opportunity, except to practice in a foreign setting (New York corporate law, for instance).
ReplyDeleteThe term Uber toilet and this blog has now appeared in a law review https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl/vol30/iss1/4/
ReplyDeleteThanks. Indeed, OTLSS is cited three times in that article. We've been cited before elsewhere. Glad to have been of service.
DeleteThe blog was an invaluable resource during the writing process. You're one of the few places keeping track of where the bodies are buried in this area.
DeleteNotice OTLSS scam is cited by the University of Michigan Law School rather than a toilet law school. The toilet law school would never want their students to learn about OTLSS
DeleteI have just begun to read the article. We know that Worcester was never honored: the Cherokee were force-marched to what is now Oklahoma a few years later, and more than a quarter of the nation died en route.
DeleteIndeed, it's one of the reasons I picked my alma mater since I knew they would give me academic freedom in this area. Old Guy, while it didn't help the Cherokee, Worcester is still good law and is the bedrock of federal Indian law as part of the Marshall Trilogy.
DeleteI am not sure licensing uber toileters as attorneys with Indian Tribes is a good idea.....
DeleteThat's on the law schools for graduating them if they weren't fit to be Lawyers. I think if Tribes can benefit from licensing some of them it's a netgood. Plus, a law degree should entitle you to practice law like it did in the old days. Wisconsin diploma privilege works fine for that state which I note in the article.
DeleteAll of the more civilized countries are jettisoning their academic integrity for the profit maximizing USA model.
ReplyDeleteThe Former British Empire, which had a great government statistic driven seat determination plan and free tuition, has gone full student loans and "demand driven" seats models.
Even Japan, which has honor and has almost no foreign influence, has moved to upping the tuition and expanding seats.
I have heard that Law applications are up 40% this year compared to last year. This year incoming class is the most competitive ever and will result in having a one of the largest classes ever graduating in three years. My fear is this large amount of students and the economy possibly entering a recession, the job market will be abysmal in three years and will resemble the post Great Recession legal job market.
ReplyDeleteIf there has been an increase of 40% in applications to law school while the scam bloggers been around for years to warn prospective law students of the pitfalls, then it is proof how many of these students lack critical thinking abilities and it makes me shudder these applicants will be representing clients
DeleteA lot of people on this blog claim that people chose law school because it is the default option for people with liberal arts degrees and no science prerequisites. However, there are some nursing programs that are designed for career changers such as Columbia University and John Hopkins. It is not even that hard to get prerequisites for the nursing program. Both Columbia and John Hopkins have online prerequisites intended for people to get the required classes to enter a nursing program. If people are willing to go out of their way to attend a law school somewhere in person for three years, then they can certainly take a few watered down science courses online such as basic biology, chemistry, psychology and nutrition.
ReplyDeleteThat is a great plan, but most people considering Law School won't follow it. 1) Nursing has required pre-requisite courses, law school doesn't, that will govern the decision most make. 2) These pre-requisites are actually challenging classes, involving math and science, that will take time, discipline and real effort to complete. Most people who breezed through undergrad, earning a worthless major, literally do not even know how to study. They have been gifted with grades they didn't earn for their entire lives, and literally do not understand the concept of memorizing a mass of material, and then learning how to analyze it and apply it to a fact pattern--they simply do not have a clue. Trust me, I know, most of the people I went to college with were just there to have fun, and they immediately got menial, low-paying jobs upon graduation and settled into lives of mediocrity, at best. US students--their test scores, reading/math ability, their study habits are a joke, generally speaking. Many, if not most, US nurses and nursing students come from abroad. As soon as most US students hear the words "Math" and "Science" they run for the hills. It is a cultural thing here, in a soft, wealthy country where Anti-intellectualism is very common. Young people focus on sports, drinking and socializing, casual sex--they couldn't care less about their studies.
DeleteRe: 2:45 I was skeptical about this but I checked out both programs and it does look like a good option with someone already with a Bachelor's who wants to enter into Nursing. If someone is not cut out for nursing they should quickly find out while taking the prerequisite courses.
DeleteUnfortunately and as usual for me, such programs did not exist when it might have done me some good. Or if these did I was unaware of it.
Not bad advice, but keep in mind your average student attending a lousy law school has both undergraduate and law school debt, often into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. So retraining for a new field would probably be well beyond their financial means.
DeleteWhile there is a definite phobia among a certain group of students regarding science and math...they're the ones going to law school.
DeleteBut let's stick with the facts: applications to US medical, dental, pharmacy, and nursing schools are through the roof. There are plenty of people-again, the liberal artists with the worthless BAs-who gravitate to law school, but there are also plenty of students taking the hard courses and majoring in difficult disciplines.
For example, only 16% of licensed nurses are foreign born. So there are plenty of Americans who are willing to do the work...they just aren't' attending terrible law schools.
And I'm old enough to remember when "nurse attorney" was a thing, and nurses with JDs were going to rule the profession. That fizzled out pretty quickly, probably when nurses figured out that an advanced nursing degree was a better investment.
I did not realize that most US nurses were native born Americans, thank you for correcting that perception. I would argue, respectfully, that most American college students are not, in fact, "willing to do the work" and take hard, challenging classes in math and science that lead to a great job afterward. Again, at the risk of repeating myself, I attended a large, well known college from 1988-1992, and the great majority of the students there could not have cared less about their studies. I have a family member who decided to party hard through college, and he is still paying a terrible price many years later. Young me who screw around in college and end up living at home with their parents afterward, working at miserable, low-paying jobs quickly find that girls aren't the slightest bit interested in them. . .their lives can spiral, especially when many of their classmates are doing well in the workplace, getting married, having children etc. and they're stocking shelves at the local supermarket. I would absolutely agree that some US students do work hard in college and go onto to good, well-paying jobs afterward, but most don't in my experience. They have fun for four years, and pay for it for the rest of their lives.
DeleteActually, I am technically in the "medical profession" as a home health aide after getting my law degree. I did pass the bar exam the first attempt but because my grades were mediocre career services wouldn't offer me assistance. They just wouldn't return my phone calls or emails. So I let my law license lapse after never finding a job rather than waste money and time on continuing education. The job for a home health aide was only watching an hour long video and promptly taking a multiple choice test to verify you understood it. Contrast that with wasting 3 years in law school. So yes, people are much better off going into the medical field than law school. Even if it's a 2 year associate nursing degree from the local community college
DeleteMaybe there should be a movie along the lines of Reefer Madness except it would be called College Party Madness or maybe Federal Guaranteed Loan Madness. Where college partiers are living the life in college but then upon graduation cannot find decent employment, live in increasingly shabby conditions, cannot form stable relationships, spiral further into substance abuse and ultimately wind up dead.
DeleteHow do you think the changes by the federal government and government job cuts will affect the legal job market in the next few years?
ReplyDelete