Activism

I want to support the idea of activism mentioned in prior posts and comments.  Prof. Campos, Tamanaha, and the wider media coverage have helped to draw attention to the law school scam.  However, the only way to avoid these revelations fading into the anonymity of the endless news-cycle-loop and blogosphere junkyard is through a coordinated and sustained effort.  Our effort to write posts about various current events within the scam, including reporting on the opposition, helps to keep us informed. 

Here are some other thoughts:

1) The idea of well-placed information and fliers in law schools and undergraduate libraries is excellent -- provided that it becomes a consistent project.  It makes the scam message impossible to ignore.  By bringing it to the youngest students before they apply to law school, it helps to counteract the empty slogans that those kids have heard throughout their lives about educational debt being "good debt" and more education/degrees/credentials always being a good thing.  It also may draw them to Inside the Law School Scam and to this blog.  In the law schools themselves, it may help to encourage disillusioned 1Ls to get out early before they build up substantially more debt.

2) A coordinated campaign to educate pre-law counselors would help to spread the message as well.  A concise cover letter and fliers may help.  As previously mentioned, alumni will have the most credibility with delivering the message.  My prelaw counselor loved me, and she would at least take my concerns seriously.  I am sure many of you will have credibility with your own counselors.

3) Do we have any artists that could help create a catchy logo for fliers?  I think Outside the Law School Scam should become more than just a perceptive blog: it should become a movement.  Creative visual artists, if you feel inspired, please show us what you’ve got!  Perhaps someone could design a logo with a carnival barker dressed in judicial robes leading a line of 1L lemmings into a circus tent with a "Law School" sign and a caption saying, "There's a sucker born every minute."  (I am sure that other people could come up with much better ideas).

4) We could start to reveal truths only discussed in rumors.  For example, everyone talks about scholarship sections, where the law schools offer a large amount of scholarships to a large percentage of students but make the scholarships contingent on maintaining a minimum law school GPA.  These scholarships are supposed to entice students with the highest LSAT scores into attending.  Then, the law school places the majority of these students into one section and waits for the curve to weed out a large portion of the scholarships.

It would not be difficult to prove these trends.  If we could get 1Ls at schools to pass out a two-question survey to fellow students, we could get solid numbers.  Question 1: Did the law school offer you a scholarship contingent on maintaining a minimum GPA? Question 2: What section are you in?

If we could reveal a trend amongst law schools, or even just bust one law school at a time, we could blow the lid off of this story.

5) The First Department in New York, when affirming the dismissal of the New York Law School case, mentioned that they found the manipulation of employment and salary data troublesome but that such complaints were best left to ethics committees.  Similarly, a few voices, including a recent law review article by Ben Trachtenberg, discuss the specific ethical violations perpetrated by the administrators of 99% of law schools.

Is anyone up for signing onto ethics complaints against dishonest law school administrators who still perpetuate fake employment data despite the reform efforts?  These efforts will keep the law school scam in the news, regardless of whether the administrators actually end up receiving sanctions.

These are just my thoughts.  Other people will have much better ideas, so let’s hear them!  We are interested!

A view from the bottom

I am a K-JD who is attending a 4th tier law school on a full-tuition scholarship, and will incur exactly $0 educational debt because of my parents being thrifty and generous with their middle-class income (I also graduated debt free from a small private college through scholarships, the money I made, and my parents).

I learned of the law school scam a little over a year ago when I stumbled onto LawProf's blog.  Before I had been relatively happy; bored of the classes but okay with my new friends and grades.  I don't remember what the newest post was on Inside the Law School Scam, but the implications terrified me.  Being more amenable to the right-wing/conservative views on economic issues, I had read about and even written on the higher education tuition bubble, but I had never questioned the value of attending law school, even (especially) for free.  After a few weeks of sizable internal struggle, I decided that because I wanted to be a prosecutor for a small to mid-sized town, it made more sense for me to graduate debt free than to transfer to a better school (for whatever reason dropping out altogether was not part of the equation).

What is interesting about the very bottom of law schools, from a general perspective, is that things have been bad before the Great Recession, at least since the 1990's when tuition really began to increase, if not earlier.  They were able to skate by for a variety of reasons that many of you are familiar with: much of the focus has always been on the elite law schools, they kept their tuition a couple levels under the elites, and the overall okay economies of the Clinton and Bush administrations (aside from the hiccup in the mid 90's and the crash in 2007) masked the struggles of their graduates.

Because of their lesser sophistication of the legal education situation (though that has been rapidly changing, at least in my school: a 2L class shirt recently had text that said: "I spend $150,000 on law school and all I got was this lousy shirt"), I think the views of those from the bottom of the law school pack have been underrepresented in these discussions (notwithstanding the excellent and entertaining Third Tier Reality and others).

LSAC applicant statistics have shown the largest decline in test-takers among those who score in the highest percentiles, and commentators even outside the profession have noted that "the wrong people are applying to law school."

This masks the incredible pressure that schools like the one I attend are facing.  Even though there are more people percentage-wise not scoring in the top percentile of the LSAT, numerically there is a much larger decline among the lower-scoring LSAT takers, and this presents an existential problem among those in the lower tiers.

How are they going to maintain their "elite" model while dealing with involuntarily smaller incoming classes?  They are going to be further squeezed through the "transfer game" (my school's 1L class seems to lose 25-35 students a year).  If the trend continues to this year then I have estimated that the next incoming class (of 2016) will be half of what my 2L class is (2014) currently, adjusted for their transfer loss.

There is not an endowment, the alumni do not give, LSAT medians have gone down, and there is close to an open-admission policy already.  So what is happening that is of interest here that could be said to be in response to this crisis?

(1) a very small tuition increase (it might actually be a very small decrease when adjusted for inflation), and (2) retooling the curriculum so students get more feedback, are better prepared for the bar, and get more practical experience.  I think 15-20 years ago a focus on very small tuition increases and a much better curriculum would have been laudable and even effective.  Now it just seems like they are rearranging the cell blocks on the Death Star, while the cynic in me wonders if the curriculum changes are designed to boost bar passage rates a little in preparation for a 10% increase in acceptances.

The view from the bottom is not pretty, and especially so for expensive, private law schools who place less than half their graduates in real lawyer jobs.  Vermont Law School is just the first of the proton torpedoes.  The proposal to merge the two Rutgers law schools is the second.

Many of these expensive, low-ranked, and poorly performing law schools are going to have to close.  But some do, according to Professor Bill Henderson, provide a clear niche by placing better than many tier one law schools.  The subject for a future post will be to lay out a few paths for those schools to bring the costs into line with their credential.  Meanwhile, keep your eyes on the schools on the bottom end.  Though a lot of talk is about Columbia's massive transfer acceptance, Georgetown's relatively poor placement rates for its supposed prestige, or Virginia hiring 20% of its graduates, the real action is at the lower tiers.  Keep your eyes peeled for the next salvo.

It Wasn’t Scholarship: Philosopher Bids Farewell to Paul Campos and “Inside the Law School Scam”

Several commenters have written to alert me that University of Chicago Law Professor Brian Leiter has authored a post in response to the retirement of Professor Paul Campos’s blog, “Inside the Law School Scam” (serious credit being due to Leiter for posting this entry so quickly, given his tendency to forget that the blog exists). Leiter and Campos have sparred in the past, so it’s not surprising to hear Leiter allege in his post that Campos’s blog “didn’t have much content, apart from insulting and deriding Deans, faculty and anyone else who contested his claims. But, true to form, [Campos] can’t say goodbye without just making things up out of whole cloth.”

It’s certainly true that Inside the Law School Scam never had much content – it featured no self-interested law school rankings or poetry, for example – and tended to focus on trivial issues like the facts that law schools are overproducing lawyers at a rate of 2:1, that law schools are using questionable recruitment tactics, that law school tuition is insanely high, that legal scholarship might not be worth the cost at which students are currently subsidizing it, and that in the end taxpayers are stuck with the bill for this mess. What I find difficult to believe, however, is that Campos is “just making things up.” Fortunately, on that matter, Leiter reports.

While Campos claims that, in response to his initial authoring of his blog anonymously, “people in legal academia instantly became more concerned with Who Was Saying These Outrageous Things than in whether those things might actually be true,” Leiter assures us that “[i]n fact, it was Campos himself who made a big deal out of ‘who was saying these things’…” How, exactly? Campos prominently bragged, in a small information section at the top of his blog, that he is "a tenured law professor at a Tier 1 law school." No one else cared about Campos’s identity or obsessed over “outing” him.

But Leiter doesn’t end his roast there. Nor should he. He explains that Campos used his prominence to “lend his claims, including his false ones, credibility,” such as his claims that law professors are “lazy” and “produce lousy scholarship.” These claims were not only false but “inflammatory and, at best, misleading” and this “is what annoyed even those who didn't know Campos and his history of trying to garner media attention by any means possible.” As to how Campos’s claims were false, inflammatory and, at best, misleading, Leiter unfortunately doesn’t explain. But let’s be honest – do we really need a factually supported argument from Leiter on this point? Campos clearly loves attention and will lie and/or mislead in order to get it.

Leiter finishes Campos off with an argument that Campos’s purported “core message” actually belongs to Brian Tamanaha and Bill Henderson. As Leiter rightly notes, it is their, not Campos’s, message to share. In fact, Leiter even concedes that he was spreading this message long before Campos ever was (don’t tell Tamanaha or Henderson) through his exhaustive linking to articles written by those law professors. But unlike Campos, Leiter spread this message the way that he spreads all of his messages: tastefully. He did so in a manner that would not (heaven forbid) completely disrupt the current system of legal education.

The cherry on top of the delicious ice cream cone that is Leiter’s exposé of Campos is what he calls “[t]he key fact to remember about Paul Campos” and which was “the first clear sign that this was an individual without a core, intellectual or moral.” For that gem, I will leave you to his article. Though please feel free to discuss the article here. Unlike Leiter Reports, and much like Inside the Law School Scam, we welcome constructive comments.

Where are we going?

(UPDATE - I should mention up front that my posts represent my own views alone, and not the views of this blog in general or any other specific writers here.  I'm just soliciting suggestions for where readers might like me to focus, and I do not speak for any other contributors, all of whom have their own styles, interests, and agendas.  But comments generally relating to this blog as a whole are also welcome.)



This will be the last of my “introductory” posts.  Next week, it’ll be on to pushing some specific activism.  But before that, I just wanted to get some thoughts together on where this movement is going.  What are we looking for?

Too summarize the scamblogs before ITLSS, there seemed to be a large group of individuals who had all suffered badly by obtaining JDs, but who all responded to this harm in different ways.  Some wanted student loan reform.  Some wanted the end of student loans.  Some hoped to achieve transparency in the statistics (and actually achieved great success with this as Law School Transparency), some wanted law school to answer for their crimes in court.  Some dreamed of law schools closing for good, while others wished for milder changes to the curriculum.  All had validity, but with so many sets of hands pulling in so many directions, I don’t recall seeing much change.  Publicity, yes, plenty of publicity, and perhaps that led to a decrease in application volume, but nothing specific and identifiable really changed.  (And if I’m wrong about this, please let me know.  I’m aware that law school applications dropped generally, which is a fine goal to have achieved, but no reforms at the institutional level.)

Then ITLSS came along, and we came together.  That site was the central plaza for the scamblog movement, and people inside the law school Establishment stopped and listened.  ITLSS gave the message some legitimacy and made many inside the scam – professors, deans, administrators etc. - realize that this wasn’t something that was going to disappear when we lost interest, and it wasn’t something that they could brush under the corner of the rug.  That didn’t stop them trying though!

But even at the ITLSS stage of our evolution, we lacked direction.  Or let me rephrase: I thought we lacked direction.  We didn’t lack direction in our motivation and passion for confronting the issues, but I never felt like we knew where we were going.

Throughout my working life, I have seen things fail because the goals were not set beforehand or developed as early as reasonably possible.  If one is aiming at an intangible, constantly-changing target, or no target at all, one never hits the ten ring.  From huge projects to small, without knowing where we are going, we end up going nowhere.  Sometimes, we end up going in the wrong direction.  Most of the success can be attributed to luck.

And we can see that even within the scamblog movement.  One group (LST) set a very specific goal early on – transparency and reform in the way law schools presented their employment statistics – and kept their eyes on that goal.  And they hit, and are now one of the great success stories of law school reform, respected too by those inside and those outside the law school scam.  And some other scamblogs have set no specific goals, or goals that really don’t mean anything, goals that can’t be turned into a plan of action, and I think it’s debatable if any can point to specific changes in the law school Establishment and say, “We did that.”

My point being as follows: I feel that if we do not set a tangible, achievable goal, we will achieve nothing except more talk.  (Although as one of my fellow writers pointed out, talk is necessary because it keeps the message fresh and keeps application levels dropping, which in turn will hopefully lead to law school reform.)  Should we set a goal?  Something that we can all aim for and work towards?  And if so, what would that goal be?  There are plenty of things that need changing.  Are there certain things that we want to see changed?  Do we want to lead the change, rather than merely being responsible for a reduction in applications, which will allow law schools themselves to dictate how they respond – and they may respond in ways that benefit the scam rather than benefiting the students.

Or am I completely wrong about this?  Should we be more focused on guerrilla tactics instead?  After all, the law school Establishment is very organized, very formal, and doesn’t know how to react to students challenging the status quo.  (I do despise the term ‘guerilla’ though, as it reminds me of that book much loved by lazy law school career services employees, “Guerilla Tactics for Getting the Legal Job of Your Dreams”, which was basically an excuse for those careers office employees to drink coffee all day and tell their students to go and read the book and then find the jobs for themselves.  In fact, perhaps that book should have been a huge red flag to us all – why did we need to use guerrilla tactics in the job search?  After all, the law schools told us that 90%+ of their grads were walking into these kinds of awesome jobs, so they should be have been easy to find, right?  But that’s another story for another day.)

What should we be focusing on, if anything?  Should we be focusing on all law schools, or perhaps just a subset?  After all, we know that Harvard and Yale are hardly scam schools, and nor are many of the top schools, especially when considering some of the truly terrible schools that reside at the bottom of the rankings.  We have limited resources, so should we focus on the main offenders?  Shuttering some of those bottom-feeder schools would result in a dramatic reduction not just in the number of available seats in law schools, but in seats in the right law schools.  Aiming for across-the-board cuts doesn’t place the cuts where they need to be.  (Rather like the sequestering process going on at the federal level as we speak.)

Or should we aim to become part of a wider higher education reform community, reaching out to broader student loan reform groups and those representing students at other levels and in other fields who are suffering many of the same problems?  I’m sure we have resources and information that would benefit them, and they would have the same for us.

I’m not necessarily advocating that we pick a single niche to focus on and do nothing else until we have achieved that goal.  For LST, it worked.  For us?  Probably not.  But I do think we need to start to at least define the problems specifically rather than generally, and that we start to really identify specific areas and schools that cause the most harm and which should be reformed.  Third Tier Reality is a good example of this: Nando focuses on the worst offenders first, the high-value targets.  He has no need to profile top schools (yet) because they really don’t contribute to the scam in the same way that the bottom-feeders do.

I’ll revisit this after we’ve all had a chance to think about it.  My personal opinion is that we need to focus first on a group of specific, named schools, and through pushing for serious reform at those schools (such as specific changes in class size, curriculum, faculty, admissions, facilities, financing etc.) we can highlight the issues in the broader law school Establishment that affect all students.  And I’d love to hear your thoughts on which schools we should be targeting.  Who are the greatest offenders?  I have my list.  Which schools are on yours and why?

In my years in practice, I’ve come to learn one key thing: you need to tell people what you’re asking for, because otherwise they just don’t know.  It’s all well and good to moan and gripe to opposing counsel about the harm done to your client by his, but you’ve also got to tell him exactly what your client wants in terms of righting the wrong.  And I think we’ve come to the stage in the law school scam movement where we need to tell people, “This is what we want.”

New York Judges Want to Kill the Law School Transparency Movement

To: Judge Lippman

As the leader of the state judiciary, you control the development of ethics rules.  Therefore, this letter must be written to you.

This letter is not about the recent mandate, requiring new lawyers with six-figure debt to perform free labor while exempting established lawyers with paychecks from making similar sacrifices.  Of course, this indifference toward the reality faced by new lawyers provides an appropriate place to start.  As the chief judge in Albany, I know that you do not see what many of us in major cities see every day: kids in their 20’s handing out makeshift business cards in court hallways and arraignment parts because no one will hire a person with a new J.D. unless you graduated at the top of the top. 

At alarming rates, new lawyers from wealthier backgrounds move into their parents’ homes and work 50-hour-a-week—for free—hoping to network their way into a paying gig sometime in the next decade.  Many young lawyers have worked non-paying jobs for many years already.  The government and the legal profession take advantage of this slave labor with loopholes in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).  The federal judges interpreting the FLSA, some of whom started a new trend of taking on free fulltime clerks, represent the greed that has devastated our young lawyers during the worst crisis ever faced by the profession.  At least the young lawyers from wealthy backgrounds can afford to eat and practice law at the same time. 

The new lawyers without family money work at minimum wage jobs, ironically protected under the FLSA, and receive Medicaid and food stamps.  Outside of the retail and fast food industry, where it is easy to leave law school off of one’s resume, no employer wants to touch a person with a law degree and no experience.  After these new lawyers fall into this trap, most never work as attorneys and never pay back their student debt.  Yet, law schools continue to proliferate and to publish false employment rates of 90% or more and to charge insane tuition ($150,000-$250,000)!

The consensus of data exposes reality.  Even the ABA has started to fess up and recognize that only about 1/3 of law graduates, mostly from the rich private schools, end up employed at $50,000/year or higher.  For the rest of the law schools, the scam is collapsing, but the 25% drop-off in law school applications from students with the top LSAT scores shows that information helps to dissuade people from the law school trap.  Unfortunately, it means the law schools are loading their classes up with less qualified students with a low likelihood of passing the bar exam.  Anything to keep the dollars rolling in—right?  The new law school transparency movement, started by indigent young lawyers, continues to dissuade young people from ruining their lives.  However, this does not help to repair the damage done to an already devastated generation. 

So far, the New York judiciary stands alone by unanimously sweeping under the rug the mess created by bar organizations and law schools.  I did not attend a Tier 4 scam-law-school like New York Law School (NYLS), but let’s be real: any lawsuit brought against a trade school for intentionally falsifying employment data and gouging students and taxpayers for incredible tuition during a recession to maintain the administration’s $300,000-$800,000 salaries would have progressed to the discovery phase—at least!  Similarly, in a lawsuit against a non-law school, we would not have seen the situation of the Albany Law School lawsuit, where a past valedictorian of the defendant school dismissed the case.  Currently, a past graduate of Brooklyn Law School is deciding the fate of that case as well!  In the normal course, these judges would have recused themselves.  That the judges of the NYLS and Albany lawsuits are friends and past coworkers in the Court of Claims only furthers the image of impropriety, self-protectiveness, and corruption.

In New York, some judges have recognized the embarrassing situation caused by unscrupulous law school factories, which pump out huge numbers of graduates by using fake “employment data” to advertise themselves.  Predictably, instead of these judges doing the right thing, their embarrassment has motivated a total abdication of holding dishonest lawyers and institutions accountable. 

As all of these judges must know, the discovery process underway in other states with identical lawsuits have revealed the fraudulent practices of greedy law schools.  In New York, the discovery process would have aired out all sorts of dirty laundry, which would have helped to purge the secrecy and corruption, allowing young lawyers to trust their profession again.  Yet, it seems as if judges find it more important to avoid prolonged embarrassment caused by the corruption inside their “noble profession,” regardless of the devastation to an entire un-hirable generation buried under six-figure debt.  This would explain the First Department’s terse affirmation of the dismissal of the NYLS lawsuit, which plainly contradicted longstanding precedent without explanation.

No one knows if these lawsuits would have survived summary judgment or trial, but to suffocate them before discovery smells of self-protective corruption.  It perpetuates the cartel image of law schools, judges, and bar associations.  Also, it strains credulity to excuse law schools for using “employment data” to coax students into taking on mortgage-sized debt and to place the entire burden of this scam on young people by telling them: “too bad—you should have known better!”  If these young people were buying chips and placing bets at a casino, this logic might pass the smell test.  However, taxpayer subsidized law schools should be held accountable for performing a ratcheted-up version of the Pigeon Drop on thousands of students.  At the very least, the discovery phase of a lawsuit would have provided a fair method for revealing the depth of the dishonest methods employed by the law schools in their quest for ever-larger class sizes and higher tuition.  The revelation of this information during discovery would have exposed corruption and inspired reform.

Instead, reform looks to be a slower process, undertaken by those of us at the bottom of the food chain with the least power and influence.  Mid-level law school employees will continue to leak (anonymously) documents and information, further revealing the ruthlessly dishonest game of enticing new applicants during this period of free-falling employment numbers.  I suppose the old guard, including the bar organizations and judges, will continue to watch from the sidelines and block any attempts at change.

Looking for Big Thinkers

Something short and sweet, and a prelude to my next post.  A question, a request of sorts.  How big can we think?  What can we build here?

I’ll go first.  I’d like to see this place become the go-to scamblog.  Big enough?  Perhaps I’m thinking too small.  My idea of what this blog can (and should) become might seem selfish, dangerous, unachievable perhaps, even utterly contrary to the diverse scamblog movement, with its multitude of victims and extraordinary scope, but let me explain.

Part of the strength of Professor Campos’ blog was the fact that it brought us together.  All voices were welcome.  Debate was healthy.  Most importantly, it showed the law school Establishment that We Mean Business.  (Do you all get the Robert Vaughn PI law firm commercials, or is it just me?)  Instead of dispersing support and ideas across ten or so separate scamblogs, each of which alone attracted a tenth of the readership and were a tenth as visible, a tenth as important, Inside the Law School Scam brought everyone together in an impressive show of force.  It was talked about, and it thrived.  And because of that, it was respected.

And I’m once again putting out a call for the scambloggers to join us, even the non-scambloggers who write about these issues.  Not – absolutely not! – that they abandon their own separate blogs, all of which are valuable, but just that they join us.  Shoot me an email at outsidethelawschoolscam at gmail.com.  Become a writer here, with full autonomy.  Cross-post with your own blog.  Write once a week, once a month, but write.  And in return, I’ll add you to the list of blogs that will be shown on this site.  (That was one item missing from ITLSS, and I don’t intend to isolate this blog from the larger movement.)  A mutually-beneficial relationship.  Write here and gain the traffic and support that will boost the profile of your own blog, you as a writer, and benefit the scamblog movement.

We all win when we work together.

I’m asking that current scambloggers consider joining us, and use our traffic to get their message out.  I’m asking lapsed scambloggers, of which there are many, to join us and get involved again.  I’m asking concerned third parties to consider joining us.  And I’m asking new scambloggers to consider this as a forum in which they can get their message out to a huge crowd with very little effort.

Blogs die when they are not visited, and they die when their writers do not write.  We can solve both those problems by working together, for us and for you.

It’s especially critical at this moment in time, when one blog has ceased and another started in its place.  While we have traffic right now, trust needs to be built between us and our inherited readership, and between us all as bloggers, writers, activists, and victims.  We could just be a continuation of what went before, a couple of writers working alone amidst a sea of other blogs.  Or we could take it to the next level, come together, and come together in a way that does not kill autonomy or become a monopoly.  I’m holding out my hand, a pen in the other, asking you all to consider becoming a part of this blog as well as your own blog.  That way, I truly believe we can make the difference for which we have hoped over the past few years.

Okay, speech over.  To put it very practically and simply, we need a critical mass of writers here so that there are at least one, hopefully two, quality posts here per day.  Without that, this place will wither, readers will get bored and disappear, and the scamblogs will be left in a terrible state of decay.  Scanbloggers past, present and future, you know who you are, and I'm talking to you.  I think this is worth fighting for, something worth rebuilding, a network of voices that work together.  I hope you do too.

Outside Just the Law Scam: More Scams

We’ve been talking about the Law School rent-seeking so much we may have forgotten about other, quite similar schemes going on. Truth is stranger than fiction: In the midst of the law school situation, I have been getting unsolicited daily calls from a place that calls itself “Academy of Art University in San Francisco”—and San Francisco is a long distance away from me, several thousand miles. There are already several for-profit “art” schools in my local area, so one would think I have little need to go cross-country to spend enormous amounts of money to get a piece of paper that entitles me to be an official “artiste”. The distance between the “Academy” and myself is hardly any restraint on their business model, however, since they have long since branched out on the lucrative low-cost-high-return online degree scheme. Tuition-seeking without so much as a classroom to rent! That scams most scams.

It is rather bizarre that I never signed up or even heard of this “Academy” before, yet somehow they have my address and cell phone number—in that sense, they are even keener hunters of student loan money than a fourth tier law school. There is no geographical limit on their online money grab, and therefore no limit to the amount of federal student loan money they can get—as if there were some kind of nationwide, critical shortage of inexperienced people who have vague aspirations to do graphic design work!

It reminds me that—depressing though the thought may be—the enormity of the law school crisis is but a drop in the bucket when it comes to the student loan money grab. (Or if you want to be optimistic, perhaps, as the Spanish-language phrase goes, one scam will finally be “The drop that overfills the glass”.) As a matter of fact, they should really call all of these things, “student loan scams” in general: no loans, no scam.