Thanks. Will take a look at this.
This seems to be the equivalent of fraud, among other things. Are you saying there are no adjudicated cases against schools that may have engaged in such heinous actions against their own students? If so, that’s shocking.
Very few filed lawsuits against law schools get far. Almost every school on that list has been involved in a lawsuit that was tossed out or ruled in favor of the defendant law school. Law students are viewed as sophisticated consumers and it is assumed they should take reported salaries and employment numbers with a massive grain of salt. The Cooley opinion allows for such “heinous actions.”
In legal ethics, the issue of law being a self regulated profession is explored in depth. Medical doctors have to report to bureaucracies, legislators, judges and others almost none of whom have a medical license. Lawyers regulate themselves through the ABA, judicial opinions(the judges obviously have JDs) and occasionally through legislatures (with a preponderance of JDs). The game is stacked against these fraud lawsuits.
Ok. Thanks again.
This is old news, and while I couldn’t track them all down, pretty sure all the lawsuits failed. Cooley’s approach does speak volumes:
Yes it is old news, parodied in the novel “The Rooster Bar.” The WSJ, the Atlantic, the NYT, the Post, nearly every major news outlet in the last decade has published a major story on the law school scam and dim prospects in the profession.
Every year, a new crop of 22 year olds sees undergrad graduation approaching and panics. They don’t have the wavelength or pre reqs for med school. Their job prospects range from retail to a 30k a year office job and debt payments are coming in soon. Law school delays the payments for three years, provides an alibi to appear busy, and allows some to party fully funded for 36 months. These students lack the accumulated wisdom of what we know from being part of the profession and refuse to recognize they are a mark for a scam.
Let’s stay away from the generalizations. For that matter, let’s stay away from beating the horse; it’s dead. You’ve already made your point repeatedly across several threads
US News rankings of the most expensive private law schools:
https://usnews.com/best-graduate-schools/top-law-schools/private-cost-rankings
Rankings are in order of highest “tuition” to lowest tuition. Columbia law charges $75,000 per academic year just for tuition.
Columbia University School of Law is the most expensive with total COA for one academic year at approximately $101,000 including personal expenses of about $5,000.
Next most expensive law schools are NYU (about $104,000 per year including $6,000 of personal expenses) & Cornell ($94,000) & Chicago at $99,000 of which $10,000 is for personal expenses.
Law school requires three full academic years.
After law school expenses include bar review course, application fees for state bar, annual bar dues, and annual continuing education fees.
A certain percentage of students who pay the full COA at those schools won’t be able to find jobs that can pay the full debt load, although most definitely will. For some, reaching neutral net worth after a few years of corporate work is a desirable outcome and going to Columbia makes sense even with 300k in loans. The bigger issue are the USCs Miamis and Fordhams on that list. They are in desirable cities, have names that are reputable on the surface, but won’t be able to provide the jobs needed to a the COA for at least half of each graduating class. That kind of debt cannot be paid off without big law assuming you don’t have a merit scholarship.
Not sure Columbia at sticker gets you anything more than say Michigan at a big discount. New York, which is where most Columbia grads end up, is a large and easy market to enter.
That said, Columbia does offer ~50 full tuition schoollys, and 2 full rides (to attract those kids from choosing Yale). Columbia also offers half tuition+ to 15% of entering students.
btw: USC does ok, as more than 50% of its grads to make big law+fed clerkships.
I would not recommend Columbia at sticker over Michigan, Penn, UVA, or any of the T13 schools with a partial scholarship. Yes, the NY big law market is far and away the easiest to enter as half of entry level big law jobs are in NYC.
USC, Fordham, BC, BU, GW, UCLA and others in that tier of schools vary between slightly over half when hiring is hot to under 20% when the economy craters. In 08, for instance, the hiring from these schools essentially evaporated as the T13 suffered to a much lesser extent. Hiring committees consider these USC type schools the marginal hires. They want the top third of them over the bottom 5% at, say, UVA, but it is contingent.
Thanks for those insights about law school scholarships! I didn’t realize those details, conditions, etc. My neighbor’s daughter got a full ride to our state law school and it seemed like a great deal. Good to know there are some fine-print type aspects to watch for!
Always happy to help. Fortunately for your neighbor’s daughter, state schools don’t pull these stunts, at least that I’ve heard of. It’s really the bootleg private institutions, often standalone with private equity ownership.
Like much of the rest of the law school bashing in this thread, the claims of “section stacking” and scholarship manipulation have been greatly exaggerated. It is not an “incredibly common” practice as has been claimed. At least 117 law schools don’t offer conditional scholarships at all. At another 50 which do offer contingency scholarships, 100% of the students kept their scholarships last year. Of the remaining few dozen that offer contingency scholarships, most have fairly reasonable retainment rates. Of course there are a relatively small number of schools that have lower scholarship retention rates; including the 5 law schools where between 40-47% of the students lost at least some of the value of their scholarship. (Stats from lawschooltransparency.com)
It is not “incredibly common.” It is far from the norm. To impugn law school generally on these grounds is a bit like impugning all of higher education because of practices at schools ITT Technical Institute.
Here’s a list; I’ll let others decide if it’s 'common" or the “norm”.
According to the linked website, last year only 2.2% of first year law students saw their scholarship values decrease after their first year. That’s only 847 out of over 38000 first year law students. Surely you agree that it is a stretch to call the practice either common or the norm.
Also, for anyone reading, the list is a terrific resource, but don’t forget to scroll down or re-sort, because the list is sorted to put the worst rates up front, so (like this thread) it is pretty misleading at first glance. Most law schools don’t even offer such scholarships.
As for “bashing” and “impugn(ing)” law school.
Well, let’s deal with the facts. Because of recurrent misbehavior by law schools collectively, the accrediting body for law schools(the ABA) requires each school to file a form called a 509 to give an accurate snapshot of each school.
Because of misbehavior by law schools collectively-which included schools lying about employment statistics and salaries of graduates(99% of our class is employed in jobs paying over 100k/yr and similar, er, “fibs”), law schools are required to publish “employment statistics” of each graduating class. No other profession in the USA requires this of its schools-not medical/dental/nursing/pharmacy-none. That requirement alone, and the reason for it, ought to be enough for any potential applicant to think long and hard before applying to, much less attending, law school.
Yes. Only more than one in fifty law students had their financial outlook wrecked, and they happen to cluster at bottom of the barrel institutions that any competent and ethical accrediting body would have disbanded decades ago. The ABA believes every town with 100k residents needs a law school at this rate, so we are stuck with the Cooley multi state franchise. Somehow I don’t think the AMA or dentistry have such ambitious plans.
The richest part of this 2.2 percent is that it came from peak media, law student, and alumni pressure that has subsided. It will probably not get better. We asked before and you never answered. Are you an attorney? Some who private messaged me are genuinely curious if you are a lawyer and why you are defending law schools so vociferously.
Thank you, this is a great resource
Well this is the short of it. Thing is, those 509s are full of junk statistics that law schools manipulate and some still outright fabricate, which people have realized through being a student or a simple LinkedIn search. Give it another recession, when the tide turns a lot of people will be exposed for continuing the charade.
There are federal loan caps for undergrad education. In other words, you can only ruin your life so much in the process of seeking a BA