<p>With, of course, three years of tuition.</p>
<p>From Paul Campos's blog (Lawyers, Guns, and Money)</p>
<p>"Coupled with the Section’s decision last August to allow a full semester’s worth of academic work to be done by “distance learning,” you don’t need a weatherman to see the way the wind is blowing, which is to eventually outsource the entire third year of law school to employers, thus essentially eliminating it as an academic matter, while at the same time still retaining the third year of law school tuition.</p>
<p>You also don’t need to be Mancur Olson to see why the forces pushing toward this outcome are going to be almost irresistable:</p>
<p>*For students, this will mean spending the “third year of law school” working instead of going to class and — mirabile dictu — even getting paid for it! I haven’t done a scientific survey, but I imagine a poll of upper level law students regarding the desirability of such an option would resemble a North Korean presidential election.</p>
<p>*For law schools, such an arrangement allows one third of the curriculum to be offloaded, with no loss of revenue.</p>
<p>*Employers will enjoy the advantages of quasi-indentured labor (if you quit your job you’re going to be dropping out of school, so you can’t quit — a circumstance that will no doubt be reflected in the compensation levels and working conditions associated with these jobs).</p>
<p>. . . These developments will have a negative effect on one group: People who have already graduated from law school, especially recent graduates, who will see a good number of traditional entry level positions destroyed by the entrance of cheap temporary labor, in the form of third year “students” doing “externships” for both credit and (now) money. As always, these sorts of putative curricular reforms do not create more jobs, which remains the central problem for the entire model."</p>