Online Law Schools

[Armando Ramos]

Law school is neither quick, easy nor cheap. You really want to be sure you know where the target is before you start firing.

I would never discourage anyone from pursuing their dreams, but those are definitely particularly important considerations under current economic conditions. I happened across this blog in my travels, which seems to reflect the outlook of a lot of discouraged law grads these days:

The Jobless Juris Doctor

Some good posts there, including this:

No Transparency: Law Schools Prefer Opaque

Looks like the Law School Transparency Project isn't getting any cooperation from law schools. What did they expect? If law schools told prospective students the truth, enrollment would drop. Why change a good scam if you don't have to?

The project asked law schools to provide detailed job statistics, for example explain how they are claiming 98% employed at graduation numbers when 95% of the class says it's unemployed. Here's how many replied:

However, just 11 law schools met the Sept. 10 deadline for responses, and only three said they were considering providing the requested data -- American University Washington College of Law, University of Michigan Law School and Vanderbilt University Law School. Ave Maria School of Law indicated it would decide later this week whether to respond, according to the transparency project.

Here's why the schools will never do this unless forced to by the ABA:

Under the project's model, participating schools would report employer type, employer name, position name, bar passage requirement, full-time or part-time status, office location, whether the student worked on a law journal and the salary paid each alumnus nine months after graduation.

How is it that law schools can get away with selling a $120,000 + investment without providing all this information? Clearly, the schools can't be shamed into providing the information, since they don't care about anything but money. The ABA needs to step up to the plate and require this.

http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ...hbxlogin=1

"Transparency" seems to be one of the magic words these days. It would be nice if the socialist drones who so vociferously demand it from private businesses would do the same from the government and the higher ed cartel.

Also, from the same blog, this cartoon, which sadly is more truth than satire: