An Expensive Law Degree, and No Place to Use It
By NOAM SCHEIBER
JUNE 17, 2016
( At least jlallen didn't waste a lot of money on his worthless law degree! )
excerpt:
Such is the atavistic rage among those who went to law school seeking the upper-middle-class status and security often enjoyed by earlier generations, only to find themselves on a financial treadmill and convinced their schools misled them, that there is now a whole genre of online writing devoted specifically to channeling it: “scamblogging.”
Belatedly, many schools are starting to respond to this brutal reality, or at least the collapse in applications it has set off. In February, Valparaiso announced it was offering buyouts to tenured professors. As of May, 14 of 36 full-time faculty members had either accepted the package or retired. The law school plans to reduce its student body by roughly one-third over the next few years, from about 450 today.
To the faculty at Valparaiso and the roughly 20 percent of the 200 or so American Bar Association- accredited law schools that have cut back aggressively in recent years, these moves can feel shockingly harsh.
“Maybe I was naïve, but I didn’t think it would be as stark,” said Rosalie Levinson, a longtime constitutional law professor at Valparaiso who recently headed a committee on restructuring the school. “The number of tenured faculty that would be leaving — not gradually but immediately — just personally, that was difficult.”
But from the perspective of the students caught up in the explosion of unrepayable law school debt, the shake-up at the school, and others like it, look rather pedestrian.
Given the tectonic shifts in the legal landscape, the relevant issue may not be how much law schools like Valparaiso should shrink. Today the more important question is whether they should exist at all.
more at the link
nytimes.com |
