Law Schools Target New Students To Fleece

Law schools are offering another 'product' that seems to cost much more than it is worth...

I like to say that law school is a great idea if you want to be a lawyer. If you don’t know what to do, it’s a pretty bad idea.

If you know specifically that you don’t want to be a lawyer, going to law school is an atrocious idea. Jesus, you don’t see pacifists going to war college. But there are a couple of stories today about law schools targeting non-lawyer professionals who have no intention of practicing law.

The deal: you pay for a year of law school, and at the end you get an entirely meaningless degree. It’s good for the law schools because they make money. It’s good for the students because… ??? Because they don’t like money?

Honestly, it’s pretty obvious that the people signing up for these programs are not asked to take any kind of “logical reasoning” exam. They’d score pathetically, I’m sure….

Articles in the National Law Journal and the Wall Street Journal highlight new or beefed up “masters of law programs” being offered by law schools. They are one-year programs aimed at mid-career professionals who somehow think that a year of light legal training will improve their career prospects.

Mind you, there is no “evidence” that this is so. There are no studies that show a person with a year of law school (who still, obviously, can’t practice as or even call themselves lawyers) do better professionally than those who didn’t waste a year and tens of thousands of dollars getting a masters.

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Here’s how stupid these programs are: they don’t even know what to call the “degree” you get when it’s over. From the NLJ:

The programs go by many different names: MSL; Juris Master (J.M.); Master of Jurisprudence (M.J.); and Master of Science in Legal Studies (M.S.) just to name a few. That hodgepodge may make it harder for students and the marketplace to figure out what the credential is worth, [said Barry Currier, the ABA’s managing director for accreditation and legal education].

Yeah, but not knowing what the thing is worth isn’t going to stop schools from charging for it:

“It’s a little hard to set the price because we don’t yet know what the market is for a degree like this,” said Janice Weis, associate dean and director of the environmental and natural resources program at Lewis & Clark Law School, which will launch its first master’s program for nonlawyers in the fall. (It will focus on environmental and natural resources law and cost slightly less than the nearly $40,000 annual J.D. tuition.)

How dumb are people? They are telling you that they don’t know what, IF ANYTHING, this is worth, and so they are just making up numbers. And people are signing up.

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These programs might work if employers are dumb enough to fund them:

The future of these programs may well depend upon whether employers will pick up their tab. A number of administrators expressed hope that companies and agencies will see the value of subsidizing their employees’ training in the law. “It only really makes sense for people if they work for companies that are willing to pay for the degree to upgrade their employees’ skills and credentials,” said Brian Tamanaha, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis School of Law and author of the book Failing Law Schools.

But it’s actually kind of hard to explain how these programs are supposed to help employers. People who complete these programs aren’t going to be qualified to do legal work. Companies are still going to need outside counsel and in-house counsel and compliance officers and all the rest. What’s the benefit of paying for people to become, like, 1Ls who barely know what’s going on but have learned some catch phrases?

Of course, asking whether or not these programs offer real value to students is not really the kind of thing law school deans care about. Traditional three-year law student applications are down. What law deans want is money. From the Wall Street Journal:

“Adding new degree programs is like a company diversifying its product lines. If demand for one sags, you’ve still got alternative sources of revenue coming in,” said Paul McGreal, dean of the University of Dayton School of Law, which now offers master’s degrees for nonlawyers and practicing attorneys alike.

Yes, but usually when companies diversify their product offerings, they have to test the product first. Here, it sure looks like law schools are just trying to sell something that isn’t worth what they are charging for it. Maybe if they brought the cost in line with the value, they wouldn’t be seeing such a drop in law school applications in the first place.

Law for Laymen [National Law Journal]
More Often, Nonlawyers Try Taste of Law School [Wall Street Journal]