Whenever you go to an unaccredited law school, you are assuming the risk that the school doesn’t get accredited. The law school isn’t going to give you your money back if the ABA doesn’t accept it into the club.
Then again, even if you go to an accredited school, things are not set in stone. The gamble of going to a law school of middling rank is taking its toll on some students in the Pacific Northwest. On the bright side, at least some students can now leave, guilt-free, and start whatever else they’re going to do with their lives…
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The biggest crisis point is at Concordia Law School. Concordia is based in Idaho, but it was launched in 2012 by Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. But the school somehow failed to get provisional accreditation from the ABA. Concordia must have submitted its accreditation materials on stamp-resistant paper for it to fail to clear this low bar.
Without provisional accreditation, Concordia students cannot take the bar in Idaho. That has led to a mass exodus from the law school, as reported by The Oregonian:
Nearly half of the third- and second-year students at Concordia Law School in Boise, Idaho, have left the school in the last three weeks after it failed to get provisional accreditation from the American Bar Association.
Without accreditation, Concordia Law grads cannot take the Bar exam in Idaho, and most other states, necessary to get a license. At least 48 of the school’s 102 third-year and second-year law students have withdrawn, transferred or taken temporary leave from Concordia, school officials said Thursday.
Concordia charges $28,500 in tuition and estimates $43,677 in total cost of attendance. So if you are a 3L who bailed, you only wasted around $90,000 on your law school lark. On the positive side, at least you didn’t spend $120,000 and the rest of your life trying to turn a useless Concordia Law degree into something economically viable.
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Concordia still has a chance to get ABA approval for its diploma mill scheme:
The ABA did not reject Concordia’s bid. Instead, it chose to withhold accreditation and send in a team of “fact finders” to more closely scrutinize the operation.
Let’s hope the “fact finders” bring their own provisions, it sounds like a ghost town over there.
Meanwhile, the situation at an Oregon-based law school that is actually in Oregon isn’t as dire, but it’s still distressing. A tipster passed along this message students received from Jennifer J. Johnson, the dean of Lewis & Clark Law School:
Due to budget constraints, we are reorganizing two of our downtown clinical programs effective December 31, 2014. We will discontinue the Lewis & Clark Legal Clinic, which provides lawyering skills training for upper division students through the representation of low-income clients…
The Lewis & Clark Legal Clinic has traditionally offered students opportunities to handle a variety of civil and administrative disputes and issues, including family law, consumer law, bankruptcy and landlord-tenant law. Through our externship program, we are integrating students with interests in these areas into alternative organizations such as the St. Andrew Legal Clinic and legal aid organizations.
We regret the need to discontinue a program that has been a part of the Law School for many years, but current budget realities—for both the law school and our students—make this move necessary. We highly value the service that the LCLC professors and staff have provided to our students and look forward to working with them over the course of the coming year.
Another tipster had this reaction:
Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, OR is quickly becoming a bare bones operation!
They just announced a complete close down of the law schools main legal clinic! Major cuts to the law library have already been executed over this last summer.
Looks like a whole lot of students are in for an unexpected surprise on their 1st day of class Tuesday morning!
I hope you didn’t choose Lewis & Clark based on the “practical” experience somebody told you that you’d be getting. But, on the positive side, practical experience is overrated when it comes to actually securing employment. Instead of helping low-income clients, try sucking up to employers who hire low-income law students.
To recap: going to law school in or around Oregon is just as dangerous as going to law school anywhere else. Any word on how the logging industry is doing out there?
Concordia Law School suffers mass defection after it fails to gain accreditation [The Oregonian]