It’s a well-known fact that many law schools rely upon the willingness of the government to supply their students with unfettered access to federal educational loans to remain in business. In the short term, those loan dollars keep the law school’s lights on, but in the long term, those loan dollars keep students indebted, sometimes for the rest of their lives.
For one law school, the student loan merry-go-round that kept its doors open just came to an unexpected, screeching halt.
Today, the Department of Education announced that on December 31, 2016, it will end access to federal student financial aid for the Charlotte School of Law, a for-profit InfiLaw institution. Charlotte Law owes its inability to secure federal loans to its non-compliance with American Bar Association standards and to its own misrepresentations to students regarding the likelihood that they’d be able to pass the bar exam.
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If you recall, Charlotte Law was recently placed on probation by the ABA for being out of compliance with requirements that it have “sound admissions policies and procedures” and admit only applicants who “appear capable of satisfactorily completing its program of legal education and being admitted to the bar.” The Department of Education did not take kindly to the fact that Charlotte Law students were being taken advantage of, and decided it was time to step in, perhaps in a way that would hurt the school the most.
Here’s more information from a press release posted on the Department’s website:
“The ABA repeatedly found that the Charlotte School of Law does not prepare students for participation in the legal profession. Yet CSL continuously misrepresented itself to current and prospective students as hitting the mark,” said U.S. Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell. “CSL’s actions were misleading and dishonest. We can no longer allow them continued access to federal student aid.” …
Today’s action denies CSL’s request to be recertified to continue its participation in the federal student aid programs. Effective Dec. 31, 2016, CSL’s participation in those programs will end, and beginning Jan. 1, 2017, students may no longer use federal student aid to attend the school.
In announcing its decision to deny the school recertification for the federal loan program, Susan D. Crim, the director of the Administrative Actions and Appeals Service Group of the Department of Education, took Charlotte Law to task in a 14-page letter that can best be described as a verbal beatdown. Here’s one of the most salient paragraphs contained in her letter (available in full on the next page):
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What are Charlotte Law students supposed to do now? Will they be forced to turn to private lenders to finance the rest of their legal educations at a school that recently posted its worst July bar exam passage rate — 45.24 percent — in nearly a decade?
Charlotte Law has until January 3, 2017, to submit evidence to dispute the Department of Education’s findings. Will Charlotte be the first InfiLaw institution to fold under the substantial weight of its own failures? Perhaps we’ll learn its fate in 2017.
Charlotte School of Law Denied Continued Access to Federal Student Aid Dollars [Department of Education]
(Flip to the next page to see Charlotte Law’s full denial of recertification letter.)
Staci Zaretsky is an editor at Above the Law. She’d love to hear from you, so feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.