**************************
UD‘s already written about the promiscuously self-accrediting law schools of America
Every school gets accredited, every fool gets accepted somewhere. New law schools are opening all the time.
Now you’ve got these impoverished unemployed indebted people. Some of them are blogging with a certain degree of anger.
Like this guy, who graduated from Seton Hall, a low-ranked law school. He went to all that trouble and expense and is that all there is?
As they enter the worst job market in decades, many young would-be lawyers are turning on their alma maters, blaming their quandary on high tuitions, lax accreditation standards and misleading job placement figures.
Students claim the schools lie or give incomplete information about their graduates.
On its website, the school currently reports an employment rate of 94 percent for the 2009 class, but does not break that down into full-time, part-time or temporary work. The school also claims a starting salary of $145,000 in private practice, though it does not specify how many grads reported salaries in this area.
******************************
Don’t tell this guy about this.
August 15th, 2010 at 12:36PM
Cases of misrepresentation and lack of transparency aside, you can’t drive successfully using only the rear-view mirror. People thinking about going into some field that is HOT at a particular moment in time should consider the possibility that lots of other people are thinking the same thing, and that excess supply will make the hotness per capita a lot less appealing.
August 16th, 2010 at 7:49AM
Accreditation is a form of self-regulation, so all accreditation is “self-regulation.” You’d prefer to put it in the hands of the folks in Washington who brought us the for-profit scandals, but that doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Furthermore, it’s simply not true that the ABA will accredit anything; there are a lot of law schools that aren’t accredited, and in fact some of the doubts about the UMass school (opening today!)revolve around whether it can be achieve accreditation.
BTW, how’s the job market for PhDs in English?
August 16th, 2010 at 8:00AM
Oh, I don’t want Washington doing the accrediting, Mr Punch. Isn’t there a way to put together a relatively independent body made up in part of critics of the traditional accrediting approach?
You and I know that the UMass rip-off will be accredited.
The job market for PhDs in English is horrible. Lots of programs should shut down, at least temporarily, or radically shrink. The situation is as unconscionable as the law school situation, and I’ve written about it on this blog.
August 16th, 2010 at 3:48PM
By the time the hot field of the month has come to the attention of the media, it has been completely saturated with prospective students, and clueless administrators are rushing to open more programs that will turn out hordes of unemployable graduates. This is more or less a law of nature as far as I can see.
August 16th, 2010 at 5:14PM
[…] This article suggests that the focus on the bad behavior of many for-profit institutions can act as a red herring, distracting attention from the larger problem: “colleges of every stripe are soaking up tons of societal resources and saddling students with excessive debt loads in the face of dubious job prospects.” The authors note that “In their thirst for the blood of the institutions that are preying on less than 10% of all students, Congress and other critics are often ignoring similar exploitation by nonprofit institutions that enroll more than 90% of postsecondary students.” (Sad story about the experience of some law school graduates here–via Margaret Soltan) […]
August 16th, 2010 at 6:20PM
I think it’s likely that the UMass-Dartmouth Law School will eventually be accredited, but in its previous incarnation as the Southern New England School of Law (1981-2010) it couldn’t get ABA approval (though it had NEASC regional accreditation). And ABA accreditation was its goal — it was originally established to serve Rhode Island, which then had no law school, and a law against operating a non-ABA-accredited law school. The idea, I believe, was that SNESL would open in Massachusetts, gain accreditation, then move to RI (across the street from its first location). But Roger Williams U. aced them out.