You can pick up the
Washington Post article if you want to, but when you start reading into the
details of the case things just get worse and worse. The Charlotte School of
Law, despite the name, is a private institution operated by a for-profit
company that chose to open a facility in Charlotte, NC, mostly because it was
the largest city in the US that did not have a functional law school. They then
started admitting students with no realistic chance of passing law school
classes, even less chance of passing the Bar exam, and no possibly way of
paying for the program except for massive student loans – although we should
probably acknowledge that some real law schools have also been guilty of that
last point…
Some of the tactic described
in the Post article are unusually disgusting even in the for-profit college industry,
such as offering students “scholarships” that they would only get to keep if
they maintained a grade point average higher than they would be allowed to get
on the curve. The Charlotte School of Law also had some more common frauds in
its arsenal, such as hiring unqualified instructors, providing substandard (or
completely useless) course content, and spending more money paying
administrative salaries and management fees (not to mention dividends for their
ownership body) than they did on instruction. All of which was made that much
worse by the nature of their curriculum – and the requirements needed to
practice law…
If a for-profit school offers
you substandard training in the Humanities, or even in some of the
less-regulated skilled trades, there isn’t going to be much impact. As I noted
in a previous post some years ago, line cooks aren’t going to make executive
chef money to start regardless of what school they attended, and not really
understanding George Elliot’s Middlemarch
might not even be a problem to you if you did pursue a career in English Literature.
Unfortunately, in most jurisdictions in the US, if you want to practice law you
are going to have to pass the Bar exam for that state (or district), and if you
can’t it won’t matter where you got your law degree. Even worse, in some ways,
is that even if you do pass the Bar, getting a job when your law degree is from
a school with a horrible reputation may not be possible anyway…
What really takes the prize
in the Charlotte School of Law story, in my opinion, is that once their
academic failure rate and the failure rate their graduates experienced in
trying to pass the Bar came out, and their accrediting body began investigating
the school, the leadership made no effort to warn their students of the
possibility that their program might lose its accreditation, the Department of
Education might cancel their student loans, and that they might all be out on
the street with tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars in student loan debt
and no law degrees. Which is, of course, exactly what happened to them. The
school’s leadership claims that they were under no legal obligation to warn the
students until they actually lost their accreditation, and the Department of
Education moves were beyond their control anyway – all of which is true, of
course, but doesn’t make those lies of omission any less despicable…
I could make some comments
about how the students attending the Charlotte School of Law should have known
better, and maybe I will in a later post. Certainly, if being told that you
have what it takes to be a lawyer, despite not having any existing academic
credentials and not being able to pass the LSAT, doesn’t send up any red flags
you are definitely far too trusting. If people telling you that you can
complete a law degree program provided that you give them very large amounts of
money and stop worrying about ever paying it back doesn’t clue you in, you’re
probably not paranoid enough to be a lawyer in the first place. But just
because someone is naïve, trusting, or gullible is no reason for the rest of us to allow something like this to happen to them…
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