Showing posts with label Charlotte School of Law. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charlotte School of Law. Show all posts

Friday, December 1, 2017

The Rooster Bar: Why Won't the ABA Shut Down Bottom-Tier For-Profit Law Schools ?

John Grisham's latest novel, titled The Rooster Bar, tells the story of Mark Frazier, a law student who attends a for-profit institution called Foggy Bottom Law School. By the time he is a senior, Mark has accumulated $195,000 in student loans and concludes he made a bad investment.

FBLS's bar pass rates are embarrassing low, and few of its graduates obtains jobs that justify their enormous student-loan debt. By the time FBLS students are seniors, their morale has plummeted, and some even spare verbally with their professors in class. In fact:
To varying degrees, almost everyone Mark knew believed that (1) FBLS was a sub-par law school that (2) made too many promises, and (3) charged too much money, and (4) encouraged too much debt while (5) admitting a lot of mediocre students who really had no business in law school, and (6) were either not properly prepared for the bar exam or (7) to dumb to pass it.
Foggy Bottom Law School is a fictional for-profit law school, but it closely resembles the real ones. Infilaw, owned by an equity group out of Chicago, runs three for profit law schools; and all three are in trouble. Charlotte School of Law closed in August after it lost its license to operate. Arizona Summit Law School was placed on probation last March by the American Bar Association, and the ABA warned Florida Coastal School of Law in October that it was "significantly out of compliance" with the ABA's accreditation standards.

Not surprisingly, Infilaw wants to sell its two law schools that are still open. But why did the American Bar Association ever accredit these schools in the first place? The answer is illusive, but here is a key fact. In the 1995, when Bill Clinton was president, the U.S. Justice Department sued the ABA, claiming it was in violation of federal antitrust laws.  The suit was settled in 1996, and the ABA agreed not to deny accreditation to a law school solely because it was a for-profit entity.

That same year, a law professor named Don Lively started Florida Coastal Law School in Jacksonville, Florida. In 2004, Lively sold out to Sterling Partners, a Chicago-based private-equity firm. According to the Wall Street Journal, Sterling created Infilaw as a holding company for the law schools and lined up additional investors, allegedly including Harvard University's endowment fund.

By almost any measure, all three Infilaw law schools are sub-par institutions. If you want to see the data, visit Law School Transparency's web site.  All three schools charge high tuition rates similar to reputable law schools like Harvard and Yale. Yet these three schools have low bar pass rates and very few graduates find law jobs that justify the enormous student-loan debt they accumulated to get their law degrees.

The for-profit advocates say schools like the Infilaw trio offer opportunities to minority students who are often rejected by reputable schools because of mediocre undergraduate GPAs and low LSAT scores. But the top-tier schools bend over backward to attract minority students and have plenty of scholarship money to recruit them. Too often the people who enroll at for-profit law schools are not academically prepared to study law and often fail their bar exams.

As has been often reported in the media, the job market for recent law graduates is terrible; and the bottom-tier law schools are producing lawyers who run a high risk of failing the bar while facing dismal job prospects.

In short, the integrity of legal education has been seriously undermined by a herd of poor-quality law schools, including the Infilaw schools and several public law schools as well.  Apparently, even Harvard University contributed to this train wreck, although Harvard wouldn't confirm that its endowment fund invested in Infilaw's schools.

The American Bar Association is primarily responsible for this disaster, but is it taking steps to shut down the bottom-feeding law schools? No it is not. In fact, the ABA is considering a measure that would allow law schools to make LSAT scores an optional criteria for law school admission. The purpose of that action, perhaps, is to make it harder to measure just how low some law schools' admission standards really are.



References

John Grisham. The Rooster Bar. New York: Doubleday, 2017.

Andrew Kreighbaum. ABA Backs Testing Choices on law Admissions, Inside Higher Ed, November 7, 2017.

Andrew Kreighbaum. Report: For-Profit Looking to Sell 2 Law Schools. Inside Higher Ed, November 29, 2017.

Josh Mitchell. The Rise and Fall of a Law School Empire Fueled by Student Loans. Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2017.

Law School Transparency web site.

Angela Morris. GRE or LSAT? ABA Council's Latest Move Could Nix Tests Altogether. Law.com, November 3, 2017.

United States v. American Bar Association, 934 F. Supp. 435 (D.D.C. 1996).

 








Wednesday, August 30, 2017

Charlotte School of Law closed, But Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been stingy in granting student-loan relief

Charlotte School of Law closed its doors on August 15, 2017. Thank God!

Before it shut down, CSL was one of the worst law schools in the United States by almost any measure. Based on metrics developed by Law School Transparency, a public interest law-school monitoring organization, 50 percent of CSL's 2014 entering class ran an "extreme" risk of failing the bar exam, and additional 25 percent ran a "very high" risk of failing the exam.

And it fact, less than half of CSL's 2015 graduating class passed the bar. Moreover, less than 25 percent of its 2016 graduates obtained full-time law jobs; and the law school's underemployment rate for that class was 58.8 percent.

Do you want other measures of mediocrity? Not a single CSL graduate in the 2016 graduating class obtained a federal clerkship, which is the most prestigious job a newly graduated attorney can get. The best paying jobs are in large corporate firms; and only 1.5 percent of 2016 graduates landed jobs in large law firms.

And in spite of its monumental mediocrity, Charlotte School of Law--before it shut down--was incredibly expensive. Tuition for the 2017 entering class (had there been one) is $44,284 per year. Law School Transparency estimated the total cost of obtaining a law degree from CSL to be a quarter million dollars!

The ABA put CSL on probation in 2016, and the Obama administration shut off student-loan money in December of last year. Still, the law school lumbered along until its state operating license expired and North Carolina regulators refused to extend it.

Most CSL students took out federal loans to finance their studies and few will be able to pay back their loans. Nevertheless, Betsy DeVos's Department of Education has been stingy in granting loan forgiveness. Only students enrolled on April 12, 2017 or later are eligible to have their student loans forgiven under the closed-school rule.

The Department also has a "borrower defense" process, whereby students can seek student-loan forgiveness if they can show they were defrauded by the institution they attended. More than 500 former CSL students have filed those claims, but DeVos put the borrower-defense regulations on hold. As of July 2016, DeVos's DOE had not approve any borrower-defense claims.

What a mess!

In my mind, there is only one fair remedy for all the people who took out student loans to attend CSL and failed to get jobs that paid well enough to pay back their loans.  Secretary DeVos should forgive student-loan debt for everyone who took out student loans to attend Charlotte School of Law.

But that would not be fair, DeVos might respond. After all, at least a few people graduated from CSL and got good law jobs.  Yes, but not many.  The administrative cost of sorting out who benefited and who failed to benefit doesn't justify the effort.

Everyone who attended this crummy law school should get 100 percent debt relief.  Unfortunately, that's not going to happen.  And there are several more bottom-tier law schools that are still operating and still raking in federal student-loan money.

Photo credit: abovethelaw.com


References

Andrew Kreighbaum, As Charlotte Law makes closure official, Education Department sets loan discharge rules. Inside Higher ED, August 25, 2017.

Andrew Kreighbaum, The Slow Death of a For-Profit Law School. Inside Higher Ed, August 16, 2017.



Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Department of Education's fumbling efforts to aid students defrauded by Corinthian Colleges: No relief for the Walking Dead

David Goldman wrote a  highly informative article for Bloomberg yesterday about the Department of Education's fumbling efforts to process Borrower Defense claims filed by people who claim they were defrauded by Corinthian Colleges. I am grateful to Steve Rhode for calling my attention to Goldman's article.

Essentially, here's the story. Corinthian Colleges filed for bankruptcy last year under a cloud of fraud allegations. In fact, the the State of California got a $1.1 billion judgment against Corinthian for its wrongdoing in that state. At the time it filed bankruptcy, Corinthian had 335,000 former students.

DOE has an administrative process whereby it will forgive the student loans taken out by students who were defrauded by for-profit institutions. So far, 82,000 former Corinthian students have filed those claims.  But DOE's process for reviewing those claims is slow. Goldman reported that so far only about 15,000 students have gotten debt relief through the Borrower Defense process.

DOE won't grant blanket forgiveness to all of Corinthian's former students, arguing that not all of them were defrauded.  But in fact, a high percentage were defrauded. As Goldman reported, "Department officials concluded that Corinthian engaged in 'widesperead placement rate fraud' for almost 800 programs at nearly every one of its more than 100 U.S. campuses."

 David Vladek, a former director of the Federal Trade Commission's consumer protection division, said this about Corinthian's former students: "These kids by and large have been scammed, and the Department of Education in some sense is continuing the harm by making them jump through hoops to get the relief to which they are entitled."

But it gets worse. Not only is DOE not processing loan-forgiveness claims quickly, it is actually employing debt collectors to hound Corinthian's former students, even though most of these students are entitled to have their loans forgiven.  Although DOE states on its web site that it will stop all loan collection efforts on Corinthian borrowers, that statement is not true.

Indeed, DOE's debt collection activities are a hell of a lot more efficient than their loan forgiveness process. As Maggie Robb, a consumer-rights attorney, observed, " When the Department of Education wants to collect money, it doesn't stop."

Goldman's story focused solely on Corinthian Colleges' former students, but there are hundreds of thousands of people who took out loans to attend for-profit colleges who have been scammed. I know one woman with a documented claim for fraud against DeVry University who filed a Borrower Defense claim with DOE last August and still hasn't gotten a response from DOE.

In short, people who have been defrauded by the for-profit college industry are the real life representations of the Walking Dead. Fraud victims have debt hanging over their heads, which DOE has not discharged; and if they default on their loans they are subject to abusive debt collection tactics, wage garnishment, income-tax offsets, and ruined credit. Many are continuing to make loan payments on debt they don't really owe; and most did not get fair value for their for-profit college experiences.

In DOE's defense, the Department is simply overwhelmed by the implosion of the for-profit college industry. It does not have the resources to process claims by Corinthian students or to even notify those students that they may be entitled to debt relief. ITT's closure and bankruptcy will bring a deluge of new claims, and other for-profits are sure to follow over the next few months. (Globe University and Charlotte School of Law, for example, have been accused of misrepresentation and many of their students will be filing Borrower Defense claims.)

There is really only one sensible solution: DOE should allow all people who borrowed money to attend for-profit colleges and who are insolvent to file for bankruptcy relief in the federal bankruptcy courts. Whether or not a a particular student debtor can prove fraud should be irrelevant. If they took out loans to attend a for-profit college, the odds are better than even that they were scammed or did not get fair value for their money.

Image result for walking dead'
Students who were scammed by for-profit colleges are the Walking Dead.

Note: All quotations come from Mr. Goldman's article.

References

David Goldman. The U.S. Government Is Collecting Student Loans It Promised to Forgive, Bloomberg News, December 19, 2016.

Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Charlotte School of Law loses access to federal student aid money: The beginning of the end for bottom-tier law schools?

In less than two weeks, Charlotte School of Law will lose all access to federal student financial aid money. CSL is a for-profit law school with an undistinguished reputation. According to Law School Transparency, an organization that gathers data on American law schools, only 46.3 percent of CSL graduates passed their bar exams in 2015. LST calculates that 50 percent of its 2014 freshman class had credentials so low that they were at extreme risk of failing the bar.  LST also reported that not a single one of CSL's 2015 graduates obtained a federal judicial clerkship, another indication of CSL's mediocrity.

The Department of Education's decision to deny student aid money to CSL is probably the school's death knell. Most of CSL's students must take out student loans to pay CSL's extremely high tuition--about $44,000 a year.

The American Bar Association had already found that the law school was out of compliance with the ABA's accrediting standards, but DOE did not pull the plug on CSL solely for that reason.

Rather, as DOE's press release explained, CSL was found to have made misleading statements about itself to prospective students:
"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."
Without federal student-loan money, CSL won't survive long. And if the school closes, that will be a good thing for the legal profession and all the potential students who might have borrowed money to attend this extremely lackluster institution.

Nevertheless, even if CSL closes, hundreds of the school's graduates will suffer. Most have borrowed a lot of money to attend CSL; few obtained jobs that made the financial investment worthwhile.

DOE needs to do more than just cut off funds from one lower-tier law school. It needs to allow graduates of CSL and similar bottom-feeder law schools to discharge their student loans in bankruptcy.

And then DOE needs to get busy and shut off student aid money to some other law schools that have low admission standards and that are not placing enough of their graduates in well-paying law jobs. Here are some schools DOE needs to examine:

North Carolina Central University
Southern University Law Center
Appalachian School of Law
Florida Coastal School of Law
Ave Maria School of Law
Arizona Summit Law School

LST calculates that  these schools admitted students with LSAT scores so low that 50 percent of their 2014 freshman class were at extreme risk of failing the bar exam.

And here are some more schools that bear watching:

Florida A & M University
Texas Southern
Mississippi College
Thomas M. Cooley Law School
Valparaiso University
St. Thomas University-Florida
University of North Dakota
Ohio Northern University
University of South Dakota
Barry University
University of La Verne

LST has identified these schools as ones that admit students with LSAT scores so low that 25 percent of their  entering 2014 classes were at extreme risk of failing the bar exam.

DOE and the ABA must work together to raise the overall quality of legal education in the United States.  As Kyle McEntee, writing for Law School Transparency, observed:
Charlotte School of Law is not the only law school operating shamelessly to the detriment of the legal profession. This school, like several dozen more, set large percentages of their students up to fail, leaving them with high debts, wasted time, no job, and no hope. It’s long past time for these schools to go.
ABA needs to rescind accreditation for some of these schools, and DOE needs to cut off federal funding for at least a dozen more law schools.

References

Law School Transparency. 2015 State of Legal Education.

Kyle McEntee. Will This Law School Close After Feds Cut Funding? Bloomberg News, December 19, 2016.

U.S Department of Education. Charlotte School of Law Denied Continued Access to Federal Student Aid Dollars. U.S. Department of Education press release, December 19, 2016.



Saturday, November 26, 2016

American Bar Association begins cracking down on mediocre law schools: Too little, too late

After waking from a long slumber, the American Bar Association is finally cracking down on mediocre law schools. A few days ago, the ABA censured Valparaiso University School of Law and placed Charlotte School of Law on probation. According to the ABA, both schools had violated ABA standards requiring law schools to only admit students who are likely to pass the bar exam.

This is not the first time that ABA has censured a mediocre law school. Last summer, the ABA's accrediting unit recommended against  accrediting the newly organized University of North Texas School of Law and cited Ava Maria Law School for failing to comply with ABA quality standards. Like Charlotte and Valparaiso, UNT and Ava Maria received ABA raspberries for low admission standards.

But the ABA's sanctions against four mediocre law schools is too little and too late. The job market for lawyers has imploded; and law chool admission applications have plunged. Many second- and third-tier law schools have had to lower their admissions standards just to fill empty seats; consequently, a lot of law schools are graduating a high number of students who will have difficulty passing their bar exams.

Law School Transparency (LST), a watchdog organization that monitors law school admission standards and bar pass rates, identified a great many law schools that have very low admission standards. LST constructed a model for determining when law school admission standards are so low that students run the risk of failing the bar, and it found a high number of law schools with dicey admission standards.

These are some of LST's most startling findings from its 2015 report on law schools' admission standards for their 2014 entering classes:
  • Seven law schools had admitted students with qualifications so low that 50 percent of their freshman classes ran an extreme risk of failing the bar exam. Those schools included Southern University Law Center, a historically black institution; and Arizona Summit and Florida Coastal, two for-profit law schools.
  • Twenty-six law schools had admission standards so low that 25 percent of their entering classes were at extreme risk of failing the bar.  Texas Southern, another historically black law school, is on that list, along with several regional public institutions, including North Carolina Central University, Ohio Northern University, and Southern Illinois University.
  • Twenty-nine law schools had admission standards so low that 25 percent of their entering classes ran a very high risk of failing the bar exam. Among this number were John Marshall Law School, a for-profit institution; Widener University, a private school; and University of Arkansas at Little Rock, a public institution.
It is the ABA's responsibility to monitor law schools' quality standards, and it fell down on the job. In fact, an advisory panel for the Department of Education recently recommended that the ABA's authority to accredit more law schools be suspended for a year--an astonishing rebuke to a very powerful professional organization.

But even if the ABA gets serious about enforcing quality standards at the nation's law schools, thousands of law-school graduates have already been seriously injured. On average, an individual graduates from law school with $140,000 in student-loan debt; and there are now two newly minted attorneys for every available law job.

Some law graduates have sued their law schools for misrepresentation, arguing they were lured into enrolling based on misleading job placement rates that the law schools disseminated. So far, these suits have been unsuccessful. Thomas M. Cooley Law School and Thomas Jefferson Law School, for example, successfully defended lawsuits filed by their graduates.

A number of law school graduates have filed bankruptcy in an attempt to discharge their student loans. Some have been successful or at least partly successful--the Barrett case and the Hedlund case. Others have lost their adversary lawsuits: Mark Lilly and Mark Tetzlaff.

In my view, people who graduated from second- and third-tier law schools with mountains of debt and no law job should seriously consider filing bankruptcy. But if they pursue this course, they must educate the bankruptcy judge about the terrible job market for lawyers and the high debt load that most law graduates now carry.

As the crisis in legal employment becomes more evident, I think bankruptcy judges will become more and more sympathetic toward law school graduates who are burdened by heavy debt loads and don't have law jobs. I think judges might be particularly sympathetic to debtors who graduated from second- and third-tier law schools given the terrible job prospects for these people.

As I said, educating the bankruptcy judge is critical. The data collected by Law School Transparency is a good place to look for data that will help bankruptcy judges understand the absolutely desperate plight of many recent law scool graduates.

References

Barrett v. U.S. Department of Education, 545 B.R. 645 (Bankr. N.D. Cal. 2016).

Paul Fain. Federal panel votes to terminate ACICS and tightens screws on other accreditors. Inside Higher Ed, June 24, 2016.

Andrew Kreighbaum. ABA Censures Law School. Inside Higher Ed, November 22, 2016.

Andrew Kreighbaum. ABA Tighens Up. Inside Higher Ed, August 31, 2016.


Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Anything to make a buck: Many law schools should be closed

Law School Transparency, a public interest organization, issued a report containing some alarming information about law school enrollments. Anyone thinking about going to law school needs to read this report, including the information it contains about individual law schools.

LST reports that law-school enrollments have declined 28 percent since 2010, which has caused a budget crunch for law schools because they are heavily dependent on tuition money to keep their doors open.

As a result of declining law-school applications, many law schools have lowered their admission standards to attract more students, particularly students with low LSAT scores. As LST points out, LSAT scores are the best predictor of whether law graduates will pass or fail their bar exams. Thus, declining LSAT scores for American law students promises to bring a higher failure rate on bar exams.  Obviously, a student who borrows a significant amount of money to attend law school and then fails the bar exam will experience a financial catastrophe because that student cannot practice law.

LST broke down LSAT scores into categories that measure the risk of failing the bar exam, and it identified law schools that are admitting a significant number of students with LSAT scores so low that they run a high risk of failing the bar exam after graduating from law school.

The picture LST paints is not pretty.

In 2010, 30 law schools admitted at least 25 percent of  their students with LSAT scores so low that those students ran a significant risk of failing the bar. By 2014, the number of law schools admitting high-risk students had more than doubled--from 30 to 74 in just four years.

In 2014, 37 schools "admitted classes consisting of at least 50% at risk students . . ." In other words, based on their LSAT scores, at least 50 percent of the students at 37 law schools were at risk of failing the bar exam once they graduated.

LST went on to report:
Every for-profit law school enrolled classes consisting of at least 50% at-risk students. The Infilaw-owned schools [Florida Coastal School of Law, Charlotte School of Law and Arizona Summit Law School] enrolled classes consisting of between 75% and 100% at-risk students. For-profit school graduates have lower bar passage rates, worse job rates, and more debt. For-profit schools also graduate a higher percentage of students with debt and receive more total federal student loans on a per-school basis than public or private schools.
(emphasis added)

"Based on available salary data from serious risk schools," LST observed,  "graduates from these programs cannot service their debts without generous federal hardship programs." Moreover, "[e]ven top earners at the more affordable schools face economic difficulty; the rest range from economic difficulty to catastrophe."

What, in a nutshell, is the LST report telling us? Less prestigious law schools, including the for-profit law schools, have lowered their admission standards in an effort to counteract declining enrollments. On average, tuition at many of these schools is almost as high as the tuition rates at more elite schools, so students who attend many of these lower-tier law schools are borrowing almost as much money as students who take out loans to attend a Harvard or a Stanford.

I have three comments to make about LST's report:

1)  Given the imploding demand for new attorneys, it is utter madness for the government to continue propping up for-profit law schools with federal student-loan money. Many people attending these schools will face a grim financial future when they graduate: poor job prospects and crushing student debts.

2) Based on a review of LST's report, it's not only the for-profits who are admitting students with low LSAT scores. A number or public universities have low admissions standards. According to LST's data, one out of four students at several public law schools have LSAT scores so low that they are at "extreme risk" of failing the bar exam.  These schools include: Southern University, Texas Southern University, Ohio Northern University, University of North Dakota and the University of South Dakota.

3) Law schools that are admitting students with low LSAT scores are not only doing their students a disservice. They are also lowering the overall quality of the nation's legal community. Many of these students will fail the bar, but many marginal ones will pass it. This country doesn't need an oversupply of minimally qualified attorneys.

In short, this state of affairs cannot continue.  Law schools with low admission standards need to be closed, and the students who accumulated massive amounts of debt to attend them should have their loans forgiven.

References

Law School Transparency. 2015 State of Legal Education. Accessible at: http://lawschooltransparency.com/reform/projects/investigations/2015/