Despite the plummeting law school applications from the highest LSAT scorers, which could prove problematic as bar passage rates in some jurisdictions continue to tank, the law schools still have a few tricks up their sleeves. As the downward spiral becomes permanent, not just a blip resulting from “bad press,” the deans must find new methods for generating income for these failing institutions.
For example, Brooklyn Law School recently announced that it will offer a two-year J.D. program designed for non-traditional students, i.e. middle-aged students, foreign-trained lawyers, and other people trying to reenter the workforce in a second post-recession career. Obviously, this is a particularly nasty scam, which attempts to attract the least hirable potential students. Most law firms do not want to hire older lawyers even if they have years of experience. It goes without saying that the majority of older lawyers will not have the ability to scrape together a makeshift solo practice, nor would most want to or plan to.
BLS is marketing this new program as a great way for older people to reignite their careers and to find employment stability before they retire. It is only incidental, I suppose, that it is also a great way to scam unemployed middle-aged people who think that a two-year program will cost less (it won’t).
The BLS factory has always had a version of this scam: the night program. However, the night program still admits mostly students in their 20s and early 30s with LSAT/GPA scores that the school wanted to divert away from USNWR (until recently). Most of the students in the night program are rejects from the full-time program. Now, with applications from the more-informed internet users drying up, the school might think that older potential students may be easier to con. Perhaps they do not realize that the over-45 crowd reads blogs at almost the same rate as the rest of us.
Touro Law School seems to have a similar plan for trying to circumvent the cynical blog-reading young adults. Recently, Touro has targeted prospective students on the opposite end of the age spectrum by offering to lock undergraduate freshman into a program with University of Central Florida where they would graduate a year early with their B.A. and enter Touro immediately. I guess that the compressed educational timeline is supposed to attract students (six years instead of seven, what a bargain)! More importantly, Touro sees that the viral spreading of information is killing the normal application pool, and so they must target a younger and more naïve crowd.
Given these desperate final attempts to scam, it is as important as ever to bring the widest possible audience to the scamblogs. Perhaps we should launch an OLSS Junior edition with scam deans played by Disney villians…
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