Cooley Weathering Temporary Storm

The fable continues.

At is peak in 2006, Cooley had more than 2,900 students at its Lansing campus, but that number had dwindled as the other four campuses have grown and overall enrollment has fallen. By the fall of 2011, it was less than 1,800. Last fall, it was less than 1,300.

And:

Just 56 percent of those who finished law school in 2012 had full-time, long-term legal jobs nine months after graduation. For Cooley’s graduates, it was 29 percent.

And:

This fall, it will raise tuition by 9 percent for first-year students, bringing the cost of the first 30 credits to $43,500, and by 8 percent for everyone else.

It hasn’t lowered its admission standards, LeDuc said....But LeDuc doesn’t see a drop in minimum requirements as out of the question.

AND NOW THE VICTORY PLAN:

As for the [$111 million cash as-of early 2011], he calls it a nest egg.

“Our model has basically been the grasshopper and the ants from your fables,” LeDuc said. “We set aside a fair amount of money to weather what we thought the storm would be..."

LeDuc believes this a cyclical downturn. He said the effects of a bad economy have been “exacerbated by the stuff on the Internet.”

His prediction: The economy will improve. Government agencies will start hiring lawyers again. The older generation of lawyers will retire. Students graduating in three or four years will find a much more welcoming job market.

Wow.

One thing I want to note immediately is that the author of this fine piece of journalism actually wrote that Cooley had been stockpiling cash to await a coming storm (like, this is straight from the Godfather's mouth) and then on page 2, the writer turned around and claimed that the January 2011 NYT article started the narrative of skepticism.

Now if you're a real journalist with that Nellie Bly instinct, you're probably going to wonder why a law school was purposefully stocking away money while telling its applicants there'd be sunshine and oatmeal raisin cookies for all. And if the law school was basing its budget on such facts, surely they were known to those in the administration and others in the industry, which should make you wonder why the narrative didn't apparently get started until early 2011.

So... what was going on exactly?

Well, thanks to the American media's collective desire to double as a propaganda division, we have no idea. Life was rolling along great, then bad things happened, but it's okay, because the law school was preparing for the bad times even while publicly denying the basic reasoning behind the bad times.

And you stupid internet people are still blowing things out of proportion. We're going to keep slandering you even though our financial planning was based more on your version of the future than the one we publicly presented three years ago.

And you new kids can trust that when Dean LeDuc says the legal economy's going to rebound, the legal economy is going to rebound. Because the rest of your are just flat-out uninformed.