The ABA - working for you, average lawyer! - released the 2015 super-truthful data of law schools recently. Notice the accuracy disclaimer on the ABA's site and consider that this is the accreditation authority who finds the need to cover its ass. Then laugh, for life is absurd and meaningless, writes Camus.
Like gold mining, there's tons of nuggets in the data, but the Gen Y populace is too darned lazy to find them. So I'll find one for you. It's the return of the raiding party. For those who don't recall, the raiding party is the idea that certain (impliedly unscrupulous) law schools prey on certain other law schools for transfer students. This, of course, is an academic example of penis envy. Let's check out some of last year's best poachers to see how they fared!
In this year's edition, George Washington took 44 students from American. American basically stood pat because, well, American has standards.
But they were bested! Arizona State took 47 students from Arizona Summit. For those of you who don't believe Arizona Summit can produce quality lawyers, Arizona State seems to disagree with you, and Arizona State has high standards. Ask Ned Flanders.
Schools like Michigan State and Florida State seem to be on a relative diet this year.
But the real standout might be Georgetown. They didn't reap harvest from any single field - they took 21 students from American and GWU, but beyond that it's single digits - but the overall volume and breadth is astounding.
Consider that Georgetown reported losing only 14 students to transfer attrition. At least four of these went to Yale, Harvard, or Columbia based on those schools' 509s, so you know that they're not exactly transferring because they can't cut it.
Consider that Georgetown only reports losing 21 persons from their 1L class total.
Consider that Georgetown's 25th percentile LSAT is only a 161 for incoming 1L students, which would exclude transfers who get added to the class later.
Now consider that Georgetown reports bringing in over one hundred (100) transfer students, including students from Arizona Summit, Barry, Capital, Charlotte (2), Charleston (2), Golden Gate, John Marshall (6!), NYLS, South Texas, St. Thomas (Fl.), Suffolk (2), Cooley, Touro, and Widener. That's 22 students right there, ignoring the mass of imports that come from middlebrow schools like George Mason or Brooklyn.
We must give Georgetown credit here. Not only do the administrators there recognize that it's the individual who matters and not the name of the school, they have found a way to somehow keep the vaunted T-14 ranking while completely manipulating the game to get what is basically an entire third-tier law school in the bottom third of the class.
You want impressive? That's impressive. For Appalachian to scam a few buck-toothed idiots into dreaming about driving Maseratis, well, that's art. But pumping through 160s, taking transfers from the shittiest of holes, and still proclaim that you're an elite institution with a straight face?
That, my readers, is a masterpiece.
Scam, er, shall I say HOYA on.
The raiding party will not stop until the 509 starts requiring the LSAT scores of transfers-in to be reported. They could easily be reported each year by class. If a school takes large numbers of lower-scoring transfers, 2L year would reflect a large decrease.
ReplyDeleteHey, Nando, if you're reading this comment, your favorite person, Cathy Lesser Mansfield, is a visiting professor at #14 Georgetown in the spring of 2016. Maybe she'll sing to the 100 transfers/Viking raid abductees if they sign up to take Consumer Finance!
ReplyDeletehttps://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/mansfield-cathy-lesser.cfm#
What would really piss me off as a Georgetown law student is knowing that the transfer students are competing with me for jobs with only their 2L and 3L grades counting toward their GPAs. According to the Georgetown Law webpage,
ReplyDelete"Transfer students do not carry over their GPA from their prior law school."
So after the first 2L semester those Cooley and John Marshall transfers are likely to have a higher GPA than the pure Georgetown student who made exactly the same grades as the transfers since the always-lower 1L grades aren't calculated into the transfer students' GPA. Also, there are suddenly more than 60 additional students to compete with in the over-saturated NY and DC markets. This must really suck.
The employers will know the pure Georgetown students by transcripts and resumes. Ultimately the joke will be on the transfers themselves, as many gave up $$ when they left their old school. What you can do is advocate in your student bar association for Georgetown to trim its class sizes rather than try to maximize them as they have been for so many years. That will protect the value of your own degree.
DeleteThis was my plan, but I didn't do well enough after the first year to get anywhere good. I wish I had dropped out right then and there. I kept a partial scholarship from the first year but the insane tuition rate was so high that I still wound up owing six figures at graduation.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm one of the "lucky" ones.
These guys are no different than used car dealerships, in my opinion. I was did a public arbitration where a young kid took his portion of Grandma's inheritance and purchased a 5 year old Olds Aurora. He was paying $450.00 a month on the remaining purchase price. The car craps out. He returns to the same dealer and trades in the merry Oldsmobile and brings home a 7 year old Lexus and the payments increase to a bit under 6 hundred a month and increases from 24 months to 48 months. Bucket seats and windshield washers, Standard.
ReplyDelete